There’s one thing I’ve been looking forward to since SolidWorks World. And now that I have that shower out of the way, I’d like to reveal what Lenovo shoveled me off from the event to the dark corner of a hotel restaurant to show me secretly whilst enjoyed an assemblage of assorted meats and cheeses. The Lenovo ThinkStation P710 and Lenovo ThinkStation P910–the next in line of their flagship workstations.
On the outside, you’ll notice a lot of similarities, the design language is largely unchanged–same grill, materials, grab handles and drive bay configuration for both. They both maintain the modular, toolless design and tri-channel cooling internally. But the power. Well, mmmmmm baby. Both bring more storage, more RAM and more graphic options than before. But the big thing I’m looking forward to with these puppies is the new Intel processors they’ll be sporting. Goodbye quad-core. Hello 22 (44 hyper-threaded) cores of CPU cranking, pucker-face inducing speed. Dual socket config? Yes, please. (Still no button to address your co-worker’s overtly vocal complaining though.)
The best way to see what these bring is to compare the Xeon E5 v3 (Broadwell) with the Xeon E5 v4 (Haswell), courtesy of Hexus.
You should read the rest of that Hexus article for details on the processors. These machines, and the P910 in particular, have so much power, I made a fake quote from Lenovo about it:
“I had been using the P910 ThinkStation daily, when I noticed a change taking place. My beard, once dry and bristly was suddenly glowing and soft as a bunny’s belly fur. I am convinced it was the five powerful, new features of the P910 that set the transformation in motion.” – Greyson Davis, Sr. Manager, Worldwide Workstation Marketing at Lenovo
That’s probably pretty much, mostly, kinda, not really, but yeah, actually true. Those features are:
- Universe melting Intel Xeon E5-2600 v4 dual processor configurations
- Pixel crushing NVIDIA Quadro M6000 graphics with 24GB VRAM, including support for three cards within the ThinkStation P910
- Memory gushes up to 1TB on the ThinkStation P910 and 384GB DDR4 on the ThinkStation P710
- Bigger than Fat Bastard storage capacities for further expandability within the 14 drive bays available in the ThinkStation P910 and 12 drive bays available in the ThinkStation P710
- Hippie flogging Energy Star 6.2 qualification, EPEAT Gold, GreenGuard, 80 PLUS certification and more
That’s a lot of lean, meaty magnificence with none of the glistening gristle to slow down the process of powering through your daily activities. When you get your hands on one, let us know how it goes. In the mean time, we’ll see about testing these mutha’s out, and we’ll at least check to see if there’s an option to replace your co-worker’s temper-tantrums with an extra processor or shot of whiskey.
The P710 and P910 are expected to hit the stores within the next few weeks, after ISV certification is finished up. Price on the current P700 starts at $1600 with the P900 starting at $1800, so expect starting prices to be around the same. Maxed out with two CPUs, memory and storage and you can expect to be in the $10k plus range and beyond. We’ll update with more pricing info as it becomes available.
Images below. P710 on left. P910 on right.
