New BOXX APEXX Workstations Now Available with NVIDIA Pascal GPUs

Having a brand-new powerful workstation to get killer amounts of design, drawing, modeling, simulation and rendering work done is a great feeling. Paying way too much money for anything, on the other hand, is a complete bummer.

Workstations are still the stalwart of engineering software users, though there is a trend toward smaller mobile workstations and powerful tablets like Microsoft Surface Pro.

BOXX workstations in particular are really well-designed machines and it's hard not to appreciate the artistry and effort that comes out of the BOXX Technologies headquarters in Austin, Tex.

It builds custom machines for hardcore product design teams that use CATIA, SOLIDWORKS, Inventor and Solid Edge, as well as KeyShot for rendering.

BOXX recently announced that its APEXX 2, 4 and 5 series of workstations now have the option of being equipped with NVIDIA’s Pascal GPUs, the Quadro P5000 and P6000.

Named for the 17th-century French mathematician Blaise Pascal, who built one of the world's first mechanical calculators, the successor to NVIDIA's Maxwell architecture involves stacking DRAM chips into tightly packed modules with broad interfaces and it scuttles them inside the same package as the GPU.

Enabling GPUs to get data from memory with greater speed allows for the design of smaller GPUs, which can fit in smaller objects. The new compact architecture allows for close to double the memory, higher energy efficiency and a near-100-percent increase in bandwidth.

Having the CPU access the GPU's memory, and the GPU access the CPU's memory using NVLink technology, means that programmers do not have to misallocate resources from the data flow between the GPU and CPU, which is where it counts.

You can see that the P6000 is packed with 24GB of memory, and thanks to the GDDR5X instead of GDDR5, you get a memory clock speed of 9.0GB/s. The P5000 packs a powerful punch with 16GB GDDR5X RAM, which is twice as much as was woven into the M5000.