Lenovo teams up with a luxury carmaker for three new desktops, Dell’s got 16 inches of mobile workstation, and NVIDIA embiggens its small hardware.
Daylight savings time has struck again, but don’t let that lost hour be the last word. With productivity boosters like these three new workstation products, you can reclaim that hour and then some.
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The name’s Station. ThinkStation.
If you’ve ever wondered what kind of computer James Bond would use if he were an engineer and not a suave superspy, look no further than Lenovo’s new trio of desktop workstations. The ThinkStation PX, P7 and P5 were co-designed by Aston Martin, makers of 007’s preferred getaway vehicles (it’s unknown whether the computers are also bulletproof).
The ThinkStation PX leads the new trio in power and performance. Designed for either the desktop or the data center, it includes dual Intel 4th-Gen Xeon Scalable processors with up to 120 cores, up to four NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation GPUs, up to 2TB of DDR5 memory and up to 60TB of storage. The PX powers it all with an impressive 1850W PSU.
Next in line, the ThinkStation P7 supports Intel Xeon W processors with up to 56 cores in a single socket and up to three RTX 6000 graphics cards, 1TB of memory and 52TB of storage. Rounding off the trio is the ThinkStation P5, which is powered by Xeon W chips with up to 24 cores, up to two RTX 6000 graphics cards, and up to 512GB of memory and 48TB of storage.
Lenovo says the three new desktop workstations are more than up to the demands of engineering workflows such as AR/VR, CAE, reality capture, AI and more. The computers will be available in May 2023, and since Lenovo hasn’t announced starting prices, one can only hope they’ll be lower than the luxury vehicles that inspired their design.
Precision plus an inch
Dell has added a new mobile workstation to its thin-and-light Precision 5000 series, the Dell Precision 5680. Introduced alongside a refresh of the entire Precision lineup, the new 5680 has “the smallest footprint in the world for a 16-inch workstation,” according to a Dell blog post.
The Precision 5680 fits its 16-inch screen snugly between razor thin bezels on the sides and bottom, with a bit of extra padding on top for the mics and cameras. The screen has a 16:10 aspect ratio and can be configured up to a 3840×2400 OLED with touch. All in, the laptop weighs just four-and-a-half pounds (though this number can increase slightly depending on the configuration).
The newly-refreshed Precision lineup includes 13th-gen Intel processors and the latest mobile GPUs from NVIDIA. The Precision 5680 can be configured with up to an Intel Core i9 (45W) CPU combined with the just-announced NVIDIA RTX 5000 Ada Generation laptop GPU. It maxes out at 64GB of DDR5 memory and 4TB of storage.
The Precision 5680 will be available on May 18, 2023, though Dell has not yet announced the mobile workstation’s starting price.
RTX graphics in the palm of your hand
Bigger isn’t always better, as David proved with Goliath and as NVIDIA hopes to prove with its new graphics card, the RTX 4000 Small Form Factor (SFF) Ada Generation.
Built on NVIDIA’s Ada Lovelace GPU architecture, the RTX 4000 SFF is a dual-slot graphics card with a low profile design. It’s made for compact desktop workstations, which are proving increasingly popular among engineers who value their desk space.
Just like David, the tiny GPU aims high. According to NVIDIA, the RTX 4000 SFF provides twice the performance of the company’s previous small form factor card, the Ampere-based RTX A2000. It’s got much more memory than that 12GB card, packing in 20GB of GDDR6 VRAM with error correcting code (ECC), though it shares the same 70W max power draw.
NVIDIA says the RTX 4000 SFF unlocks “a new level of performance and efficiency for mini-desktops” and that its rendering and visualization performance will suit applications such as computer-aided design, data analysis, artificial intelligence and more.
The NVIDIA RTX 4000 SFF Ada Generation will be available starting in April for an estimated price of $1,250.
