Dell Powers up Precision Mobile Workstation

Looking to free engineers, creative professionals and research scientists from being tethered to their desktops, Dell has announced its most powerful mobile workstation yet - the Precision M6500, which is the first in this category to support the next-generation Intel Core I7 processor along with a variety of other pioneering enhancements.
Among the first-of-its-kind performance features that the Precision M6500 brings to a mobile platform are four DIMM slots to support memory scalability of up to 16 Gbyte in addition to support for DDR3 1600MHz memory, both of which deliver the horsepower to accommodate any mixture of engineering and software development workloads. The Precision M6500 is also the first mobile workstation to offer the new NVIDIA Quadro FX3800M, a high-end GPU that features 128 NVIDIA CUDA parallel computing cores, 1GB of G-DDR2 graphics memory and other capabilities designed to handle professional engineering applications.
The new workstation, which replaces the Precision M6400, is aimed squarely at engineers looking for a performance boost that doesn't keep them tied to their desktop. "People in engineering are used to working on a fixed workstation and have been limited by mobility," says Mano Gialusis, Dell's senior product manager for mobile workstations. "Who says good ideas only come between the hours of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.?"
With the state-of-the-art Intel processor and GPU options, along with the fast memory and claim for 100 percent of the Adobe color gamut, the Dell M6500 has the potential to change the way engineers, design professionals and research scientists work, according to Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research. "Typically, an engineer or designer would do most of his or her work on a big, powerful deskside machine then load a couple of display files onto the laptop, go to a design review meeting, show the files, but not be able to manipulate the model or do any serious real-time work," Peddie explains. "With this machine, everything can be done on it, and the laptop can support a second large-scale display just like a deskside (machine)."
In addition to its deskside-class performance features, the M6500 brings another key element to the mix: Certification on 95 key applications, including most of the leading CAD and CAE programs. Pricing on the M6500 starts at $2,749 with the Quadcore processor. Gialusis says pricing should go down once Intel releases it Duo Core chip platform.