Historically, if you wanted an Intel Xeon in your mobile workstation you needed to buy a specialist machine from the likes of Eurocom.
Now Intel has announced that it will soon be launching the Intel Xeon E3-1500M v5, a dedicated Xeon chip family for mobile workstations and laptops.
Intel is currently keeping its cards very close to its chest in terms of specifications, so we have no indication as to the number of cores or GHz. However, as the chip is based on the Xeon E3 family rather than the Xeon E5 it is unlikely that we will see 12 core compute beasts like the Eurocom Panther 5.
What Intel has said that is this new family of processors are based on the next gen Skylake architecture and they will deliver ‘high precision computing horsepower in notebook form factors, delivering the right balance of power and mobility.’
Features include support for error-correcting code (ECC) memory that automatically detects and repairs errors on-the-fly that could cause data corruption and system crashes and Thunderbolt 3. The former should be of particular interest to users of simulation software who want to minimise the possibility of crashes happening in the middle of complex FEA or CFD calculations, which can take hours.
Lenovo is the first workstation manufacturer to announce new mobile workstations based on the new chip. Its ThinkPad P50 and ThinkPad P70 can host up to 64GB of RAM, which is a first for a mainstream mobile workstation.
The Lenovo ThinkPad P50 will be one of the first mobile workstations to feature the new mobile Intel Xeon CPU
