Dell Bolsters Workstation Portfolio With New Systems

Dell is upgrading its high-end and mainstream workstations with Intel’s upcoming “Haswell” Xeon processors and next-generation graphics capabilities from Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia.

At the Siggraph 2014 show, Dell officials announced the single-socket Precision Tower 5810, dual-socket 7810 and expandable 7910, and the 2U (3.5-inch) Precision Rack 7910 workstations, which they said also will feature a new version of the vendor’s Precision Optimizer for automatically configuring the system settings to ensure the best performance for the workload.

“Every key component of our new workstations has been updated, resulting in outstanding performance gains to help our customers design without limitations,” Andy Rhodes, global executive director for Precision workstations at Dell, said in a statement.

The new Xeon processors will feature DDR4 memory, which is designed for better performance and power efficiency over the DDR3 memory in use in most systems today. The workstations also will leverage the latest FirePro GPUs from AMD and Quadro graphics technology from Nvidia, and offer enhanced I/O performance and up to 1TB of DDR4 memory. The towers also offer the option of Thunderbolt 2 technology for faster transport speeds and simultaneous 4K video file transfer, according to Dell officials.

The latest version of Precision Optimizer v2.0 brings with it automatic dynamic performance tuning of the workstations’ settings, tracks system utilization and offers system updates. The new version of the performance-enhancement software will be available for download starting Sept. 4, and will be factory-installed in Dell’s new tower workstations starting in mid-October. Dell officials said the Precision Optimizer v2.0 increases application performance by as much as 121 percent.

In addition, the new workstations come with Dell’s Quick Resource Locator for faster access to extensive system information as well as how-to videos that can be seen through a smartphone, which officials said will help users be more efficient in managing their hardware. A partnership with Teradici has led to software that offers faster and more secure remote access for not only the new workstations but also ones already in the Dell portfolio.

The new workstations will be available Sept. 9.

The Dell workstations were introduced the same day that Lenovo announced new ThinkStation systems.