Lenovo has been hitting it out of the park as of late. Even its smartphone unit, Motorola, has recovered, and in servers and PCs, Lenovo is a true force to be reckoned with.
But last week, Lenovo teamed up with Aston Martin to launch a new line of ThinkStation workstations, expanding its lead in that market. They’re impressive performers, using two of Intel’s most powerful CPUs and four of Nvidia’s most powerful professional graphics cards. They draw so much power that you’ll need to rewire your desk or home office to get the thing running.
Let’s talk about some of the ways Lenovo has found to get around its competitors, resulting in its growing share and generally being ranked as number one in an increasing number of categories. We’ll end with our product of the week, GrammarlyGO, a solution that adds generative AI to its automated editing product line.
The Aston Martin Workstation
This column inspired the announcement of the workstation at DreamWorks, once the most prominent reference account of the old HP. But when Meg Whitman split the company, neither HPC nor HP could bid the hybrid workstation. A significant advantage with either system, or clearly did, cause DreamWorks to flip it to Lenovo instead.
From talking to DreamWorks, it was likely the servers, not the workstations, that forced the switch. Lenovo’s early recognition of the unique performance advantage of AMD’s Threadripper platform resulted in Lenovo taking the market leadership of high-end servers, proving to be another great move by the company.
Aston Martin co-designed the workstation Lenovo launched last week. This alone is interesting. Not because Q, James Bond’s armourer, was fond of those cars (there’s an interesting backstory here), but because like Porsche and BMW, Aston Martin has become a design house contracted to design other things. May go.
From left: Thinkstation PX, P7, P5 (Image credit: Lenovo)
Like BMW, which HP has used for workstations in the past, Aston Martin is good at blending clean exterior design with optimized airflow to create an attractive, high-performance, air-cooled workstation platform. To be honest, I had it on the Aston Martin Workstation, because it’s doubtful I’ll ever be able to afford the car, the Workstation being something I can afford.
As mentioned above, the most high-performance configuration has two of Intel’s most powerful professional CPUs and four of Nvidia’s most powerful professional GPUs, which together require a 20-amp dedicated circuit to run. So, if you want incredible levels of power, you’ll probably need to pull a 20-amp dedicated circuit just so you can plug the thing in.
If you leave that workstation running, your electricity bill will skyrocket. But for those who need ultimate performance, to my knowledge, there’s nothing more powerful than what the anticipated dual-socket AMD Threadripper has to offer.
hot water cooling
DreamWorks indicated that it turned to Lenovo servers because they could be cooled with hot water. According to DreamWorks, this unique approach developed at IBM resulted in over 30% energy savings for DreamWorks’ render farms and earned the company several environmental awards.
It still amazes me that hot water cooling is unique to Lenovo, given its massive performance and cost advantages. With hot water cooling, you don’t need a water chiller, making it much less expensive to install, and you don’t get the condensate that can cause corrosion problems.
Over the years, Lenovo has developed better and faster water connections, pivoting connections that allow for easier maintenance. The resulting servers run much quieter and make server rooms more tech-friendly than they usually are.
While it still has some air-cooled components such as power supplies, the plan is to make them water-cooled, promising an ultimately nearly dead-cool server room. If you’ve never been in one, a typical server room looks like you’re inside a windstorm or vacuum cleaner. They are extremely noisy, making them undesirable places to work.
The rack-optimized ThinkStation PX provides flexibility for use in both desktop and data center environments, allowing a convenient transition between the two. (Image credit: Lenovo)
It’s interesting to note that Lenovo demonstrated both what DreamWorks was using — a four-socket Intel server — and what the next generation was likely to look like — two AMD sockets and up to 4 GPU accelerators. They would have issues, given that GPUs are distributed as socketed parts. This last one suggests that there is an opportunity for AMD or some other graphics vendor (Intel?) to create a socketed GPU solution which could result in some interesting market share shifts and performance improvements.
For now, we’ll call it a lost opportunity.
generative ai
At Nvidia’s big GTC conference next week, there will be a great deal of generative AI content. DreamWorks indicated that it is gradually ramping up its generative AI capabilities, which should power these new Lenovo workstations and servers.
I expect this to be a game changer for filmmaking as these introduce increasingly capable AI physics and better allow animators to create and move characters in a film in real time, with game-like capabilities Which automatically causes clothing, hair and visual elements. Moves as if they were in the real world.
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When implemented, I bet this technology will massively improve DreamWorks’ productivity and allow it to hire more animators who aren’t good at drawing but can create more balanced and interesting imagery with the help of these generative AI tools. There are strong special skills to build upon.
In short, the future for DreamWorks, thanks to suppliers like Lenovo, looks surprisingly bright!
wrapping up
Lenovo is showing tremendous strength in each of its segments. Last week, it put in a strong showing with its Aston Martin-designed workstations and warm-water-cooled servers. Lenovo channeled some of this to DreamWorks, a performance-oriented company that supported Lenovo’s claims of market-leading efficiency, cost, and performance, lending a great deal of credibility to those claims.
Frankly, I thought that James Bond’s car company designed a new line of servers, which Aston Martin uses for its car designs, was an impressive way of arguing that Lenovo not only has these The regions best value but also the most powerful and efficient. Solution.
Now, if I can just get them to lend me an Aston Martin SUV, preferably the DBX that was in the program, I’d love it.
GrammarlyGO – Generative AI for the rest of us
Generative AI, like ChatGPT, is all the rage now, but these tools usually don’t integrate well with your workflow, and Microsoft hasn’t talked yet about how it plans to integrate generative AI into Office. Will implement
Last week, Grammarly announced its next-gen AI implementation, called GrammarlyGO — which should integrate with any platform that supports Grammarly, including multiple browsers, Word, and Outlook.
Using easy-to-understand notation, you can set the tone of a piece, set the theme, and notate internal elements.
GrammarlyGO will write an article or column for you, help you work through writer’s block, or compose an entire email from just a few short sentences. I hope Steve Ballmer liked that last part, because he used to treat email responses like every word he typed put his life at risk.
Existing Grammarly customers will have access to this capability in beta form starting in April, with the final version likely to be revealed by the end of the year. Using the combined Grammarly toolset should improve both the quality and quantity of your writing and allow you to get much more done in less time.
Given that this will significantly impact my productivity, GrammarlyGO is my product of the week.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ECT News Network.
