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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, Interesting) by Unixnut on Sunday February 07 2016, @11:34AM
I was never into the beefy laptops, preferring a beefy workstation that I can upgrade as I wish, and with all the power I could want. My desire for a laptop was always for it to be light and have long battery life.
Nowadays with "cloud computing" et al, there is even less reason to lug around such power. I can spin up amazon instances when I need to execute something seriously heavy duty, or SSH into my desktop if the requirements are not that high. Essentially my laptop is a thin terminal, into more powerful machines where my data is stored and there is power on tap.
I.M.O. the era when you would have to lug around all this in a laptop for those moments when you need all the power have become a niche. The only people who would be interested in this are gamers who go to a lot of lan parties, or workers who have to go to remote places with poor Internet access, but need the power (e.g. workers at oil rigs, CAM/CAD/CFD consultants). Demand yes, but generally a niche.
(Score: 1) by Pax on Sunday February 07 2016, @12:41PM
and DJ's too!!
I went digital to save weight. Now with the software i use (Traktor and PCDJ RED) i can also sync up a video i have prepared with my set.
Hardware wise I use numark mixtrack pro 2
I have a Clevo i7 based laptop as it has the balls to do the job and I can also game while travelling with it. I know I'll have at least another 2 years before I'll need and upgrade. All in all it cost 1197.00 GBP
I know some guys who also hook into lighting systems to that the audio,video and lights are all synced up.
But in general I reckon you are right.. it's a lan gamers/niche application type spec.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by HonestFlames on Sunday February 07 2016, @03:33PM
I was always the "I'll upgrade my desktop" guy.
Except every time it was time to upgrade, there was no damn upgrade path that didn't involve replacing the motherboard and RAM. Oh, and the hard drive interface had gone through another revision... plus there's a new connector for GPU's. So... you can keep the case, keyboard, mouse and monitor but most everything else needs swapping out.
I got real tired of that. OK, this isn't quite as true these days. PCIe has been the thing for GPU's for a while (although nVidia are about to launch something new on that front) and SATA isn't going anywhere... except maybe NVMe is taking over.... so actually maybe this *is* all still true.
Long story short: I ploughed £1800 into a laptop that I then upgraded with 2 SSD's, 1 hybrid drive and some nice RAM. Total probably around £2200.
This was 3 years ago. It's a monster laptop (Clevo, but not Clevo branded) and it doesn't do anything other than behave itself and do what I tell it, which lately is sometimes running Mac OS X in a virtual machine.
I'm just about ready for an upgrade, but I'm holding off until a while after nVidia release their fancy new stuff... i.e. the kind of mobile GPU that can push a 4k display when I want it to or a 1080p gaming experience without the fans trying to deafen me. The 680m in my laptop has (according to GPU Boss) roughly equivalent performance to a desktop 750Ti. Current king-of-hill is the desktop 980 in mobile form - which this Eurocom linked in the article is supposed to have as an option, but doesn't list it in the drop-down.
My all-time, 'do want' laptop would be something Eurocom probably could put together, with Xeon CPU, ECC RAM, a couple of NVMe drives, a 4k IPS display and a GPU to drive it all.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mhajicek on Sunday February 07 2016, @04:25PM
I just built a desktop workstation with almost identical specs for CADCAM. Having the same thing in a luggable format would be handy.
CADCAM requires a lot of horsepower, and since most files are proprietary one cannot cloud, unless of course it's your own personal cloud.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Sunday February 07 2016, @04:56PM
Exactly. For the stuff that I need to do locally, the 1TB SSD, quad-core i7 and 16GB of RAM in my laptop are adequate, though 32GB would be nice for a few more (and larger) VMs. For stuff where I really need compute power, we have a rack with a few 24-core boxes with at least 384GB of RAM (512GB or 1TB in the newer ones) and a deduplicated ZFS pool with a big SSD for L2ARC and log device (so the big spinning rust disks are there for persistent storage but never end up on the hot path for disk I/O). If anything, those machines could be faster - I certainly wouldn't want to compromise their performance by requiring that they be portable, or able to run for more than 5 minutes on a battery.
The one thing that I would like in a laptop is the 128MB eDDR for L4 cache that a few of the newer Intel chips have. That makes a huge difference in a few of our workloads (FPGA synthesis times half of the fastest Xeons that we can buy without it).
sudo mod me up