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The folks at Eurocom have released another monster 'mobile workstation'
This time around the company's released the Sky X9W complete with a quad-core, eight-thread, Intel Core i7 6700K capable of operating at 4.2GHz and nestled amidst an Intel Z170 Express (Skylake) chipset. The NVIDIA Quadro M5000M dwarfs the CPU for core count: it's got 1,536 of its own.
Pack in 64GB of DDR4-2133, 2400 or 2666 RAM, if you please, then throw in up to four NVME SSDs and give them the RAID 10 treatment for data protection.
There's also a 17.3 inch 4K screen at 3840 x 2160.
[... it also has] a single USB-C port, a pair of mini display ports capable of driving four monitors, an HDMI outlet, five USB 3.0 ports, a pair of RJ45s and Wi-Fi.
Configurations start at $2930 (and weigh in at 4.8 kg / 10.6 lbs — ouch!) , but you can configure it to a price well over $4000.
Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/05/eurcom_sky_x9w/
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 07 2016, @09:43AM
This kind of machine would've really been exciting for me a decade ago, but now I find myself increasingly impressed with what people are doing with stuff at the exact opposite end of the spectrum: tiny computing.
In an age of Alpine Linux (10MB!), Rasberry Pi, BeagleBones, Docker containers (and et cetera) I must confess I'm nonplussed.
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Sunday February 07 2016, @06:52PM
If you get one for free, please give it to me. I appear to find more value in the concept than you do.
It would be nice to have a computer that will have acceptable performance for at least five years, run VMs and allow me to test the environments I want to test -- without requiring an internet connection or subscription to do it. I bet I can even play games on that thing. And -- it's portable, if not the size of a Motorola RAZR. I guess nothing is anymore, since too small is useless for many complex tasks (RAZRs did not do what your smartphone does, but was impressive for its size and capabilities at the time), and my tasks often find the hardware and services you discuss to be useless except for perhaps as nodes reporting to something like this laptop.
I will always take more than I need if I can get it affordably, because I want the product I own to die of old age before I buy a new one, as opposed to finding that I need the next version of the pi, or pay more for hosting, or a faster internet connection, because I was cheap to begin with.
Nothing scales better than choosing the right solution to begin with. And having more solution than you need lets you then pick goals, via serendipty or the option to be flexible, simply due to having the luxury of being able to creatively experiment.
Everything you say are certainly luxuries to creatively experiment with. But I can't do my job soley on any of them, and with a laptop like this, I can do my job and emulate all of them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 07 2016, @10:17PM
http://www.fanlesstech.com/ [fanlesstech.com] has a lot of good AMD64 builds for people who want a happy medium between power/traditional apps and small, fanless cases.
Me? I have a fanless i7-5557U with 32GB of RAM and 2.5TB of SSD. The case is about the size of a small pizza box. It uses about 28W of power. That's even a lot compared to some of the new Skylake processors.
Tiny computing doesn't have to mean powerless. Although, I probably won't upgrade until I can get a decently supported ARM-based machine that outperforms this one in about 7-8 years.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday February 07 2016, @11:12PM
Nah, local computing power and storage will always be useful. I regularly run 1.0 load or higher. A computer exists to do all the hard stuff people can't, and that involves a lot of multitasking. If you don't have all sorts of scripts and programs doing/assisting your work in the background, you aren't using your computer to its fullest.
It also helps that your work doesn't blink out whenever the network connection is flaky.
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