HP CEO touts diversity and innovation heritage at 50th anniversary of HP Labs
Dion Weisler, CEO of HP, at the 50th anniversary celebration of HP Labs. Hewlett-Packard, the original startup of Silicon Valley, is in its 76th year. Its HP Labs research division has just turned 50, and Dion Weisler, the CEO of the newly reinvented HP, honored the occasion with a speech that touted the company’s innovation heritage and its emphasis on diversity.
Joining in the sentiment of other Silicon Valley CEOs like Intel’s Brian Krzanich, Weisler said on September 28, 2016 at HP Labs in Palo Alto, California, that diversity will be critical to the success of HP Labs in the future, as well as to the company as whole. He emphasized the need to keep innovating at the company that invented the inkjet printer and many other inventions of the modern age. “It’s amazing to be celebrating 50 years of HP Labs and to be celebrating the new HP,” Weisler said. “Bill (Hewlett) and Dave (Packard) were at the epicenter of Silicon Valley. It began in that garage” on Addison Street in Palo Alto. Weisler said it was humbling to take the mantle of HP, one of Silicon Valley’s iconic companies.
“All of us here take that incredibly seriously,” he said, speaking to the press and HP Labs executives. “I went to the garage and sat there. I wrote the opening words” to the speech he made when the company was reborn.
HP split itself in two in November 2015, with Meg Whitman running services firm HP Enterprise and Weisler taking charge of HP, which has the core PC and printer divisions. HP reported revenues of $12 billion last quarter, down 4 percent from a year earlier. Profits were slightly up, as HP struggles to deal with the challenges of keeping printing and PCs relevant in the smartphone era. The company has been cutting back on staff.
But Weisler said, “You can’t cut your way to glory. You have to innovate your way to success. It shouldn’t be innovation for innovation’s sake.”
He said, “In a world that is changing as quickly as this world is changing, social and mobile are opening the way, inviting millions and billions of people into the broader community. Innovation also needs to change at that pace.”
HP has a mission of making life better for everyone, everywhere. HP Labs focuses on developing technologies that make the world better today, but also anticipate what’s needed far ahead. Shane Wall, head of HP Labs, said earlier in the day that HP has a 30-year vision of the world’s trends and the opportunities it will focus on to deliver the right technology.
He added, “You can’t just expect to have one set of folks working in the U.S. designing products for everyone in the world. It just doesn’t happen that way. It also means that innovation can be born anywhere, anytime. It happens best when it is spread around the world. Innovation comes from everywhere. And it needs to come from everywhere if it is to serve global markets. So diversity is the cornerstone, the foundation of how we create innovation and differences of thought. If we get it from all over the world, it raises all boats and we are better.”
When HP set up its new board of directors, the company focused on diversity as well. HP’s board includes younger entrepreneurs such as Stacy Brown-Philpot, the CEO of TaskRabbit and an African American woman.

AMD’s seventh-generation Pro APUs arrive in HP and Lenovo business desktops
AMD said on October 3, 2016 that desktops powered with its seventh-generation Bristol Ridge Pro Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) are available to purchase. These desktops target businesses rather than mainstream consumers, packing lots of computing and graphics performance into a small, energy-efficient chip. These Pro chips can be found in several desktop solutions from HP and Lenovo such that the former company’s new EliteDesk 705 G3 Series desktops and the latter’s ThinkCentre M79 desktop.
AMD’s seventh-generation Pro APU lineup currently consists of seven chips: two A12 units, two A10 units, one A8 unit, and two A6 units. The chips consume between 35 watts and 65 watts of power, depending on the APU, and support DDR4 memory clocked at 2,400MHz. The two A6 APUs provide Radeon R5 graphics while the remaining five sport Radeon R7 graphics.
AMD’s prior sixth-generation family of A-Series Pro APU’s consisted of 11 chips spanning from the quad-core A12-8870 APU to the A4-8350B dual-core APU. When comparing the new A12-9800 to the older A12-8870, the newer chip has a slightly faster base clock speed and support for HDMI 2.0 instead of HDMI 1.4. Otherwise, the two seem to consist of the same number of CPU and GPU cores, the same boost clock speed, the same GPU clock speed, and the same thermal envelope.
Systems that now feature AMD’s seventh-generation A-Series Pro APUs include: HP : EliteDesk 705 G3 Mini ; EliteDesk 705 G3 SFF and EliteDesk 705 G3 Microtower. Lenovo : Think Centre M79.
The new seventh-generation APUs fit into AMD’s new AM4 socket for consumer and business-focused processors. What is great about this socket is that it works with both traditional CPUs and APUs.

Dell plans to move VR content creation to the cloud
Dell is planning thin clients that can be used to create VR content, with servers in the cloud providing the graphics horsepower. Dell wants to prove that you don’t need a high-end GPU in your computer to create content for virtual reality headsets. Instead, the company wants to move VR content creation into the cloud with new computing products it plans to release. The goal is to add more mobility and security to VR content creation.
Among the new products planned are thin clients that run applications stored in remote servers or appliances. The servers will have GPUs that power VR content creation on virtual desktops. Virtual reality is an interesting market, and Dell will have products to talk about in the future, said Jeff McNaught, executive director of cloud client computing at Dell. Some products provide the linchpin to get the effort started, McNaught said. The company on Sep 23, 2016
released the Latitude E7270 Wyse mobile thin client, which has an Intel Skylake chip and an integrated GPU to handle client-side graphics. The company in May also started shipping the Precision Appliance for Wyse, a 2U rack server that can be packed with Nvidia graphics cards to power content creation on thin clients.