Amulet Hotkey: Directing Innovation for Media & Entertainment

04 December 2025

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, the world of work changed irreversibly for many industries, and the media and entertainment industry was no exception. As well as adjusting to working from home, we also made changes to how we view and consume media content.

According to figures released by the UK regulator , the height of lockdown saw people spend twice as much time watching streaming services such as Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime. This surge in demand for content lead to streaming services rushing to release new content, but with production and postproduction teams working from home, studios were faced with new a problem: how do you enable production and postproduction teams to function remotely, without compromising on production quality?

Working with key partners and vendors, Amulet Hotkey’s zero client and host card solutions were vital in helping some of the world’s biggest pre and postproduction studios transition to remote working seamlessly, and 5 years later, we continue to innovate in the media and entertainment space with the launch of the latest in our range of remote workstations, CoreStation HX: a high performance workstation solution that is designed for the data center.

How has the shift to remote working impacted end user compute?

The shift to remote working has led to an increase in demand for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) as organisations look for new ways to maximize performance and improve the remote working experience whilst reducing costs.

Traditional VDI deployments typically involve moving high-powered tower workstations into the data center, which can be a great way of providing the power user with the performance they need, but it does pose a new set of challenges.

High-performance workstations are expensive assets to manage and secure, and with application and resource requirements growing more and more sophisticated this can lead to performance issues, particularly for users who require maximum performance and run specialized workloads:

1. Resource Contention: In a virtualized environment, multiple VMs share the same physical resources. This can lead to contention for CPU, memory, and storage, resulting in performance bottlenecks.
2. Latency Issues: Virtualization introduces an additional layer of abstraction, which can increase latency. For applications that require real-time processing or ultra-low latency, this can be a significant drawback.

Form factor is also another consideration. 4U tower workstations do not make efficient use of rack space, and small form factor workstations, whilst more suited to being rack mounted, trade-off performance due to space and cooling restraints.

Traditional workstations usually have one power supply, resulting in a single point of failure risk and are hard to manage in a data center as they often lack the out of band management needed for remote system provisioning and management.

CoreStation HX addresses these issues by providing the power user with access to their own dedicated workstation, combining the benefits of high-powered workstation in a form factor that is designed for the data center. This bare metal VDI  approach takes advantage of VDI benefits such as flexibility, ease of management and scalability, whilst eliminating VDI bottlenecks to provide unparalleled performance, low latency and enhanced security.

How is CoreStation HX redefining VDI for Media, Entertainment and Gaming

Designed, built, and manufactured in the UK by Amulet Hotkey, CoreStation HX is a unique compute platform that addresses a range of workstation performance needs, in a compact data center form factor, that gives your organization the flexibility to adapt new technologies and new workloads.

The CoreStation HX solution compromises of a 5U enclosure, the HX5, that supports up to twelve single-width AI-enabled workstation nodes. Each node leverages Intel Core processors and a dedicated NPU, which is something that current VDI solutions are not able to deliver. With a range of graphics options that scale from integrated Intel Graphics, discrete mobile NVIDIA GPUs, or double-width nodes that can incorporate discrete PCIe GPU cards from Intel and NVIDIA.

The modular design of HX5 ensures ease of upgrades with no backplane, replaceable I/O module and hot swappable high-efficiency power supplies. The workstation nodes are fully independent and can be removed, replaced, or upgraded without affecting other users.

The result is a dedicated workstation platform designed for adaptability and longevity to give you maximize flexibility and return on investment.

Move your workstations to the data center today

Whether working with film, in publishing or game development, in the studio or remotely, security and performance are paramount making CoreStation HX the perfect solution for studios that are looking to secure their data without compromising on the performance they need to generate crystal clear images.

Whether you are working in online/offline editing, VFX, animation, virtual production, eliminate VDI bottlenecks with your own dedicated AI workstation solution: CoreStation HX.

If you’re interested in seeing the power CoreStation HX for yourself, please contact us to schedule a Test Drive of one of our virtual nodes. Hosted at Equinix LD7 in London, this service allows you to perform initial performance and functionality testing absolutely free.

Contact us today to learn more about how Amulet Hotkey and CoreStation HX is empowering organisations to think differently when it comes to VDI.