Acer brings NVIDIA’s Quadro RTX 5000 to its ConceptD 7 laptop

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Intel new Core i9 gaming CPU, 10nm processors teased ahead of Computex

Computex this week will most likely showcase a plethora of upcoming products that will make both consumers and manufacturers drool or dream of the future. For Intel, however, that future isn’t that far off. Later this year, it will launch two products that aim to address areas where Intel has been perceived to be lagging behind. With the 9th gen … Continue reading

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NVIDIA is giving away the 'Quake II' ray-tracing demo on June 6th

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Razer updates the Blade with NVIDIA’s new Quadro RTX 5000

Hot on the heels of NVIDIA announcing the arrival of its Quadro RTX 5000 for laptops, comes the parade of companies who have signed up to offer the new silicon. First off, is Razer, which is upgrading its line of Blade 15 and Blade Pro 17 professiona…

NVIDIA is bringing pro-level Quadro RTX GPUs to laptops

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Nvidia announces its Studio line of laptops to compete against the MacBook Pro

During its press conference in Taipei a day before Computex starts, Nvidia announced a new line of laptops that will run its RTX graphics processing units, as well as a new software platform called Studio, with SDKs and drivers to make graphics rendering and other tasks faster. The units are targeted to creative professionals, like video editors, photographers and graphic designers, and meant to compete with the 15-inch MacBook Pro.

One of Nvidia's new Studio laptops, meant to compete against the MacBook Pro

One of Nvidia’s new Studio laptops, meant to compete against the MacBook Pro

The series will include seventeen laptops made by Nvidia’s manufacturing partners (including Acer, ASUS, Dell, Gigabyte, HP, MSI and Razer). The laptops will begin retailing in June, with prices starting at $1,599.

The 17 laptops will be equipped with Quadro RTX 5000, 4000 or 3000 GPUs or GeForce RTX 2080, 2070 and 2060 GPUs. Nvidia claims they can perform up to seven times faster than the MacBook Pro. Studio laptops with Quadro RTX 5000 GPUs will have 16GB of graphics memory, and some of the devices will also have 4K displays and Nvidia’s Max-Q tech for building thin and lightweight laptops.

The Nvidia Studio suite includes the CUDA-X AI platform for automating tasks like color matching videos or tagging photos.

Lenovo Project Limitless: 5G PC, Powered By Snapdragon 8cx

At Computex 2019, Qualcomm and Lenovo have demonstrated “Project Limitless” the world’s first 5G PC, powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx platform and a discrete Qualcomm X55 5G modem.

We have explained what Snapdragon 8cx and the X55 modem are, but we’ll go over what the combination of both in a laptop means for apps and communications in upcoming always-connected PCs.

Computing speed and battery life

When the Snapdragon 8cx processor was announced in December 2018, it looked extremely strong on paper, but in Taipei, we were able to observe PC benchmarks like PCMark10 running on this platform, and the scores reveal much about what to expect from the user experience.

UL, the company behind PCMark 10, has just launched a new “app” benchmark that tries to measure the speed and productivity of real apps such as Microsoft Office, and the results for this new Qualcomm-powered Lenovo laptop are stunning.

The DX12 graphics performance in the PCMark 10 Night Raid test shows a significant performance leap from Qualcomm’s Adreno GPU over Intel’s HD graphics (i5-8250U) and a native support from engines such as Unity will help a lot of developers transit to ARM support.

Unity Engine, running natively on ARM

Essentially, the absolute performance of Snapdragon 8Cx is often higher than an Intel Core i5-8250U, but with a much better power-efficiency, that not only limits performance throttling (which contributes to higher scores) but also yields a huge battery-life advantage over Intel, sometimes topping 100% longer battery life.

Qualcomm’s power-efficiency has always been better than legacy PC processors, and that’s already true for the current Snapdragon 855 SoC present in today’s on laptops such as the Lenovo C630 WoS we previously reviewed.

But while we found Snapdragon 855’s performance is comparable to a 4.5W “Y-series” Intel processor, Snapdragon 8cx behaves like a 15W TDP Intel processor, especially when it comes to running common office applications.

5G Communications

Snapdragon 8cx has an integrated 4G LTE modem, but in this case, its functionality is completely disabled, leaving the new X55 modem to handle both 4G and 5G communications with higher performance.

There are no commercial 5G networks in Taipei for now, but from the early 5G test conducted in the USA (in sub-6 frequencies), we already know that 5G networks can be substantially faster than their 4G counterparts, even without support for mmWave, the fastest implementation of 5G.

Streaming 4K videos over 5G is easy

Such real-world speeds go from ~600Mbps to nearly 1Gbps in download speeds, depending on the location, and network conditions. That’s well above anything we’ve experienced on 4G LTE devices, and offer a mobile user experience that is superior to most WiFi networks.

As 5G networks become denser and get support for mmWave, we expect the speed to increase, and the latency to decrease. Eventually, mobile broadband will feel no different than home or office networks.

Even if you don’t have 5G coverage right now, the good news is that Snapdragon 8cx and the X55 modem are a platform that is future-proof when it comes to 5G.

Unprecedented battery life

The battery life score results of PCMark 10 are particularly impressive. Using a loop of three use cases (Office, Video Playback and Idle state) the new PCMark 10 is much more realistic than other tests often used by OEMs.

We previously estimated that the PCMark 8 battery test was the most consistent and representative, at least until today.

Battery life is the stronghold of Qualcomm’s always-connected platform as it objectively performs without competition. No other PC platform can claim multiple days of battery life, and Snapdragon has a fundamental advantage here, due to its mobile-first design.

Conclusion

Lenovo and Qualcomm have introduced what is going to become the template for Always-On, Always-Connected 5G PCs for the next 12 months.

The Qualcomm PC platform has evolved unbelievably fast over the past couple of years, improving on all aspects: functionality, performance, connectivity, battery life.

From a hardware standpoint, this platform is a very strong foundation for ultra-light and ultra-enduring productivity laptops.

The next question is whether software support will improve as much. The ARM-native versions of browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, and Edge have contributed greatly to closing the gap with a legacy PC experience.

When hardware becomes available for review, we’ll take a second look at the complete state of the Always-On, Always-Connected PC, and how it might make your digital life better.

Lenovo Project Limitless: 5G PC, Powered By Snapdragon 8cx , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

NVIDIA announces Quadro RTX mobile workstations for Studio program

Going hand-in-hand with the announcement of its new Studio program – which will see a collection of RTX-powered laptops launch with content creators and designers in mind – NVIDIA revealed that it will also be releasing a line of Quadro RTX mobile workstations. These Quadro RTX laptops will be on the high-end of spectrum for Studio computers, with the Quadro … Continue reading