text:
HP EliteBook 8740w: IPS on the Goby Dustin Sklavos on 12/8/2010 3:10 AM EST
- Posted in
- IT Computing
- Intel
- EliteBook
- Mobile Workstation
- Quadro
- Laptops
63 Comments
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slacr - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - link"Of course, being a Quadro it does bring all of the secret sauce that NVIDIA packages with its workstation class cards"
What does this secret sauce do these days, the only documents i've found are rather old and talk of anti-aliasing in CAD software. Other "CUDA capable" cards offer GPU-assistance in for example Adobe CS and CAD software is no longer particularly bound by cpu so the only benefit i've seen is the larger video RAM which can be found on normal cards anyway, so what does the price premium actually buy? Reply
JarredWalton - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkI believe it's line anti-aliasing, better OpenGL drivers (with ISV certification for various applications), and some 64-bit FP performance enhancements. To my knowledge, all of this stuff is available in the standard NVIDIA GPUs, but they only enable it on the Quadro drivers. Reply
DanNeely - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkFP64 is the big one. ATI's high end GPUs are limited to FP64 performance that's 1/5th of FP32. Nvidia's high end consumer cards only have 1/.8th, while GT100/110 quadro's are 1/2 (the highest possible without throttling FP32). For scientific computing this is enough to justify paying several times as much as a consumer card so nVidia hobbles the GeForces to support sales of Tesla boxes. Reply
mczak - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkFP64 is really for tesla though. Maybe workstation cards still have the full performance FP64 enabled, but honestly noone would care. It's pretty much line aa still I think, plus geforce cards also have artificial limitation on (non-tesselated) geometric throughput. Reply
carsandcomps - Thursday, December 09, 2010 - linkThe secret sauce is overlay planes and 3D wireframe performance. Consumer cards are great for tesselated 3d with texture maps, but most are pretty horrible when there a hundreds of thousands of 3D wireframe edges in a view.
You are correct about the drivers being better also. While a crazy "flareout" or glitch from a surface is no big deal in a game, it is a show stopper on a real 3D engineering model. Not that I am a Nvidia fanboy, but their workstation class drivers have always been better in my opinion. Reply
sheltem - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkI'm pretty sure the Quadro 5000M is the same exact card as the 480M. The main difference is the drivers. You can either hack the driver files to trick it into a 480M (or vice versa) or mod the bios.
I actually have the Elitebook 8740w, but with an AMD FirePro 7820. I hacked the Catalyst Mobility drivers to work with my FirePro 7820M. Reply
Zan Lynx - Monday, December 13, 2010 - linkYou can hack it, but there's more to it than just the drivers.
The Quadro and Tesla hardware goes through a much more careful test process.
The gaming hardware will produce calculation errors fairly often.
The Quadro and Tesla hardware: hardly ever. Reply
yakugo - Monday, March 21, 2011 - linkHow/what did you do to hack your 7820 drivers so catalyst control center would work? i have a dell m6500 with the m7820 card. Could you email me at email@example.com
-Aaron Reply
mschira - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkWell, I do appreciate a decent screen, and you know what I might even be ready to pay 550$ extra for it, but a 17" laptop?
What's the point for that?
They never fit onto anything else but a desk. Even 15" laptops are a pain to carry around.
So why not get a decent all in one PC like an iMac ?
And why, oh why is there no smaller laptop that offers a decent screen?
M. Reply
damianrobertjones - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkWhy an iMac instead of the other oem machines? Reply
darwinosx - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkBecause the other all in ones suck. Reply
Joos - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkBecause a iMac is even more crap to drag around and has useless hardware for a workstation. Reply
Joos - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkAnd a 15" chassis is to small to be able to handle the thermal output of all those high spec components. Reply
Belard - Thursday, December 09, 2010 - linkNot really.... ThinkPad and others make 15" notebooks with top-end i7 mobile CPUs. The 17" models typically have room for a 2nd drive and a 2nd video card and because of the bigger screen, a much larger battery.
So in general, no... the extra 2" are not helping to keep it cool. Reply
erple2 - Friday, December 10, 2010 - linkThe CPU isn't the primary heat generator in a high end laptop. Even the top end mobile i7 940XM puts out about half the heat than the GeForce 480M (or Quadro 5000m).
And the Thinkpad 15" doesn't have a great GPU. The Quadro 880m is "ok", but it's just a slightly tweaked Geforce 330M.
Fast CPU in a laptop without the corresponding fast GPU = unbalanced laptop that, in general, disappoints. Then again, I'm looking for a laptop that is reasonably speedy in games. Reply
Candide08 - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkI have 1920 x 1200 resolution on my main workstation and really appreciate it, that is the main reason I chose this laptop... that and the 8GB RAM and i7 860 processor.
You ask a very good question about laptop screens - and why nobody really has decent resolution on a smaller laptop.
The point with this is that I can take it places. I have a rolling laptop case for longer trips. This is not a netbook or a carry-into-Starbucks laptop, it is a desktop replacement, running two or three Virtual-machines that I can take to meetings or other locations in my company - and work, REALLY work.
There are many classes of "laptops" these days, from ultra-light netbook to, well, THIS. Reply
seanleeforever - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkthey do have 15 inch dream color notebook, just FYI.
anand finally get their hands on a non-apple premium notebook. something i have been using for years, and wanted to see a objective review badly. the IPS screen is very very good and certainly not anything TN can be compared to, that include RGB LED TN that apple, lenovo, dell uses in their high end. the chart doesn't really do all the justice. if you actually view the screen from an angle, you will very, and i do mean VERY appreciate the benefit of IPS technology. in a realistic situation, you, or people who you want to share view, are never in a ideal 0 degree angle from screen, and that's when the IPS matter the most.
however, i disagree with the track pointer. they are far far away from ones you find in the thinkpad. as matter of fact, if you don't use track pointer at all, you won't see the difference. However, for people who rely on track pointer, it is a big deal. or example. say you are scroll up or down a page, or zoom in and out in firefox (with help of holding ctrl) , the easiest way to do on lenovo system is, hold the middle mouse button on the track point pad, and move the point up or down. super, super easy, and allows you to move pages left/right/up/down with millimeter movement on your finger. now, on HP unit. first of all, track pointer button require a lot of force to be pressed, i would say it probably requires 3~4X more force than thinkpad, second, the track pointer is level below keys,so you have to dig in to operator the pointer. and the worse part is the middle button cannot be configered. let me give you an example below.
say you are on cnn.com reading news, and you want to scroll down. on a thinkpad, no matter where you cursor is, just hold middle button using your thumb, and move your figure on the pointer (similar to type "space" + "B"). on a HP, you can only do it OCCASIONALLY. meaning you have to move the cursor away from any hyper link before you can navigate. or else it will open a new tab, very very annoy. and there is no way to fix it either...
and again, the touch screen audio bar, is there any one can operate it at all? Reply
seapeople - Thursday, December 09, 2010 - linkWhat is it with you people? I'm currently sitting on my couch with my 17" laptop on ... wait for this... wait for it... IT'S ON MY LAP! OMG! How dang small are you? Three feet tall? Do you ride around in hotwheels all day? Is Mini Me your physical superior? A 17" laptop is like 15-16 inches wide, most people are wider than that. Where do you like to put your laptop, on your nose? Hold it in the palm of your hand?
You say even 15" laptops are a pain to carry around? Were you born on the moon? Are your bones brittle and weak? Stop being a wuss, maybe this is why heart disease is starting to rise in thin people even, because people are so weak and out of shape that they think carrying a 6-7 lb laptop is hard. I hope you enjoy sitting there squinting at your 10.3" 1000x600 laptop placed precariously on the armrest of your sofa just so you can feel unencumbered. Reply
andy o - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkI got a little excited to see "32 nm" cause the first 32nm quad-cores should be Sandy Bridge! Reply
Dustin Sklavos - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkYou're right. Fixed it! Reply
blyndy - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkMy question is could HP/Dell put this level of build quality into a premium consumer without breaking $3500 (without hamstringing it with )?
prerequisites for any notebook:
- no glossy plastic
- no glossy screen
- no crappy keyboard
- no downright ugliness
And then the premium part:
- core i5
- 4gb ram
- nv 460m / ati 5870m
- IPS display
- RGB backlight option
- solid chassis
- solid hinges
The closest thing would be an alienware m15x or m17x, unfortunately, for all of the things that can be configured with alienware, removing the glossy plastic screen cover and IPS are not options. Reply
JarredWalton - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkConsidering you can get the 8540w with DreamColor 2 1080 for around $2150, and that includes a Quadro 880M GPU and an i5-520M, I'd say it would be trivial to make such a system with a 460M consumer GPU instead. Problem is, apparently they don't see a market for it. Heck, with the current sale you can get an i7-620M and DC2 plus a few other extras and still be around $2500. Reply
Zebo - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkJarred, could you link this deal?
Also - is this the cheapest you can configure a Dream color? I don't need quad or anything else fancy. I'll stick a intel SSD in once i get it that's about it. Reply
DanNeely - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkYou can just go strait to HPs website and get it. The discount code CTO8540w is 24%, 18% for the 17" model.
You're limited on your GPU with a 15" one though. 72nvidia or 400 ati SP's max. Reply
sheltem - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkIf you are smart with the choices, you can get this laptop for a decent price. I paid $1862 after tax with a 28% discount back in June. Aside from upgrading the screen to 1920x1200 /w camera, adding backlit keyboard and getting quad core (for the 4 dimm slots), I kept everything at it's bare minimum. I upgraded the memory, hd and added a SSD myself.
HP's business support is fantastic. I purchased an open box docking station from ebay which broke after 2 weeks. HP sent a brand new one to me with overnight delivery. I didn't even have to send the old one back. Any complaints about HP's customer service, is most likely directed towards their consumer products. Reply
Belard - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkFirst, for a "business" class notebook, 17" are TOO big. And with todays extra-wide-made-for-movies screens, 15.6" displays are just wide versions of 14" monitors.. might as well save a point and space for a quality 14" notebook nowadays.
Price as Configured is $5400~6500 (depending on coupon)... for that much money, might as well get a ThinkPad W701DS! Yeah, its a bit older - until Lenovo upgrades the touchpad and keyboard... where is our W710?
Here is a ThinkPad W701DS I priced out to almost the MAX at $5565!
- Core i7-920XM (2.0Ghz) - save $550 to go with the same Q820.
- Quadro FX 3800M (maybe on par with the FX5000)
- 4x4GB RAM DDR3 (8GB total)
- Camera, bluetooth, fingerprint reader, Centrino Advanced-N + WiMAX 6250
- 160GB SSD boot drive
- USB 3.0 / eSATA, DVD drive (of course)
- Pantone Color Sensor + WACOM Digitizer w/ Stylus
- Anti-spill channels for keyboard.
Don't know if theres a 56k modem (people use those?)
And this ThinkPad has dual screens. A 17" at 1920x1200 and the 2nd 10" screen does 768x1280.
Oh, and the keyboard is real... not the cheezy and easier to break island keyboards... but the trackpad is out-dated compared to the newer ThinkPads. They have the a light that makes it easier to see the keyboard at night... but it would be nice to have back-lit keys while keeping the great feel of a ThinkPad.
At 17 inches - these are work station, not office type computers... they are heavy and expensive.
The W510 (15" screen with 1920x1200 rez) with similar stats above like the HP is about $2200 is better suited for business. Reply
SandmanWN - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkyes, we know they are workstations. They are listed on the HP website as mobile workstations. It has workstation graphics and other parts. What are you going on about????? Get off the soap box. Reply
Belard - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkFor an "enterprise" $6000+ product, it comes with a cheezy keyboard found on their $500 toss-in-the-garbage models. Other than that, its a bit of a sexy notebook... which looks almost like an older 17" IdeaPad, down to the cheezy keyboard.
Many of the aspects of this HP design are obviously that they are from ThinkPad. The heavy-duty hinges, Trackpoint in the center of the keyboard, 3-button "mouse" buttons below and above the trackpad. So yes, this is aimed at serious people who tend to get a ThinkPad.
So, I'll stick to my phrase "Why bother", when you can get a ThinkPad with better specs in most areas for about $1000 less.
I'll get off my Soap box, but I'm taking it with me!
:) Reply
JarredWalton - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkOne major reason: ThinkPad doesn't have an IPS LCD. They use the same RGB LED backlit panel as the Dell M6500 (pretty sure anyway). Also, style preferences are just that: preferences. I'm sure plenty of people will prefer the look and keyboard on the 8740w. Having used an 8440w in person, I can say that I have no complaints with that keyboard, and a larger chassis with 10-key shouldn't change the feel much.
If you want a ThinkPad, sure, get a ThinkPad. If you want a Dell Precision, there's that option as well. If you want an IPS LCD, though, you're going to have to get an EliteBook. Reply
Belard - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkNods about the get what you want (Dell, ThinkPad, HP)
Considering what Lenovo charges for their 1920x1200 screens, I would think it would be a different type of screen.
I guess these new flat-keyboards are made for anyone under 30, eh? I'm in the camp that likes curved keys and a nice feeling keyboard - something that Lenovo hasn't messed with since they bought the ThinkPad line. And they redesigned the keyboard slight and its for the better.
Personally, I think its odd for Lenovo to still sell the older-style chassis with their W7xx series. Reply
erple2 - Friday, December 10, 2010 - linkThat 1000 dollars more or less covers the upgrade from the FX3800M to the FX5000M. So I'd be willing to bet that's where the cost goes. Reply
Dug - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkMany designers work at the office and at home. The 17" works well because its very hard to work on a 15" screen.
The size isn't bad when you consider they are only transporting it from office to car and car to home.
Now if you are traveling everywhere such as on a plane, then you wouldn't be looking at one of these anyway.
I'm just glad Anantech is taking the time to review a wide variety of laptops and emphasizing screen quality. Hopefully product managers and marketing get off their high horse and realize that people don't want crap. A lot of us are willing to pay for quality. If laptop manufacturers would just look at what has been reviewed and look at all the plus and minuses, then make a notebook that is all pluses. It really isn't that hard. Apple really took charge on this (although not perfect), so I hope others follow. Reply
kmmatney - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkI'm an Engineer/Scientist/Programmer who works at home, and use a 17" Dell with an upgraded 1920 x 1200 panel, bought in early 2007. I remember having to fight hard to justify the extra $300 in screen and cpu upgrades, but they were well worth it. Our normal upgrade laptop cycle is 3 years, but with a T7200 Merom and a 1920 x 1200 "true life" display, I can hang onto my system for a while yet. Along with a recent SSD upgrade, my system is about as fast as anything I can buy new at the moment (until SandyBridge, I think).
What kills me sometimes is the weight - it can really hurt your shoulder after carrying it a while. My computer case has wheels, so I use those whenever possible.
I fly a lot, so get free upgrades to economy plus on United. With the extra leg room, I can easily use my 17" laptop on the plane. Reply
Belard - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkWith one our ThinkPad users, he has a dock that allows him to connect two 23" 1920x1080 screens. So he gets the portability of a 14" notebook with the power to drive two big monitors. Not bad for a $250 dock with DVI & Display Port connectors, which also has USB, Ethernet and recharges the notebook's battery. Reply
Burner.Tom - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkAre u sure about only 1-year standard warranty, because as I know, all EliteBooks have 3 yeat standard warranty. Reply
SandmanWN - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkShould be 3 years. Even the models below this, ProBooks, have 3 years. Reply
sheltem - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkIt's 3 years - 8740w owner Reply
Dorin Nicolaescu-Musteață - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - link"even after calibration colors can feel oversaturated. 100% Adobe RGB gamut is good for those that need it, but for everyone else working in sRGB color space, that's the penalty."
Sorry guys, but that's just not true.
One has to use color-managed applications to judge if color is good or not. In a non-color-managed environment, a wide gamut display will have incorrect (oversaturated) colors, just like a low-gamut display (undesaturated).
Just curious, how do you judge whether the colors are oversaturated or not? What do you look at and with what software? Reply
kmmatney - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkThe eyes are a pretty good judge at oversaturation.
In my line of work, I have to often align X-ray beams for scientific equipment. I can use a high-sensitive, high-precision detector, or just use my eyes and a fluorescent screen to maximize the X-ray beam intensity. Although I always double-check things using the detector, I've found that my eyes can detect tiny changes in the green glow from the fluorescent screen, and always get the sensitive alignments spot on. We are talking about very small changes - its pretty amazing what the eyes can detect. Reply
JarredWalton - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkI'm curious... what exactly is "not true" about the above statement? (This is directed at Dorin.) Good for those that need it is another way of saying "good in color managed applications", which is why we go on to state that everyone working in sRGB isn't going to like it as much. Reply
Dorin Nicolaescu-Musteață - Thursday, December 09, 2010 - linkWhat is not true, or rather not correct, is saying that having a wider gamut is a penalty and/or a drawback.
Remember the days when computers had a Turbo switch? We used it to slow down the programs (mostly games perhaps; Pacman running too fast? :)) that were designed for slower machines, and that were running too fast on newer better computers. Is it correct to say that newer faster machines are worse or the extra MHz are a penalty? Or rather that was a programs' problem?
Same here. Programs or systems that display oversaturated colors on a wide gamut display, are basically not functioning correctly.
Also, regarding "even after calibration colors can feel oversaturated"... calibration, at least on Windows, is a two-step procedure: 1) profile and calibrate display; 2) use color-managed software. There's no point to calibrate the display without using color-managed software and no point to use color managed software without calibration. If you use both as you should, the colors will not "feel oversaturate". In this regard, the statement is false and misleading to those that do not have at least a basic understanding about color management. Reply
JarredWalton - Saturday, December 11, 2010 - linkThe problem is that so many applications assume sRGB color space, so if we go by your suggestion that anything that's not color managed is not functioning properly, about the only apps that are "correct" are Adobe Photoshop (and presumably Premiere and a few others). Interestingly enough, Windows Photo Viewer appears to be managed -- i.e. the colors look correct after calibration -- but only if you're not in fullscreen mode. I took some photos in the Dell XPS 15 review a few weeks back comparing colors, and you can clearly see that fullscreen, the B+GR panel in the XPS looks oversaturated, and the older Studio XPS 16 RGB LED looks even more so! Reply
a1trips - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkAhem
<Note that HP charges substantially more for a configure-to-order (CTO) system—$5792—but there's an 18% discount code (CTO8740W) to bring the price down to just under $4750, saving you $150. >
not to put too fine a point on it, the math don't work here. so which is it? 18 per-cent
A1 Reply
sheltem - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkIf you speak directly with an HP rep, you can get a 28% discount, which is what I got back in June. Reply
JarredWalton - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkThe $150 savings is relative to the $4900 SmartBuy model with the same components. Sorry if that's not clear. Reply
OneArmedScissorB - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkYikes, 49w idle. That's pretty much small desktop + typical laptop TN LED monitor territory, but that's not quite what the hardware is, which raises questions.
Any chance that you checked the power with the screen on and off while it was plugged in? I'm curious how much the screen is hurting it there, as every variation of desktop IPS monitors seems to use a bit more than their TN counterparts. Reply
mczak - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkThat's a really really hefty enterprise tax you pay there. It is using 4 4GB so-dimms. You can buy these easily for about 60 bucks each nowadays (or 240$ for 4 of them). That's worse than what apple overcharges...
(Though I understand there's a premium for 8GB so-dimms, which are nowhere near mainstream, but again it's very ridiculous - more than 2k per dimm...) Reply
mczak - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkBoth the gtx 480m and the desktop gtx 465 have 352 cores (11 SM) enabled. The quadro fx 5000m only has 320 cores (10 SM) enabled. Unless you absolutely must have workstation graphics in your notebook, this is very obviously about the worst choice of chip you could order (price, power consumption, not even performance is anything to write home about). Reply
nitrousoxide - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkDoes it make any sense to test gaming performance on a card designated for mobile workstation? Or Anand doesn't have the test suite for pro cards? Reply
JarredWalton - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkMostly for a point of reference. You'll note that other than running the tests, we didn't spend a lot of time in the intro or conclusion discussing the games. I have to admit that Dustin and I probably aren't the best people to talk to regarding workstation graphics. I had him run the standard SPECviewperf 11 to cover that aspect, but if you have any other tests you'd like to suggest, please let us know. Reply
stanwood - Thursday, December 09, 2010 - linkSeems like the main reason to get an IPS screen is color fidelity. So I'd be interested to learn if this machine (or others) is effective for photo editing. Or more generally, what CPU/GPU combinations are best for that application. And what features of the CPU/GPU do Aperture, Photoshop, and Lightroom use for hardware accelleration (if any). Reply
AnnonymousCoward - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkIs the comparison to the M6500 fair? The chart numbers might be misleading, if they apply during perfect perpendicular measurements, while real laptop use involves viewing the screen non-perpendicular and with a different angle on the top versus bottom.
This point is dramatized when you consider a 25-28" TN, which has a huge color shift from top-to-bottom with normal viewing, but the chart numbers might look fine. Reply
anactoraaron - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - link...'borrow' one of Anand's SF SSD's and throw it in this and retest :) Reply
qwertymac93 - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - link"4x4GB DDR3-1333 (Max 4x8GB)"
Does this thing really have 16gigs of ram?! that's a lot... Reply
TheAdAgency - Thursday, December 09, 2010 - linkNo, they only state that several times throughout the article for shock value. Reply
ijozic - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkI wondered this ever since I got the M6400 which actually had a Q43 chipset which comes with an integrated GPU - all they had to do is use it and add a hardware switch and you would have a 1-2 hour longer battery life (it was around 2 hours of low intensity usage at best).
It's even more obvious with this HP model which offers up to an hour and a half of light usage. There are certainly situations where you could use that extra time and given the price tag on these laptops, hybrid graphics should be there. It would be also cool if the CPUs would offer disabling some cores in these low intensity usage situations.
I like the improvements in the looks department of the HP compared to my old 8710w (brushed aluminum vs plastic and a backlighted keyboard (finally!!)), but I'd still vote for the M6500 looks and keyboard. Reply
ijozic - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkBTW, the mobile GPUs are rather disappointing in the gaming department by looking at the 3dMark 2006 numbers which are still only a little above the FX3700M. And there was the FX3800M and now the FX5000M. The names change, but little else does :)
For gaming (however silly it may sound to buy one of these workstations for moderate gaming, but I really hate the childish design of the gaming laptops plus their added weight and dimensions), the best buy would be the ATI cards (the M7740 or M7820) which offer similar performance levels with a lower TDP and a much lower price tag. Too bad the M7740 wasn't around when I was getting my Dell. Anybody wants to trade? :) Reply
Akv - Wednesday, December 08, 2010 - linkHowever I am part of the population having large desktops and screens for office and home work, so I have no need for desktop replacement laptops.
I need a low power low heat low noise laptop for traveling, waiting at the airport and communications from the hotel room.
A less great screen, but matte for editing a few photos, 15 inches, no need for more on a laptop. For me at least. Reply
ijozic - Thursday, December 09, 2010 - linkI understand where you're coming from because it's rather tiring to carry these 17" beasts around. M6400 is like 3.8 kilos plus that beast of a charger is an extra kilo and more plus the bag and extra equipment. I have the small low heat low noise laptop which I usually carry together with this one for longer trips so it gets even heavier :) Reply
ahmed25 - Thursday, December 09, 2010 - linkCould u pls do a review of the t510... Reply
DanaG - Friday, December 10, 2010 - link...I'd probably get it with the FirePro M7820. It's based on Mobility 58xx, and can do 5 displays if you have the fanciest dock -- 3 displays with laptop alone. And it's cheaper than the Fermi card!
Laptop has: Internal, DisplayPort, VGA.
Fanciest dock has: 2 DL-DVI, 2 DisplayPort.
You can choose any 5 displays, but a maximum of two may be "legacy" (DVI or VGA, not sure about internal).
What was the color depth on that DreamColor display? I know the desktop DreamColor is a 30-bit display. Do any of your LCD tests show off the difference between six- and eight-bit-per-component displays (18 and 24 bits total, respectively)?
Plus, if my 8530w is any indication, you can install (without any hacking!) the generic Mobile Catalyst Drivers -- it shows up as Radeon in device manager, but the GL renderer name "Compatibility Profile Context FireGL". Reply
nsiboro - Thursday, December 16, 2010 - linkFYI, future/current owners can get some peer support (and get acquinted with PROBLEMS of this "mobile workstation") at
Additionally if you intend to get one with the FirePro M7820, know that OpenCL driver is NOT available yet.
Yes, I own it (M7820, 2x SSD, 16GB) - and the experience is *frustrating*. YMMV.
nsiboro Reply
shenma - Thursday, May 24, 2012 - linkhttp://www.elecachat.fr/hp-elitebook-8740w.html Êtes-vous intéressé à batterie/chargeur/Adaptateur hp elitebook 8740w, Li-ion, acheter le remplacement ou nouveau? Si oui, la batterie hp elitebook 8740w est prêt pour vous. Meilleure qualité, 1 an garantie, Tout modèle en stock, envoi rapide. Reply


text:
The Xeon Phi at work at TACCby Johan De Gelas on 11/14/2012 1:44 PM EST
- Posted in
- CPUs
- IT Computing
- Intel
- Larrabee
- Xeon
- Cloud Computing
- Xeon Phi
46 Comments
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tipoo - Wednesday, November 14, 2012 - linkI wonder if we'll ever have more numerous smaller cores like these working in conjunction with larger traditional cores. A bit like the PPE and SPEs in the Cell processor, with the more general core offloading what it can to the smaller ones. Reply
A5 - Wednesday, November 14, 2012 - linkThat's called heterogeneous computing. It's definitely where things are going in the future and you can argue that it's already here with Trinity. Reply
nevertell - Wednesday, November 14, 2012 - linkThe great thing about the Cell was that both the PPE and the SPEs had access to the same memory. Trinity doesn't and while that may be because there isn't an OS that would take advantage of that, hardware is as capable as software is efficient for that exact hardware solution.
There is no need for major parallelism in the consumer space, since nobody is willing to rewrite their programs to run on something faster whilst the general public is already served well enough by a Core i3 or i5. Reply
name99 - Friday, November 16, 2012 - link"The great thing about the Cell was that both the PPE and the SPEs had access to the same memory."
Hmm. This is not a useful statement.
Cell had a ludicrous addressing model that was clearly irrelevant to the real world. It's misleading to say that the cores had access to "the same memory". The way it actually worked was that each core had a local address space (I'm think 12bit wide, but I may be wrong, maybe 14 bits wide) and almost every instruction operated in that local address space. There were a few special purpose instructions that moved data between that local address space and and the global address space. Think of it as like programming with 8086 segments, only you have only one data segment (no ES, no SS), you can't easily swap DS to access another segment, and the segment size is substantially smaller than 64K.
Much as I dislike many things about Intel, more than anyone else they seem to get that hardware that can't be programmed is not especially useful. And so we see them utilizing ideas that are not exactly new (this design, or transactional memory) but shipping them in a form that's a whole lot more useful than what went before.
This will get the haters on all sides riled up, but the fact is --- this is very similar to what Apple does in their space. Reply
dcollins - Wednesday, November 14, 2012 - linkThat's exactly how this supercomputer, and all supercomputers offering accelerated compute, work. Xeon or Opteron CPUs handle complex branching tasks like networking and work distribution while the accelerators handle the parallelizable problem solving work.
Merging them onto a single die is simply a matter of having enough die space to fit everything while making sure that economics of a single chip is better than separate products.
tipoo - Wednesday, November 14, 2012 - link*in consumer computing I mean. Reply
Gigaplex - Wednesday, November 14, 2012 - linkBoth AMD Fusion and Intel Ivy Bridge support this right now. The software just needs to catch up. Reply
tipoo - Wednesday, November 14, 2012 - linkSort of I suppose, but I think something like this would be easier to use for most compute tasks for the reasons the article states, these are still closer to general processor cores than GPU cores are. Reply
frostyfiredude - Wednesday, November 14, 2012 - linkSomething like ARM's big.LITTLE in a sense seems like a good idea to me. I'm not sure how feasable it is, but having one or two small Atom-like cores paired to larger and more complex Core processing cores all sharing the same L3 sounds like a decent idea for mobile CPUs to cut idle power use. My guess is the two types of cores would need to share the same instructions, so the differences would be things like OoO vs In-order, execution width, designed for low clock speed vs high clock speed. The Atom SoCs can hit power use around that of ARM SoCs, so if Intel can get that kind of super low power use at low loads and ULV i7 performance out of the same chip when stressed that'd be super killer. Reply
CharonPDX - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - linkOne rumor I had heard upon Larrabee getting cancelled and turned into Knights Ferry was that this technology might be released as a coprocessor that used the same socket as the "main" Xeon.
That you could mix-and-match them in one system. If you wanted maximum conventional performance, you put in 8 conventional Xeons. If you wanted maximum stream performance, you'd put in one "boot" conventional Xeon, and 7 of these. (At the time, there were also rumors that Itanium was going to be same-socket-and-platform, which now looks like it will come true.) Reply
Kevin G - Saturday, November 17, 2012 - linkThat rumor has a grain of truth to it. A slide deck about Larrabee from Intel indicated a socketable version fitting into a quad socket Xeon motherboard. This was while Intel still had consumer plans for Larrabee which have since radically changed.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/06/clearing-up... Reply
alpha754293 - Wednesday, November 14, 2012 - linkI don't even know what generally (and publically accessible) programs are available that you would be able to use to do this sort of HPC testing.
OpenMP code is sort of "easier" to come by. A program that has both an OpenMP and a CUDA version where it's a straight port - I can't even think of one.
The only one that might be a possiblity would be Ansys 13/14 because they do have some limited static structural/mechanical FEA capabilities that can run on the GPU, but I don't know how you'd be able to force it onto the Xeon Phis.
Hmmm.... Reply
TeXWiller - Wednesday, November 14, 2012 - linkThe next version of OpenMP should have accelerator suppport via the OpenACC scheme. I'd bet that most engineering applications will be able to support most accelerators like Phi, Tesla and APUs in a transparent manner simply through the math libraries, not perhaps in the most optimal but at least in a sufficiently worthwhile way. Reply
rad0 - Wednesday, November 14, 2012 - linkOne thing I've yet to understand about the Xeon Phi is: do you get to run anything you want on it, or not?
Could you run Oracle's JVM (or any other JVM) on it? I know HPC isn't all that interested in Java, but a cheap 60-thread Java machine would be very interesting to play with.
Can you just ssh into the embedded linux and run anything you want? Reply
coder543 - Wednesday, November 14, 2012 - linkWhy Java? A dozen negative adjectives pop into my mind at the mere mention of the word outside of a coffee shop. Reply
madmilk - Wednesday, November 14, 2012 - linkYou can probably run Java on it, but it will not run well. Most Java code is application code - very branchy, something the Phi's memory architecture cannot handle well. The JVM certainly will not vectorize code either, so you have all those vector units being wasted.
This is really much closer to a GPU in terms of the kind of optimizations that must be done for performance, even if the underlying instruction set is x86. Reply
Jaybus - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - linkNo, it is much closer to a CPU than a GPU. This is an area where it differs VASTLY from a GPU. In fact, the cores are CPUs. Reply
llninja1 - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - linkAccording to Tom's Hardware, you can login to the Xeon Phi card and get a command line prompt
so that implies you can do whatever you want with some finagling. Whether your 60-thread JVM thought would work well or not on this architecture remains to be seen. Reply
extide - Wednesday, November 14, 2012 - linkDo some Folding@Home benchmarks on a Phi if at all possible!
Thanks! Reply
tipoo - Wednesday, November 14, 2012 - linkLike the people in charge of F@H would develop and release a new folding core so that it could run on one of these in the off chance some enthusiast has one of these multi thousand dollar cards and a computer system that can run it?
Not going to happen. This isn't a general CPU core that any existing software can run on, nor is it aimed at home users. Reply
SodaAnt - Wednesday, November 14, 2012 - linkIt does support the x86 instruction set though, so it shouldn't be too hard to port. Reply
MrSpadge - Wednesday, November 14, 2012 - linkBut you have to use the custom vector format to stampede anything. Reply
Kevin G - Saturday, November 17, 2012 - linkIn theory it should run the current the Linux version of F@H without modification. That catch is that the current version is going to be horribly suboptimal as it doesn't natively support the 512 bit wide vector format used by the Xeon Phi. This would leave only the x87 FPU for calculations. This would allow the 60 scalar FPU's to be used but limit performance to a mere 60 GFLOP across all the cores. There maybe some weird scheduling oddities with Linux and/or F@H due to the chips ability to expose 240 logical processors to the host OS (the result would be better performance from running multiple instances in parallel instead of one large instance using 240 threads).
An OpenCL version of F@H might be coaxed to working and it that would utilize the 512 bit vector units. Intel would have to have OpenCL drivers available for this to even have a chance of working. This would allow the full ~1 TFLOP performance to be utilized. Reply
SydneyBlue120d - Wednesday, November 14, 2012 - linkWhy did Intel choose a custom SIMD format? Why not AVX? Reply
Jaybus - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - linkBecause they needed heavier duty vector units. Each Phi core has 32 512-bit registers, where Core i7 has 16 256-bit registers. They just didn't implement the backward compatibility, probably to reduce complexity. It is certainly possible to do, and we may indeed see AVX, SSE, etc. added in a future revision. Reply
Kevin G - Saturday, November 17, 2012 - linkThe 512 bit vector instructions change how exceptions and the register masking are handled in comparison to AVX. Outside of that, the vector instructions are similar to how AVX instructions are formatted and the output complies with IEEE floating point standards. So while there is a distinct break in ISA capabilities, it does appear that it is possible to bridge the two together in future designs. Still it is odd that Intel has forked their ISA. Reply
coder543 - Wednesday, November 14, 2012 - linkI just want to know how much it will cost.
Why is Intel keeping this such a ridiculous secret? Knowing Intel, these will easily be $2,000+ a piece, if not much higher, but I still want to *know.* Reply
LogOver - Wednesday, November 14, 2012 - linkDid you read the article at all? Check the second page again. Reply
Comdrpopnfresh - Wednesday, November 14, 2012 - linkHow could PCIe 3.0 result in more overhead? Reply
nutgirdle - Wednesday, November 14, 2012 - linkI concur. A major dis-advantage to co-processor computing is the time it takes to move data on and off the card. The PCIe 2.0 bus is already a bottleneck in our workflow involving a Tesla card. This was a very short-sighted omission. Reply
Kevin G - Saturday, November 17, 2012 - linkIt is dependent upon the bus encoding. PCI-E 1.0/2.0 use an 8/10 encoding scheme to handle traffic while PCI-E 3.0 uses 128/130 encoding. PCI-E only increases the clock speed of the bus by 66% with the rest of the bandwidth increase stemming from the more efficient encoding schema. Xeon Phi seems to have kept the PCI-E 1.0/2.0 encoding but supports the higher clock rate of PCI-E 3.0. This appears to be nonstandard but the LGA 2011 Xeons appear to support this for additional bandwidth.
Any overhead is likely adding full PCI-E 3.0 support in addition to PCI-E 1.0/2.0. Reply
mayankleoboy1 - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - linkAssuming you can buy a single Xeon phi card, can it work in desktop motherboards and processors ?
Can it work with AMD processors ? Can it work in tandem with Nvidia and ATI GPU's ? Reply
Joschka77 - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - linki think the answers would be: Yes, Yes, no! ;-) Reply
Jaybus - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - linkNo, it is yes, yes, and yes. The Stampede also uses 128 NVIDIA Tesla K20 GPUs, as stated in the article. Reply
Kevin G - Saturday, November 17, 2012 - linkThat's with in the cluster, not necessarily in the same host system. I strongly suspect that the visual nodes featuring K20 GPU's are isolated from the Xeon Phi nodes. Reply
maximumGPU - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - linkcan't deny that openMP code that automatically runs faster on the phi would represent a great solution for those looking for the speed up without the cost and time of modifying code for gpus. There certainly is a market to cater for with these cards. Reply
creed3020 - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - linkJohan,
The numbers you describe as to configuration of the units doesn't add up.
Eight of the compute sleds plus two PSU sleds cannot fit into a 4U unit. Judging by the photo it appears that in this vertical configuration of nodes it goes something like this: {Compute, Compute, PSU, PSU, Compute, Compute } 4U. It appears this leads to a total of 5 chassis per cluster within the rack.
This is then compounded with two distinct clusters per rack with their own Infiniband switch + regular Ethernet switch. This makes for a total of 10 C8000 chassis per rack.
This makes sense when considering a 48U rack. 22U per cluster x 2 clusters per rack = 44U with a few spare slots at the top and middle. I could two at top and one in the middle. Reply
llninja1 - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - linkI think the author got some Dell facts mixed up. Looking at Dell.com you can fit 8 compute sleds in, but those compute sleds are half width and don't contain the necessary double wide PCIe slots to accommodate a Xeon Phi card. So in a single 4U unit, you are correct it can only hold 4 compute sleds and two power units as depicted in the Stampede picture. Reply
creed3020 - Friday, November 16, 2012 - linkThanks for the explanation. I didn't go over to the Dell site but it would explain that a slimmer sled is possible if you don't have to stick one these huge 2 slot Xeon Phi cards in.
It makes me wonder how big a difference there is in total PFLOPS/rack when configured with the half height sled vs. full height sled with Phi. Reply
mfilipow - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - link"Eight of those server sleds find a home inside the C8000 4U Chassis, together with two power sleds." did you write - but on the photo I only see 4x computing sleds plus 2x power. Where are the other 4?! Reply
creed3020 - Friday, November 16, 2012 - linkThere are only 4 per row in the chassis because these units in Stampede feature the Xeon Phi card which requires a bigger sled. The author got the potential specs messed up with the way they are actually configured for this supercomputer. Reply
GullLars - Thursday, November 15, 2012 - linkSo, it seems these are great at general purpose supercomputing.
How do they stack up against the latest FPGAs if they are set up carefully by the people who will be running a specialized problem on them?
And would these be able to work effectively with offloading of some key functions that would be able to work 20-100x faster (or power efficient) on a carefully set up FPGA?
Some people in the comments mentioned hetrogenous computing. A step on the way is modular accelerated code. I'm interrested to see if we get more specialized hardware for acceleration in the comming years, not just graphics (with transcoding) and encryption/decryption like is common in CPUs now. Or if we get an FPGA component (integrated or PCIe) that can be reserved and set up by programs to realize huge speedups or power savings. Reply
Jameshobbs - Monday, November 19, 2012 - linkWhy have there not been a lot of reports regarding the PCI express. This was the first source that I was able to find that even mentions the speed of the PCI e bus for the Xeon Phi.
One of the most challenging things for programming on accelerators is handling the PCI express and trying to balance data transfer with computational complexity. Everyone, NVIDIA, Intel, AMD seem to be doing a lot of arm waving regarding this issue, and there are many GPU papers that tend to omit the transfer times in their results. To me I find this dishonest and cheating.
One thing that continues to shock me as well is that people keep complaining about how difficult it is to debug a GPU program and then they reference old out of date references such as http://lenam701.blogspot.be/2012/02/nvidia-cuda-my... which was mentioned above. The things that the author of that blog post complained about have been resolved in the latest versions of CUDA (from 4.2 onward... maybe even in 4.0).
Programmers can now use printf and it is possible to hook a debugger into a GPU application to do more in depth debugging. The main thing that bothers me about GPU programming is you must check to make sure a program has successfully completed or not. Other than that I find it relatively easy to debug a GPU application. Reply
MySchizoBuddy - Wednesday, November 21, 2012 - linkNext version of AMD APU will allow both the GPU and CPU access to the same memory locations. Reply
sheepdestroyer - Wednesday, December 05, 2012 - linki would really like to see a benchmark of this cpu on LLVMpipe
The original Larabee would have had a DirectX translation layer and this project could be seen as an OpenGL version of it.
Just loading a distro with Gnome 3 running on LLVMpipe or benchmarking some ioq3 and iodoom3 games would be VERY interesting. Reply
tuklap - Sunday, March 03, 2013 - linkCan this accelerate my normal PC applications like Rendering in AutoCAD/Revit, Media Conversion, STAAD, ETABS and etc computations???
or do i Have to create my own applications? Reply

subset: commoncrawl