Lenovo’s New P Series Workstations Are Seriously Powerful

Investing in a new workstation is crucial if you are a hardcore CAD designer, a simulation engineer, a visual effects artist, a video editor or need to perform high-resolution renders daily.

Lenovo just released two new powerful workstations you may want to take a look at: the ThinkStation P920 and ThinkStation P720.

Common Features Shared by ThinkStations P920 and P720

1. They are bundled with Intel’s newest Xeon processors—Platinum, Gold, Silver or Bronze—giving users access to processing speeds of up to 3.6GHz.
2. They have full RAID support for NVMe drives, a crucial feature for reading and writing huge CAD project files.
3. They are outfitted with NVIDIA Quadro GPUs.
4. They come with increased six-channel memory to support increasing computational loads.
5. They have support for 28 cores per CPU.
6. They both run from the Intel C621 chipset.
7. They both have two M.2 connectors on their motherboards.
8. They both come with Windows 10 Pro, Ubuntu (pre-load) and Redhat Linux (certified).

ThinkStation P920

Outfitting your workstation with the right hardware is crucial to optimizing the performance you get from your machine­. If your workloads require massive GPU power, this workstation can fit three NVIDIA Quadro GP100 or P6000 GPUs, and can be customized with up to 2TB of 2666 MHz RAM in 16 DIMM slots.

Wi-Fi, an optical drive, and a memory card reader are integrated into the P920, and the chassis can hold 12 internal drives. The large chassis gives users the option of adding up to five PCIe x16 slots, and three PCIe x4 slots.

ThinkStation P720

The P720 is a similar machine with a smaller chassis. This means it can only hold two NVIDIA P6000 or GP1200 GPUs (versus the P920’s three GPUs), but it can still pack in two Intel Xeon Platinum, Gold, Silver, or Bronze CPUs. The design of the P720 gives users the option of adding up to 384GB of DDR4 2666 RAM with 12 DIMM slots available.

The amount of detail digital artists and creative professionals need to generate is staggering. A CGI character requires so much processing power—because the amount of data can be massive—that it generally must be split into different body parts, like components in an assembly. This allows the artist or creator the ability to better manipulate their 3D data in real-time (or as close as they can get).

The ThinkStation P series has a lot of raw processing power for almost any kind of single-threaded or multi-threaded workloads. No artist or creative professional wants to be delayed because their workstation hardware is inadequate. Artists and creative professionals can’t afford to fall behind or become a bottleneck in production for the wrong reasons.

If you aren’t into building your own computer—maybe you don’t have the time—and are in the market for a workstation, it’s reasonable to conclude that you may be interested in checking out this latest offering from Lenovo. And if you can’t go to Lenovo, don’t worry, because the company is going on a world tour.

Lenovo’s Global ThinkStation Tour

Lenovo is engaging in a worldwide tour through North America, Asia and Europe in the next few weeks to showcase it new ThinkStation P series in a variety of contexts. The hope for the company is to highlight who it thinks will benefit from the workstations and what kind of work it can do in different industries all over the world.

Check out these tour dates:

1.       Trojan Horse Was a Unicorn (Artists and Creative Professionals)—Portugal

You read that right, Lenovo’s first stop is at a six-day conference called Trojan Horse was a Unicorn in Tróia, Portugal. Lenovo has sponsored this conference­—aimed at art, design, production, animation and gaming—for the past few years.

If you’re going, you can see the new ThinkStation P series in the co-labs at the event, where Lenovo is teaming up with the best visual effects school in the world: Gnomon.

2.       Autodesk University—Japan (AEC Professionals)

Within the AEC sector, visualization, simulation and analysis of complex CAD data is the name of the game. Like artists and creative professionals, AEC professionals are segmenting design and simulation workloads into smaller sections, which are then combined into a completed assembly using powerful rendering software internally, or sending it to professional render farms for a fee.

The ThinkStation P920 and P720 may give AEC pros the ability to tighten their security by ensuring that they can process their 3D data in-house, irrespective of complexity or size. To put its money where otsmouth is, Lenovo is showcasing how pioneering AEC company MX3D used the ThinkStation P900 series to power its robotic 3D printing system, which is working to build the world’s first truly functional, 3D-printed steel bridge.

MX3D’s work and partnership with Lenovo will be showcased at Autodesk University Japan later this month, and attendees will get a chance to immerse themselves in MX3D’s tech through a VR experience that teleports them to Amsterdam where they can walk across the steel bridge while learning about the robotic 3D steel printing technology that will have enabled its creation.

3.       87^th Annual SEG International Expo—Houston, Texas

In the oil and gas sector, users must deal with complex datasets that represent intersections of different disciplines like seismology, geosciences and energy exploration.

The datasets contain massive amounts of information that need to be worked through efficiently, which means that professionals in this sector need enormous amounts of memory and computing power. At the conference being held later this month, Lenovo will bust out all its new gear, and highlight the ThinkStation P920’s visualization capability and real-time manipulation of earth-shatteringly large sets of seismic data sets.

Bottom Line

The ThinkStation P920 and P720 seem like badass workstations capable of processing vast amounts of data sets and manipulating them in real-time. This works for artists, creative professionals, AEC professionals, MFG professionals and oil and gas professionals.