HP has an interesting announcement today - they are refreshing their existing Z240 workstation, which is targeted towards small and medium-sized businesses, with a non-Xeon Core i7 based processor. It was already available with Skylake based Xeon CPUs, up to the Intel Xeon E3-1280 v5. That's a 3.7-4.0 GHz Xeon, with 4 cores, 8 MB of cache, with an 80-Watt Thermal Design Power (TDP). That's certainly an excellent choice for a lot of workloads that workstations are tasked with, and with support for ECC memory, reliability under load is also a key factor. But HP has been talking to their customers and found that many of them have been choosing to forgo the error checking capabilities of ECC and have been building or buying equivalent gaming-focused machines in order to get more performance for the money. Specifically, they have been building desktops with the Core i7-6700K, which is an unlocked 4.0-4.2 GHz quad-core design, with a 91-Watt TDP, and in pure frequency can offer up to 13% more performance than the fastest Skylake Xeon.

So armed with this data, HP has refreshed the Z240 line today, with the usual Skylake Xeons in tow but also an option for the Core i7-6700K. This desktop sized workstation supports up to 64 GB of DDR4-2133, with ECC available on the Xeon processors only. It's a pretty interesting move, but can make a lot of sense if most customers would probably rather purchase a workstation from a company like HP so that they get the testing and support offerings found with workstation class machines. If some of them had to resort to building their own in order to get the best CPU performance, HP has made a wise decision to offer this.