This serious Intel, Nvidia silicon is not for tablets, smartphones

If you look hard, among all of the smartphones, tablets, wearables at CES, there's a machine packing some serious, old-school silicon.

Brooke Crothers Former CNET contributor

Brooke Crothers writes about mobile computer systems, including laptops, tablets, smartphones: how they define the computing experience and the hardware that makes them tick. He has served as an editor at large at CNET News and a contributing reporter to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. His interest in things small began when living in Tokyo in a very small apartment for a very long time.

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Brooke Crothers

Jan. 9, 2014 10:49 p.m. PT

HP's Z1 G2 all-in-one workstation packs plenty of horsepower and doesn't skimp on fans. Brooke Crothers

LAS VEGAS -- There were occasional reminders at the Consumer Electronics Show that even in 2014, the fastest silicon is not in tablets and smartphones, or even inside PCs.

Enter Hewlett-Packard's new all-in-one workstation. It squeezes some pretty brawny silicon behind a 27-inch touch screen. And some serious cooling power too.

Announced at CES, the Z1 G2 can be configured with the 82-watt Intel Xeon E3-1280 v3 processor and up to a 100-watt (max power) Nvidia Quadro K4100M graphics.

While consumers have gotten used to fanless phones and tablets, professional-class -- and some might say real -- horsepower still needs fans galore to keep things from overheating.