Thin clients — affectionately referred to by some as dumb terminals — aren’t what they used to be.
HP is making sure of that by adding features that are bound to turn heads as this Read Write Cloud post describes. The new HP t610 series thin client boasts an AMD G-Series dual core Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) that “combines a low-power CPU and a discrete-level GPU into a single integrated unit…providing high-performance multimedia content delivery and supporting DirectX11 for 3-D visual effects and accelerated graphics performance,” according to HP’s press release.
Integrating an APU into a thin client system takes much of the graphics processing demands off of the server CPU and places it directly within the thin client. So now you can stream full 1080p HD video via a thin client. It also boasts a single PCI-Express expansion slot and a quad-head display connector. How cool is that? It makes my PC from 2005 look even worse.
What HP is adding to thin clients is what is awesome, and a trend that is sure to continue. Read Write Cloud writer Scott Fulton puts it best, “The original concept of the thin client device, which Hewlett-Packard helped pioneer, was to strip the PC down to just the minimum hardware needed to serve as a decent enough remote access terminal, while moving the compute power to the data center. But with new private cloud architectures enabling businesses to shift computing power between processors as needed, suddenly there’s a trend toward fattening the thin client.”
Not physically, but feature-wise. Just look at the other “thin-clients” we have grown accustomed to — smart phones and tablets which are getting much more streamlined, yet more powerful, energy efficient, and robust. Consider that “Your mobile phone today has more computing power than all of NASA did in 1969.” I read that here on Bit Rebels.
Granted, there’s no spinning disks in any of these thin clients, and that’s just fine with me. Give me a device that delivers a more compelling and satisfying experience – the disks can sit in the background churning out all of the content and data we can get our hands on. Just another chapter in the saga of the ever-disappearing hard drive.
What say you? Still a fat client PC user, or are thin clients the way to go?
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