Dell Introduces Precision Laptop With 32GB RAM

[orionantares]

[citation][nom]pharge[/nom]I agree...Just like one of my professor said: no PC is powerful enough for her, if she need to calculate something she will use the supercomputer on campus. She never need a powerful laptop. She just need a laptop can let her VPN back to the supercomputer anywhere she likes.[/citation]

I doubt she works with graphic intensive software such as CAD or needs to access such software from remote locations that would require cellular or satellite service to reach a supercomputer very frequently.

Not everyone has the convenience to VPN to a server to do their work remotely.

 

[kalogagatya]

@Orionantares:

Yeah i agree but no laptop with a good professional graphics card actually uses 32gb of RAM.. for CAD!
That said, CAD software portability is excellent as you said, but the main question is: 32gb of RAM? What for..?

No serious mining business will analise such amounts of data on site. They mostly collect data on the field and then analise it with proper computing power. A laptop workstation is weaker than just one node on a decent cluster. Actually having a person travel to insert data on such supercomputer is actually cheaper and quicker than analysing data on a laptop! (if no surface satellite connection exists, which i doubt)

 

[xeensd]

This is for Lidar/CAD type instances and I can tell that hyper accurate surveys require gobs of ram.... I have seen 16GB choke on several million points (this is a medium size data set). I can see many in-situ instances where this would be useful. Especially in remote sites where office space is non-existent. I am surprised it is not ruggedized though...

BTW for good desktop DDR3 32gb is very expensive.

With CAD rendering I have always used distributed computing...

 

[nxym]

$1000 for i7 Xtreme. $2999 for the 32gb ram. who wants to buy?

 

[tipoo]

Pro tip: If your wondering what you would do with that RAM, its not for ya.

I think they use these high performance laptops on oil rigs, some army aircraft and whatnot.

 

[excalibur1814]

[citation][nom]dextermat[/nom]Way to go dell stuff you laptop full of useless ram that won't get used anyway but only in rare occasion...this is no mainstream computer I guess.I hope there extra cooling or it will overheat!!![/citation]

Don't talk rubbish. VMWare will EAT that ram and want more.

 

[excalibur1814]

[citation][nom]adonn78[/nom]Seems like a waste of unused RAM. when an SSD will give a much more noticeable performance increase. Get a good videocard faster CPUa nd SSD and get 8GB of RAM. anything more is stupid.[/citation]

No, its not. VMWare willl easily use that much ram and more. You're thinking 'home' user.

 

[awaken688]

"Is it more of a mobile workstation then a laptop?"

Come on Marcus. "than" is used for comparison. I expect it from uneducated readers, but not from professional writers.

 

[fulle]

RAMDisk? No seriously though, an application loaded into a RAMDisk can have like 500% faster read write times than a SSD... I suppose a good application for a machine like this would be video encoding. Although, I'm sure there's lot's of good uses.

 

[alphadark]

[citation][nom]Manthas[/nom]But wait a second here - looking at the Dell web site, it looks like they don't offer any 64-bit OS choices; it's all Win7 or WinXP 32 bit. Someone needs to explain that one to me.[/citation]

That much ram is useless without a x64 OS. Only Win7 Pro, enterprise, and ultimate support that much memory.

 

[Lutfij]

I'd just buy myself an LED tv rather than give it to intel

 

[coldmast]

Dell needs to edit their page, I keep trying to build a system (for s#its and giggles) and I keep getting compatibility errors.

 

[omenowl]

I reguarly hit the 4gig limit causing crashes on engineering software. Trust me the expense is not in the hardware. If you need a mobile workstation you are probably running 30k+ of software where your time is 100+ dollars an hour. I don't have time to waste 3-4 days of work on a program I can barely run with little confidence. If the program takes 3 hours to run that is fine, but if it takes 3 hours to crash then you have lost a lot of productivity.

Overall though if your work is reviewing, analyzing and producing designs for 100+ million dollar projects then an 8k-16k computer is not much even when multiplied by 20 people. Besides when you buy in bulk the cost drops to 50-75% of the list price.

 

[jonnyboyC]

why would anyone want that much ram

 

[rebb]

[citation][nom]jonpaul37[/nom]All for the low price of $3,999.99, which, surprisingly, is still lower than the price of a Macbook with an Intel core 2 duo and 4GB of RAM...[/citation]

My company bought my 17" Macbook Pro with an i7 and 8gb of ram for under $3k. Still, entirely too expensive, but not quite as exaggerated as your claim

 

[mrmotion]

I would love to run some 1k+ part solidworks models on this bad boy!!!

 

[dark_lord69]

[citation][nom]jonpaul37[/nom]All for the low price of $3,999.99, which, surprisingly, is still lower than the price of a Macbook with an Intel core 2 duo and 4GB of RAM...[/citation]

LOL!!! very true!

 

[ksampanna]

Why not just throw dual processors into the mix?

 

[maestintaolius]

[citation][nom]pharge[/nom]I agree...Just like one of my professor said: no PC is powerful enough for her, if she need to calculate something she will use the supercomputer on campus. She never need a powerful laptop. She just need a laptop can let her VPN back to the supercomputer anywhere she likes.[/citation]
Well, in the case of complicated engineering simulation software where you use a lot of ram you'll typically have very good initial guesses for your iteration process reducing the number of operations needed when you're in the field (because you've done them before back at your main desktop). Granted, any engineer worth their salt should have taken at least 1 or 2 numerical methods classes and have a good idea of the number of FLOPs needed to solve any given problem (which can be a very big issue because one choice may result in a 2 hour calculation whereas another choice could result in a 3 month calculation for only a slightly more precise answer, which is a bad thing in the world of non-academia where deadlines are generally sooner and cost/time are watched more closely).

I used to run plant simulations in aspen back on my 233 and it'd take days for the first solving (or longer if the system seized), but after you got that first solving done, the smaller changes you'd make in the field generally didn't take more than a few minutes to get a solution.

 

[Simple11]

Excalibure, you can specify that amount of RAM thats being 'ate' by VMWare...

 

[gammaraptor]

What a bunch of rubbish. Why on earth would you NEED that much power "on the go"?

 

[accolite]

My workstation at work has dual socket quad xeons, 16 Gig memory and it still has a hard time with Large Models, loaded/ modifying, currently it takes me up to 1 hr to load a really complicated Model, just to give some perspective.

The more ram the merrier, in other words I can work with larger files and not worry about being bottle necked by memory. And if I could take my workstation on the go that would be freaking awesome.

This should answer all those comments about "why would you need that for".

 

[ben55124]

640K of ram -- what for?

If you don't need a laptop with 32GB, Dell has other models for you. Don't let their other customers make you feel like they are cheating on you.

 

[lashton]

[citation][nom]Zaixionito[/nom]Ah, but you could buy 10 desktops that are more powerful in CPU and GPU performance for that price..[/citation]

but this si mobile hence why this will sell!!!

 

[omenowl]

It seems there is this idea you are always with a fast internet connection and cell phone reception. I can verify this is not true. Also the size of files and the ability to manipulate them on the fly limits the use of VPN. Even going to different office buildings you may find that you cannot access their network, but need to do work. The other issue is you may actually be running multiple instances of a program or multiple programs that provide input to each other.

If you are the primary engineer on a site and everyone is waiting for your recommendation. It is much cheaper to have the hardware w/ software than to hold up a rig that costs 300k a day.