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Today’s topics include Lenovo introducing two new ThinkPads, and Nvidia’s new GPUs speeding up real-time simulations.
Lenovo unveiled on Aug. 13 two new ThinkPad laptops: the ThinkPad P1, Lenovo’s thinnest and lightest model to date, and the ThinkPad P72, featuring advanced graphics hardware for users in the oil and gas, automotive, financial and other industries.
The P1 includes a 15.6-inch Full HD display or an optional 4K UHD touch-screen display, a choice of Intel 8th Generation Xeon or Core processors, up to 64GB of DDR4 memory, and up to 4TB of NVMe solid-state drive storage.
The P72 includes a 17.3-inch Full HD display, the same optional display and processor options as the P1, up to 128GB of DDR4 memory, up to 6TB of storage and support for an optional 16GB of Intel Optane memory.
The two devices will be available by the end of August, with the ThinkPad P1 starting at $1,949 and the ThinkPad P72 starting at $1,799.
Nvidia has launched a new series of high-performance GPUs that it claims greatly reduce the processing time for animation rendering from hours down to near real time.
Nvidia CEO and founder Jensen Huang announced Aug. 13 the new Nvidia Turing GPU architecture, which uses machine learning, the company’s latest RT Core processors and Tensor Cores to make real-time ray tracing possible.
Ray tracing is a rendering technique for generating visual images designed to simulate real-life objects, which often takes many hours of computer processing time. A render farm of 240 dual 12-core Skylake Intel CPU servers costs about $2 million, according to Huang, compared to a comparable setup of four Nvidia RTX 8-GPU servers that would cost $500,000, take up about a tenth of the space and require one-eleventh of the power to operate.