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Dell "Personal Supercomputers" Now Available With Nvidia Tesla GPUs

Andy Salisbury — Thu, 07 May 2009 16:27:48 -0500

To those looking for another venue to get their very own supercomputer, you’re in luck! Nvidia has recently announced that their CUDA-based Tesla C1060 GPU is available in Dell’s Precision R5400, T5500 and T7500 workstations effective immediately.

If you’re worried that just one of these GPUs isn’t enough to handle your hardcore needs, worry not – just one C1060 has enough power to control the main system of the European Extremely Large Telescope project (reportedly the world’s largest). According to Jeff Meisel with National Instruments, a workstation “equipped with a single Tesla C1060 can achieve near real-time control of the mirror simulation and controller, which before wouldn't be possible in a single machine without the computational density offered by GPUs."

Image Credit: Nvidia

Dell to Apple: Kiss our RAM - all 192GB of it

Gordon Mah Ung — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 06:41:43 -0500

Hoping to upend Apple’s Mac Pro cart, Dell said its new Precision 7500 dual Nehalem Xeon workstations will pack up to six times the amount of RAM and at higher speeds than are available with today’s hottest Apple machines.

Users can get to the 192GB mark by stuffing 12 16GB DIMMs into the Precision T7500’s chassis. Dell said the RAM speeds are also increased thanks to support for DDR3/1333. The Precision will use registered ECC RAM for high density configurations. The new chips will also mark the end of FB-DIMM in the dual processor Xeon lineup.

FB-DIMM’s, which use a small and wickedly hot memory controller on each DIMM to buffer the signals, have long been dinged for massive thermal issues and latency penalties. Dell officials said people’s feelings on FB-DIMM aside, it did get the previous generation of CPUs to the RAM densities people needed. One of the primary justifications for FB-DIMM was the density issue on DDR2 but Dell officials said the 192GB mark for DDR3 was not a major technical hurdle in itself. Keeping it cool and keeping acoustics acceptable was a problem, but Dell said it has it under control.

Bandwidth and compute performance of the dual Nehalems leave the previous design in the dust, Dell said. Like the Core i7, the top-end Nehalem Xeons will feature 8MB of L3 cache, 6.4GT/s QPIs, and support Turbo Mode and Hyper-Threading. The Xeon’s will also support something called Direct Cache Access which lets single-threaded applications subsume all of the available shared L3 cache when it’s not being used by other threads.

For expansion, the Precision T7500 will feature five physical x16 PCI-E 2.0 slots. Two will run at x16, two at x8 and one at x4. An additional PCI-X and PCI will be included for legacy hardware. Dell will support Windows XP and Vista in 32-bit and 64-bit flavors as well as Red Hat Enterprise Linux in 64-bit, FreeDOS and Novel SLED Linux.

Oddly, Dell didn’t release the clock speeds nor model numbers of the CPUs in the launch but it is assumed that the company will use Intel’s 2.93GHz Xeon X5570 part. Apple announced a Mac Pro using the X5570 part on March 3. Dell could also step it up a notch and use the Xeon version of the Intel’s Core i7-965 Extreme Edition brother: the 3.2GHz Xeon W5580. Although Dell and Intel declined to give details on the Xeon lineup, the leaked list has been available for some time. No fewer than ten Nehalem-based Xeon’s are due this year including half-cache versions and even non-Hyper-Threaded and dual-core chips using DDR3/800.

The company said the year marks the ninth year that it has led in workstation machines and current estimates give Dell about 40 percent of the market.

EVGA Updates Precision Overclocking Tool, Adds Multi-GPU Support

Paul Lilly — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 10:40:34 -0500

You have to admire when a company doesn't just talk the talk, but walks the walk. EVGA, one of three Nvidia add-in board (AIB) partners to offer lifetime warranties for its videocards, not only allows end-users to overclock their cards without voiding the warranty, but arguably encourages the behavior by serving up OCing tools. Registered owners can download the company's GPU Voltage Tuner utility, and anyone can download EVGA's Precision overclocking software whether they own an EVGA-brand videocard or not.

In the case of the latter, a new version is now available, v1.5.1. Several updates have been added to the 1.5.x refresh (the majority were included in v1.5.0 released last Friday), including multi-GPU support. The overclocking tool now gives users independent access to thermal monitoring, overclocking, and fan control settings of all installed GPUs whether configured to run in SLI or not.

Other changes and fixes include better support for GeForce 9 and older videocards, a pair of new skins, settings no longer reset at Windows startup on multi-GPU systems, fixed memory clock monitoring for G98 GPUs, and Precision now displays the graphics processor codename in the system info.

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Dell Announces 10 New Laptops, 19-Hour Battery Life, Linux “Latitude On” OS – Hands-on plus photos!

Norman Chan — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 15:30:58 -0500

The torrent of business laptop announcements continue. Earlier this week, we took a look at the new Lenono Thinkpad W700 and HP Elitebook 8730w 17” mobile workstations announcements, and now Dell is making itself heard with a completely revamped Latitude Business notebook lineup. We attended the Dell Mobility press conference event in San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art to check out the new laptops, which are infused with some very interesting technologies: 19-hour battery life and an always-on Linux-based OS frontend.

The new lineup of Latitude E-series notebooks rolled out at the event showcase Dell’s new commitment to extending battery life, adding robust connectivity, and enhancing product design. Here’s how Dell lists the new features, according to their engineering blogs:

•   Excellent battery life: some system configurations can get up to 19 hours. But it's not just the largest batteries that benefit—we've made improvements on battery life whether you use a 6-cell, 9-cell battery or a battery slice.
•   All models offer lots of connectivity options: Wi-Fi (802.11n), several mobile broadband options, WWAN, Ultra-wideband and Bluetooth 2.1. Most are WiMAX ready, and can be ordered with an optional GPS.
•   All kinds of security options: smart card and fingerprint readers, hardware-based disk encryption, contactless smart card technology. Another hardware-based security feature is Dell's ControlVault solution that centralizes user identity key management and storage.
•   Centralized control via software—Dell's ControlPoint software allows users to manage battery power, network and connectivity configurations and system security settings all in one place.
•   In the coming weeks, we will offer color options on the E4200, E4300, E6400 and E6500 in addition to Mica-Brushed Metal Black: Regatta Blue and Regal Red. The E4200 adds Quartz Pink as an option, and the Latitude E5400 and E5500 are available in Matte Black.
•   Slick design that doesn't sacrifice functionality: our team focused on balancing aesthetics with durability and functionality. Besides the looks, these laptops feature full-frame magnesium alloy construction and all-metal hinges.

Sounds pretty sweet. In addition, the new laptops can be equipped with backlit keyboards, LED displays, and solid-state hard drives.

So how does Dell get 19-hours of battery life out of a laptop? The 19-hour rating (which we’re skeptical about) is actually only achieved if you use a large 9-cell battery (upgraded from the default 6-cell) in conjunction with a thin battery slice that covers the entire base of the laptop. Because of the large surface area of the battery slice, it’s supposedly not very thick – but it’ll no doubt add heft to the system. Dell also claims that it has made significant improvements to overall battery utilization – an “all day” mode can be enabled with software to extend battery life by reducing and optimizing power usage (ie. lowering the screen’s refresh rate to 40Hz).

Another feature that Dell will be rolling out in the coming months is the “Latitude ON” technology, which, like the HP/Voodoo Omen’s Instant-On feature, is a Linux-based UI that loads instead of Windows. Dell execs said that they weren’t creating the OS themselves, but have partnered with a yet-to-be announced third party to create the embedded Linux solution (apparently not SplastTop). What will differentiate Latitude ON from HP’s solution is that Dell is also utilize a separate low-voltage sub-processor to power the Linux OS, which in theory will let the laptop run for multiple DAYS.

But on to the actual laptops. Bookending the product line are a 2.2 pound ultraportable and a massive 17” workstation powerhouse.

The Latitude E4200 is a 12” ultraportable, which at its lightest weighs in at 2.2 pounds– the smallest Dell corporate laptop to date. Along with its 13” sibling (the E4300), the 4200 supports options like a built-in camera, contactless smart card, LED backlit display, SSD drive, and backlit keyboard. Getting our hands on a working pre-production model confirmed that yes, it is pretty light! But we also couldn’t help but notice that the laptop’s plastic construction also felt a little flimsy – it definitely didn’t feel as solid or rugged as the larger Latitudes sporting anodized aluminum chassis. Still, we were impressed by its weight and compact size.

On the high end was Dell’s Precision M6400 model, which was a concept workstation built to compete with HP and Lenovo’s high-end offerings. The 17” laptop supports up to 16GB of DDR 3 RAM (!!!), terabytes of storage on two hard drives in RAID, Intel’s quad-core mobile processors, and Nvidia’s 1GB Quadro 3700M GPUs. The LED backlit display on this beast also supposedly covers 100 percent of the Adobe color gamut, which makes it well-suited for image editing.

No word on the pricing for these models, but they should be popping up on Dell’s website in the next few weeks.