During the last decade or so, developments in CPU and GPU architectures have mixed extraordinarily properly with the relentless march of Moore’s Regulation on the silicon entrance. Collectively, these have resulted in hand-held gadgets which have extra computing energy than large and power-hungry machines from the flip of the century. On the desktop entrance, small form-factor (SFF) machines at the moment are turning into a viable possibility for demanding skilled use-cases. CAD, modeling, and simulation capabilities that required massive iron servers or large tower workstations only a few years again at the moment are able to being served by compact techniques.
Workstation notebooks integrating top-end cellular CPUs {and professional} graphics options from AMD (FirePro) or NVIDIA (Quadro Cellular / RTX Skilled) have been round because the mid-2000s. The appearance of UCFF and SFF PCs has slowly introduced these pocket book platforms to the desktop. Zotac was one of many early gamers on this market, and continues to introduce new merchandise within the Zotac ZBOX Q Collection. The corporate has two distinct strains – one with a pocket book CPU and knowledgeable cellular GPU (with a 2.65L quantity), and one other with a workstation CPU (Xeons as much as 80W) and knowledgeable cellular GPU (with a 5.85L quantity).
At this time, Lenovo can also be getting into the SFF workstation PC market with its ThinkStation P360 Extremely fashions. The corporate already has tiny workstations that don’t embody help for discrete GPUs, and that’s mounted within the new Extremely techniques. That includes desktop Alder Lake with an Intel W680 chipset (permitting for ECC RAM possibility), these techniques additionally optionally help discrete graphics playing cards – as much as NVIDIA RTX A5000 Cellular. 4 SODIMM slots enable for as much as 128GB of ECC or non-ECC DDR5-4000 reminiscence. Two PCIe Gen 4 x4 M.2 slots and a SATA III port behind a 2.5″ drive slot are additionally out there, with RAID risk for the M.2 SSDs. Relying on the selection of CPU and GPU, Lenovo plans to equip the system with one among three 89% effectivity exterior energy adapters – 170W, 230W, or 300W.
The entrance panel has a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Sort-A and two Thunderbolt 4 Sort-C ports, in addition to a combo audio jack. The vanilla iGPU model has 4 USB 3.2 Gen 2 Sort-A ports, three DisplayPort 1.4 ports, and two RJ-45 LAN ports (1x 2.5 GbE, and 1x 1 GbE). On the WLAN entrance, the non-vPro possibility is the Wi-Fi 6 AX201, whereas the vPro one is the Wi-Fi 6E AX211. Along with the PCIe 4.0 x16 growth slot for the discrete GPU, the system additionally consists of help for a PCIe 3.0 x4 card such because the Intel I350-T2 dual-port Gigabit Ethernet Adapter.
With dimensions of 87mm x 223mm x 202mm, the entire bundle is available in at 3.92L. With a view to cram the performance into such a chassis, Lenovo has employed a customized dual-sided motherboard with a novel cooling answer, as indicated within the teardown image above. A blower fan is positioned above the 2 M.2 slots to make sure that thte PCIe Gen 4 M.2 SSDs can function with none thermal points.
As is common for Lenovo’s enterprise / professional-oriented PCs, these techniques are examined to navy grade necessities and include ISV certifications fro corporations corresponding to Autodesk, ANSYS, Dassault, PTC, Siemens, and so forth. Pricing begins at $1299 for the bottom mannequin with out a discrete GPU.
The ThinkStation P360 Extremely joins Lenovo’s already-announced P360 Tiny and the P360 Tower fashions. The P360 Tiny would not help discrete GPUs, whereas the P360 Tower goes overboard with help for 3.5″ drives, and as much as 4 PCIe growth playing cards, together with a 750W PSU. Most workstation use-cases can get by with out all these bells and whistles. Further choices for the tip client are all the time welcome, and that’s the place the P360 Extremely comes into play.
