upFront.eZine Issue #844
Dell doesn't have a new line of mobile workstations this year; instead, it is upgrading some features. A "mobile workstation" is a laptop that's powerful enough to handle CAD, digital video editing, and other power- and disk-hungry programs. Dell has four mobile workstations for engineers:
Model M2800 M3800 M4800 M6800
Screen size 15.6" 15.6" 15.6" 17.3"
Start price $1,000 $1,700 $1,230 $1,580
Top price* $2,010 $3,630 $4,800 $8,380
(*) The top price depends on the options you select; I choose nearly all of the most expensive options.
Karl Paetzel, Dell director of marketing for workstations, and Mano Gialusis, Dell product marketing manager of mobile workstations, wanted to talk to me about the M3800, the thinnest and lightest 15" engineering laptop on the market.
"It's too powerful to be called an ultrabook," said Mr Paetzel. Intel defines the size and function of laptops that can be called "Ultrabooks," which are light, slim, use low-power 15W CPUs (to lengthen battery life) with integrated graphics (graphics processing is included in the CPU).
And technically, the M3800 is not an ultrabook, even though it is the correct size and weight. Where it misses out is that it employs a full-power CPU (37W i7 Core) and discrete graphics, specifically Nvidia's Quadro K1100M GPU. "Competitors have Ultrabook workstations, but our's is still the thinnest and lightest 15-inch mobile workstation," he said.
(The situation is like the laptop I bought last summer, which sported a sticker proclaiming, "Inspired by Ultrabook." It too fails the strict definition, because of its more powerful i5 CPU.)
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New for 2015
For 2015, there is no change to the size, weight, or starting price of the M3800, explained Mr Gialusis. Changes involve a few upgraded functions and some new options.
One upgrade is the Thunderbolt 2 port for access external drives and so on. It replaces the miniDisplayPort (DP) on last year's model, but can still work as a miniDPort port. Thunderbolt is known as Lightning on Apple's computer, and both use miniDP as the connector, which is about the size of a miniUSB port.
Another upgrade is ethernet dongle, from USB 2.0 to USB 3.0 for gigabit network speeds.
A larger SSD (solid state drive) is available, going from the old maximum of 512GB to 1TB. Note that this computer has two slots for drives, allowing a total 2TB internal storage. It can mix and match SSDs and hard drives.
For developers, especially those using Linux, the Bluetooth spec is upgraded.
Finally, there is a new display available as an option. The Ultra 4Kx2K screen has a very bright display for daylight usage, and sports Gorilla glass (for toughness) and 10-finger touch.
Q&A
upFront.eZine: Being thinner and lighter means a smaller battery. Do engineering users want that trade-off on the worksite?
Dell: Two batteries are available. One is the standard 61WHr [watt-hour] model that we rate at 6 hours; the other is a 91WHr model rated for 8-9 hours of computer use. The bigger battery does not stick out of the case, because it intrudes into the 2.5" bay [which then cannot be used for the second hard drive].
upFront.eZine: Is LTE [high speed data via cell towers] an option in your mobile workstations?
Dell: It is available internally with the other three workstations, but not on this M3800. On this one, it is available through a USB dongle.
upFront.eZine: What are you seeing customers use Thunderbolt for?
Dell: Data transfer with media and entertainment customers. When recording movies at 4K resolution, an awful lot of data is generated and needs to be copied from the camera to the workstation in a reasonable time.
- - -
Mr Gialusis concluded by reeling off some of the improved stats for this upgraded M3800:
- 26% faster rendering
- 3-4 degrees cooler on top
- Zero frames dropped, as opposed to 37 interruptions (one or more frame drops) in playback on Apple MacBook Pros.
For greater power and storage, there are Dell's bigger workstations: M4800 handles 5TB of storage, while the M6800 can take 7TB.
http://www.dell.com/workstations
And One More Thing...
Opencartis announces Spatial Manager for BricsCAD, a plug-in that imports and manages geospatial (mapping) data inexpensively ($99 and up). Spatial data is imported from files and servers as BricsCAD DWG entities, with data tables stored as extended entity data.
The plugin transforms geometries between coordinate reference systems. Functions are grouped in a palette. It is also available for AutoCAD. http://www.spatialmanager.com/spm-forbricscad
Even More News
WorldCAD Access is blogging nearly every day about the CAD industry and tips on using hardware. (The feed is available on RSS and through email alerts.) The following articles appeared during the last week:
- Live blogging the Raspberry Pi 2 launch
- foto of the sunday: German Technical Museum
- Geometric Modeling by Nikolay Golovanov (book review by Ralph Grabowski)
On Twitter, @upfrontezine offers CAD news, late-breaking updates, and wry commentary throughout the day.
To donate to this newsletter's operation through PayPal, click http://www.upfrontezine.com and then choose the Donate $25 (personal) or Donate $500 (corporate) button. A big thank you to these readers who donated last week:
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Letters to the Editor
Readers Respond: Can We Trust DWGs Displayed by AutoCAD 360?
Funny thing: Before reading your eZine, I wrote a comment on the Inventor forum about drawing interchangability [translation]. Maybe that's a similar issue, in principle, as A360 &tc? Here's what I wrote:
"I remember when I was on DOS 3.1, how I kept banging the drum of file interchangability. It was a matter of common sense, not a wishlist item. Everybody and their brother kept saying, "Yes, yes, wait till next release of the software." So we spent the money and, well, here we are almost 30 years later (yes, THIRTY YEARS), and I'm still waiting. After a few decades worth of 'trends, I began to realize it was all marketing "lies" to keep us on the hook paying for everybody else's software R&D, so I quit hoping for the impossible.
- Chris Cadman
Fantastic article, Ralph! It brought back memories of endless hours spent verifying platform translations between different CAD systems in the 1980s and 90s. Variable-width plines, custom linetypes, nested block inserts, xrefs, and then all the weird entity types other systems created that didn't come back through the vendor porthole, as we called it.
I've sometimes wondered if it were ever possible to quantify the hours and related costs of that one aspect of proprietary translation -- what it cost our businesses and government during those years. Then again, in my case, it was defense department spending: a black hole filled up from an invisible pipeline.
- David Stein
The editor replies: It is remarkable how the cloud is making interoperability worse.
Ralph Grabowski asks in upFront.eZine #843: 'I am not sure what file corruption of drawings by clones has to do with display corruption by Autodesk software, which is used by engineers working outside of the office, who rely on what they are seeing to resolve problems with contractors on the job site.'
Yes, I agree that any viewer software should display the file contents reliably and I hope Autodesk will fix this soon in AutoCAD360 - at least for 2D DWGs. But there is a difference in the trust -- 'trusting in what is currently displayed on my mobile device' (when I can double-check the real contents in desktop AutoCAD) and in 'trusting that the original contents is not corrupted forever' (when you open/save a DWG in a clone CAD).
Any not-fully-recognized 2D object in AutoCAD360 can be still edited properly and it will be properly represented inside the cloud-based DWG. Any DWG edited in a clone is quite probably corrupted for any future use. We have lots of customers complaining then about double "0" layers, draworder not working, failures on plotting, missing objects and other strange problems caused by non-genuine DWGs.
It is like a web page: you know that it may look (or behave) slightly different on your tablet but I doubt you will like the risk of corrupting the page for any future visitors.
- Vladimir Michl, CAD Studio
http://budweiser.cadstudio.cz/2015/01/autocad-360-and-budweiserdwg-benchmark.html
The editor replies: I don't think it is like a Web page at all. Engineers in the field do not have the luxury of comparing the look of hundreds of drawings displayed by AutoCAD on their desktop computers with those displayed by 360-based software on their phones, just because Autodesk's cloud suffers from display corruption.
You wrote, 'a key statistic I was relying on did not mean what I first thought it meant.' Okay, in strictest confidence, what statistic? "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics" is usually attributed to Mark Twain.
- Bill Fane
The editor replies: One page of Autodesk's Web reports 170+ million users of their consumer software; another reported 25 million. I asked Autodesk pr about the disparity, they pointed out the 25 million represented the number to which they could push ads.
Mr Fane responds: As more and more manufacturing gets moved offshore, it becomes apparent that the western economy's prime industry is advertising.
The editor replies: Oh, I dunno. Yahoo announced it is laying off a bunch of advertising staff, because much of it is now automated -- like those ads that follow you around after you view an item on Amazon or Staples without buying.
Thank you for caring. Based on what I see in the news, most journalists would've just gone ahead and published.
- Jess Davis
You'll probably hear this from others, but I've now received three copies of this week's issue.
- Bill Glennie
The editor replies: My ISP screwed up the settings to my connection, and as I result I had to resend the newsletter to some readers. I am hoping this affects fewer than 500 readers. Thank you for the heads-up.
Spin Doctor of the Moment
"Power button available on select devices, and may not be on the device shown."
-- Footnote accompanying all computers in a Dell flyer
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