With HP unveiling a slew of new workstation laptops and PCs at CES 2025 earlier this year, it was only a matter of time before we would see the launch of the flagship ZBook Ultra G1a here in Australia. Justin and I had the pleasure of attending the launch event in Sydney, where we had the chance to get hands-on with the absolute beast of a laptop–and lots of food!
Both media and business customers were invited to this event being held in the city. It was quite a large turnout with both HP and AMD execs present as well. We were quickly ushered into the main hall, and we must say, the lighting and ambience was top-notch; chic yet futuristic, fitting for the launch of the Ultra G1a. Before the main keynote-style presentation began, Justin and I had a mosey around the various booths they had set up, demonstrating the Ultra G1a in different work (and play) environments; CAD workloads, Excel spreadsheets, y’know… boring adult stuff.
However, it was obvious that one corner of the room was getting all the attention. Whilst I was busy chatting away with an AMD rep, Justin had already joined the crowd at the sim racing setup powered by the Ultra G1a, watching as people took on the iconic Albert Park race track (where the season-opening Grand Prix had taken place just two weeks earlier) in F1 24 . Keep in mind the Ultra G1a was outputting to two 4K displays simultaneously whilst running one of the more recent titles out there. It didn’t break a sweat. Definitely impressive given the lack of a dedicated GPU! Naturally, we had to give it a go… and Justin ended up setting the fastest lap of the day—turns out, that late-night Marketplace impulse buy had been worth it after all.
Soon enough, we were invited over to the main presentation, where the real launch event was about to kick off.
The ZBook Ultra G1a is HP’s most powerful 14” workstation to date, packing up to 128GB of unified memory (think Apple’s M-series chips) and 16 Zen 5 CPU cores with its Ryzen AI Max PRO processor—that’s a lot of Chrome tabs. Up to 96GB of that unified memory can be allocated to the AMD RDNA 3.5-architecture iGPU, meaning it’ll breeze through heavy AI workloads like Meta’s Llama 70B and Mistral AI’s Mixtral 8x7B. Pair that with an onboard AMD XDNA 2 NPU with up to 50 TOPS of AI processing ability and the Ultra G1a easily exceeds the CoPilot+PC qualification.
Better yet, this all comes tightly packed within a sleek 14” frame–what is, in our opinion, the perfect sweet spot for both functionality and portability. Justin and I have been daily-driving 14” laptops for the better part of a decade throughout high school and university, and we couldn’t imagine going smaller or larger. The units on display did feel exceptionally premium in hand, being made from 80% recycled aluminium. The keyboard felt great to type on, offering a good amount of travel and tactility; I’d probably set a new Monkeytype record on this if you gave me an hour or two to spare. Port selection on the Ultra G1a looks great too; I did also ask about the thermal performance and battery life of the Ultra G1a, though we’ll have to wait till we get our hands on a review unit to get the full picture.
During the presentation, a key point both HP and AMD really honed in on was security; both HP’s in-house Wolf Security and AMD’s Pro Security solutions come ready to go on the Ultra G1a, with a ton of business-oriented features to boot. You can expect HP’s Tamper Lock, Sure Admin and SureView, which will take advantage of the Ultra G1a’s 5MP 88° IR camera to detect onlookers and prevent them from seeing what’s on your screen. Cool stuff.
Speaking of the camera, HP didn’t miss the opportunity to integrate a bunch of AI features into the overall camera experience; Polycamera Pro houses the suite of tools including the AI-assisted spotlight feature, background blur/replace, filters, auto-framing and more.
A fireside chat followed the main presentation, where we heard from industry professionals and HP’s category manager Aman Sangar sharing the potential of the Ultra G1a and the broader AI movement in general. Admittedly, some of it sounded like corporate fluff, but something that did stand out was mention of today’s growing reliance on generative AI across different industries. This had me thinking about the current discourse around AI-generated content and plagiarism (namely the whole Studio Ghibli situation). Though not directly related to HP and the launch of the Ultra G1a, it does raise the question; with AI tools like this becoming increasingly widespread and accessible, where do we draw the line between genuine creativity and an AI just remixing what it’s been trained on? It’s something that we think will only get trickier to distinguish as the tech keeps evolving.
We brooded on this dilemma over lunch-time, where we were treated to an array of finger foods; chicken souvlaki, fries and fresh, leafy salads that went down rather well. This was also the perfect opportunity to mingle, and we got the chance to meet with some fellow Aussie creators in the space.
We’re definitely excited about the potential of these new, uber-powerful mobile workstations, and we’re sure it’ll only be a matter of time before these processing capabilities come to consumer-grade devices–and eventually down to consumer-level pricing. The Ultra G1a will be available on HP.com from 1st April 2025 starting at $3,000 AUD RRP, competing with the likes of Apple’s MacBook Pro, Dell’s Precision and Lenovo’s Thinkpad. This laptop definitely won’t be for everyone, especially not the average Joe just opening emails and watching cat videos, but for those engaged in heavy CAD or AI workloads–this is one to keep your eye on.
