Monthly Archives: July 2012

Dell announces new Precision Mobile workstations

July 24, 2012 By in 3D Design, CAD, New Technologies Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

24 July 2012: I was pre-briefed last Friday about Dell’s new mobile workstations. Today I am in the Shenandoah National Park in Virginia writing this blog, taking time from all this natural beauty to keep you informed about the latest technology.

Today Dell is announcing the newest entries into its Precision line of workstations – the M4700 and the M6700 mobile workstations.

While these are hardly your ordinary laptops, weighing in at about 8 pounds, they offer a high degree of portability and an awesome display of computing power, incredible graphics options, high speed memory up to 16 GB or 32 GB depending on memory speed, disk capacities of up to 3.2 terabytes, and all this with a 10 hour battery life. Nevertheless, it’s better than lugging a desktop workstation and an external display to your next meeting. This is truly a machine that I would be comfortable to use as both my desktop workstation AND and mobile workstation.

They are not cheap. Starting prices range from $1649 for the Dell Precision M4700, to $2199 for the M6700, and $3579 for the M6700 Covet. Fully decked out I could easily imagine them coming in at 100% to 150% above their base price.

Why the covet name I asked? Mano Gialusis, Dell’s Sr. Product Manager, replied that after seeing the Gorilla Glass and edge to edge display, all users will covet it!

Last year TechniCom had the opportunity to benchmark software using the M6600 and that delivered excellent performance on Autodesk Inventor and SolidWorks. While Dell was not able provide any specifics on the performance of the latest workstations, I estimate that the M6700 with the extreme I7 processor and the higher performance graphics cards should deliver from 2X to 5X the overall performance on compute intensive operations. The overall performance that users will see, naturally will depend on the specific applications being run.

A bit about the graphics options. The AMD card is new and these workstations are the first to have it. The specs are available on the Dell website. This card offers HD3D stereoscopic viewing. NVIDIA offers three cards, offering their Quadro GPU technology, 3D vision and power conservation techniques. See more details at http://www.dell.com/precision .

Dell was not able to use Intel Xeon processors because they are too big and power hungry for mobile workstations. Instead the Intel Core i7-Extreme Edition Processor provides outstanding features, such as: four 3.33 GHz cores for better multitasking and multithreaded performance, 8 MB of smart cache, an Integrated memory controller delivering high memory bandwidth, and a new Quick Path Interconnect for fast data transfer between the processor and chipset.

Conclusions:
I am very impressed with Dell’s attention to the high end engineering and graphics markets. The previous announcement a few months ago of their desk-side systems show that they understand these market needs by offering well balanced compute speeds, amazing graphics, monstrous expandability, serviceability, and reliability. These mobile workstations expand on those offerings.

These babies are hot! If you need high end, portable workstations that are truly super-computers, there is no better way to go.

http://www.dell.com/precision

Disclosure: I received no compensation for this review. All opinions are mine.
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Stereoscopic 3D – it works!

July 20, 2012 By in 3D Design, New Technologies Tags: , , , Leave a comment

I noticed that Randall Newton, in his Graphic Speak newsletter of 16 July 2012, commented on the Dimension 3 conference in Paris that focuses on digital 3D. He stated that “not all is well in 3D Land, reports Kathleen Maher; total revenue from 3D movies is dropping, despite blockbusters that do well. 3D in the home is still an expensive novelty, with few choices for consumers.” http://gfxspeak.com

I want to give you some feedback on my own experience with 3D TV and how it changed my perception.

On a recent trip to visit my son, it turns out he had a room added to his house and was in need of a new HDTV. He asked me to help him make a selection. Being somewhat of an electronics geek, I happily agreed, particularly since he was paying.

Off we went to Costco to browse their selection of LED TV’s. One that instantly struck our eyes was a new 3D LED HDTV by Samsung, a 55 inch TV from their new ES Series. While this was almost $400 more than we expected to spend, after looking at it and the rest of the offerings, my grandson lobbied hard for this TV. Even without seeing 3D on this set it blew away anything else in the store. He coupled this with a 3D blu-ray player by Samsung. My contribution was to buy a 3D movie (John Conner 2012) so we could test it out at home.

The hookups were easy, so after about half an hour of moving everything around and connecting all the wires, we turned it on and were literally blown away by the 3D experience! Lightweight active glasses seemed to avoid headaches I typically have gotten from passive glasses.

The picture was crisp and with amazing 3D. I didn’t quite flinch when things appeared to come out of the screen, but came close a few times. I had seen the movie before in 2D and was amazed by the difference. More lifelike. More compelling. Great images.

My conclusion: the next TV I buy will be one with 3D. I wonder why all CAD vendors don’t fully support 3D? We have 3D input devices. We have 3D printers. Yet, few vendors offer 3D display software for graphics design. Why?

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Cloud PLM Systems ease collaboration

July 19, 2012 By in Manufacturing industry, New Technologies, PLM Industry Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

While there have been several articles negatively discussing using cloud software for CAD, users should be aware that for the PLM aspects of collaboration a cloud based system is by far the best way to go. Okay, there are a few cons to using a cloud system for access, such as concerns over security and potential downtime over which users have no control. Security may be a major concern for government projects requiring super high levels of secure data requirements. For 98% of users this should not be a concern. That does not mean that you should blithely ignore what security your chosen cloud vendor provides – by all means make sure that your concerns are met. But today’s security and encryption seem more than adequate for most users, providing that it is properly executed and monitored. You might even want to consult with independent security experts prior to committing to a solution.

Nevertheless, there are a quite a few benefits that far exceed the other alternative — that of maintaining an internal server capability.

First I need to make an assumption that a typical user installation has the following situation:

  • More than one engineering facility at which design is done
  • Multiple suppliers that need some type of restricted access to the design data

 

Assuming this is the case (and I’ll bet that more than 80% of users fit in this category), then here are only a few advantages cloud based PLM software accrues:

  • Little or no IT required for installation, setup, updates to the software, or backups.
  • A single copy of the database that does NOT require synchronization among multiple servers.
  • Easy management by database administrators
  • Lower software costs??
  • No personnel and space costs for servers or multiple servers
  • Ready internet access via various speed connections worldwide
  • No special costs for high speed telecomm connections

 

I can think of only two PLM systems that are completely architected for cloud operations: Arena Solutions and Autodesk 360.

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Assessing the state of Product Development

July 14, 2012 By in Manufacturing industry, New Technologies, PLM Industry, Uncategorized Tags: , , , 1 Comment

After spending many years working with the CAD/CAM/PLM vendors I am now turning my attention to users of the software.

In my experience with users from many industry specialties, which includes many in-depth conversations and a few handfuls of on-site consulting assignments, users are not taking full advantage of the software and related process tools to re-engineer their environments.

Introducing new tools into a flawed product development process is only a band-aid. Without re-thinking the entire process the latest and greatest software will only result in a nominal ROI.

Instead of thinking about the miniscule advantage of moving from 2D design to 3D design, or the introduction of the latest PLM system, users should instead focus on the overall business benefits that might best cause them to produce better, more timely, higher quality products that can beat the pants off their competitors.

Believe it or not, just a few nights ago I was explaining to my wife, during a long drive home from dinner, about what a difference better design makes. And she actually listened. I guess I was really charged up!

One subject that always fascinates me is how truly innovative products are developed and how often competitors cannot react to substantive changes. She and I both use iPhones, so she immediately connected with the product. Not only that, but she said she loved her iPhone. Never heard that about her Samsung 10 key phone. After reading earlier that day about the current travails of RIM, the maker of the Blackberry phones I explained how RIM and Nokia seem to once have led the mobile phone industry and now both are deeply troubled, and may had difficulty surviving. And all this only in the last few years. Both companies seemed to have missed the point that the iPhone is not really a mobile phone, but a computer that can also make phone calls. The technology and innovation embodied in this product made huge leaps over the then existing mobile phone technologies. And their large competitors failed to recognize it. Then they failed to react to it. What was it in their product development process that was flawed: management, engineering, competitive analysis, business planning???

Do you have similar flaws in your process? Should you be asking whether or not you do?

Lately I have been exploring the idea of developing techniques for how to assess this in user companies. I am becoming more and more convinced that by carefully examining the key processes in product development and comparing them to best in class techniques used by successful organizations that this can be accomplished, and at a reasonable cost.

I’ll explain more about my thinking in future articles. I would love to hear from you about what you think. Reply to this blog and let the rest of us know.

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