Almost three years after the launch of its Rome-based wearable a-X2P mobile workplaceMediaWorkstation has an updated model, arguably the most powerful integrated portable computer in the world.
It’s not one Laptop or a mobile workstation in the proper sense; it is closer to one in its design All-in-One PC, similar to the luggables of yesteryear in that it doesn’t have an internal battery; You would probably use at most 10 minutes with one of our devices best portable power plants.
The new model is ideal for what the boutique PC vendor describes as “very multi-threaded applications in the field” and has been updated to support AMDs EPIC Genoa based on Zen 4. That means two EPYC 9654 CPUs with 96 cores each, up to 12 x 256 GB memory modules (total 3 TB DDR5 memory).
You can connect up to two full-height, full-size graphic cards (or accelerator), an M.2 NVMe boot SSD and five storage drives. All this is cooled by half a dozen fans and a power supply of unknown capacity (probably closer to 2 kW). The recently introduced Gigabyte MZ73 is probably used as the mainboard, a rare e-ATX dual-socket SP5 model.
There are plenty of ports, but no Thunderbolt 3 or 4
There are plenty of ports but no Thunderbolt 3 or 4 connections, which is a surprising omission given the multitude of use cases that would put this to good use. In the absence of any wireless connectivity options, a pair of 10GbE ports ensure this mobile studio can connect to the outside world.
The images show five 5.25-inch drive bays and a slot-in optical drive, seven slots for PCIe devices and legacy ports such as DVI and PS2.
The a-X2P can also be used with six 24 inch supervised (up to 4K and 1000 nits of brightness), a configuration that increases the weight of the mobile workstation to 55 pounds. Each workstation comes with a touchpad and a rugged mechanical keyboard that folds onto the display for portability, and a thick, sewn vinyl, wheeled carry case.
We reached out to MediaWorkstation to find out if the a-2XP actually supports 6TB, as the specs mention that it’s compatible with 256GB 3DS RDIMM DDR5 modules.
Expect to pay more than $200,000 for a full-featured, top-of-the-line mobile workstation that rivals any desktop bounty workstation PC or video editing pc. You can’t configure products online and have to go through a form or do it over the phone – which is understandable as such a niche player wants to weed out time wasters and focus on serious customers instead.
The company also sells portable Xeon-based workstation PCs, in both single and dual-socket variants (i-X1P, i-X2P), as well as AMD EPYC-based single-core and Threadripper Pro PCs (a- X2P, a-XP).
