HP Unveils Latest Flexible Series Thin Client

Hewlett-Packard is bolstering its thin-client lineup with what officials are calling the company's most powerful offering to date.

The t820 Flexible Series thin client, announced Aug. 19, offers better performance, improved graphics and enterprise-level security capabilities, and is aimed at businesses—such as financial trading, engineering and military organizations—that need to run specialty workloads on high-performance computing systems

It is powered by a quad-core Intel core i5 or Pentium chip, helping make it eight times faster than HP's t610 Flexible thin client. The new thin client also can run large amounts of data and multiple applications at the same time, and enables users to leverage multiple monitors to get their work done. It can support three large monitors, and that can be expanded to seven high-definition monitors by adding Advanced Micro Devices' Radeon HD 7650A MXM graphics card and taking advantage of one or more optional multi-stream DisplayPort hubs.

The thin client comes with a built-in VGA video port and DisplayPort 1.2 technology.

"There is new and growing demand in today's market for quad-core processing and multimedia graphics on thin clients," Jeff Groudan, marketing director for thin clients at HP, said in a statement.

HP currently offers two thin clients in its Flexible Series, the t510, and the higher end t610.

On the security side, the t820 comes with fiber-optic networking, Intel's vPro technology, BIOS implemented to NIST guidelines, and pre-boot authentication.

In addition, the thin client comes with HP's Velocity network performance management software, which enables the system to automatically adapt to network conditions. It also improves network utilization, which means fewer disruptions when using real-time communications applications, such as video conferencing.

For virtualization, the t820 supports both VMware and Microsoft's Hyper-V technology. It's VMware Horizon View-certified and RFX-certified for Windows Embedded Standard 7 E operating systems.

The new thin client will be available in November, but HP officials will demonstrate the t820 at the VMworld 2013 show in San Francisco, which rungs Aug. 26-29.