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This Workstation Will Change the Game

Lenovo ThinkStation P620 Threadripper Pro Workstation

By Chris Sutcliffe
VFX & Animation Senior Account Manager

If you are a little bit of a nerd like me, you’ll likely remember your early introductions into technology. For me, it was my first Atari console and playing Space Invaders. Around the same time, I received a calculator watch – yes, those were a thing back in the 80’s for you millennials! Later, in my early 20’s, a close friend introduced me to the first PlayStation and “Lara Croft”. It couldn’t get any better than this….
As I got older (and matured!), technology became more to me about what it could do in the world. How could it help improve lives and our way of living. In recent years, such things as leveraging AR/VR for medical training and in pediatrics has proved to be highly successful. These are the shifts in technology that really excite me, as well as being a huge benefit to society.
Consequently, I still get a little excited, like I did when I was younger, when I see something that is a significant shift from the norm. As someone that looked specifically after workstations over the last 2+ years, that shift came in the form of the new Threadripper Pro Workstation from Lenovo.
AMD have changed the game in recent years with the low nanometer count on their processors. People were very excited at the launch, just because it was AMD. However, this box offers a couple of other significant updates which some may have overlooked.
Lenovo ThinkStation P620 Threadripper Pro Workstation
I always recall the story of a North American airline that only had one model of aircraft in its fleet. Their maintenance crew were able to turn up at any airport with the same tool bag and replacement parts. That made them the most profitable airline in North America at the time and it brings up an interesting concept. What if every PC or workstation you had was fitted with all the same parts and components? That would make maintenance and management far simpler, ultimately saving money and making the organization more profitable. You could keep one machine on hand for spare parts, knowing if any one machine failed in your fleet, you have an identical replacement sitting there ready.
Secondly, this is the first 4th generation PCIe box to market. Early indicators are that this single processor significantly outperforms an equivalent dual Xeon processor. Add to this all the other components on the PCIe Gen 4 bus, such as memory, hard drive and GPU, you suddenly have a significant boost in performance. When those new PCIe Gen 4 GPUs come out in early 2021…wow!

In the world of Media & Entertainment, when you are compiling or building using Unity or Unreal, you need as many cores as possible. The 64-core option offers the most cores available in a workstation today, either single or dual. And perhaps the 64-core will help disrupt the market a little, providing alternatives to GPU rendering for Arnold or V-Ray. Then there are 3D artists using Autodesk Maya, ZBrush, Blender or Houdini, who rely heavily on the clock speed. The same box offers 12 or 16 core machines which would work perfectly for these applications. As per the airline though, the beauty of these machines is, that you can have the wide spread of processors (12, 16, 32 or 64 core) in the same box.

I wonder if that will be the future, eventually everyone having the exact same device? Either way, the Lenovo P620 is a game changer.

 About Chris Sutcliffe

Chris Sutcliffe is Annex Pro’s VFX & Animation Senior Account Manager.  Chris’s knowledge of the media and entertainment industry spans over 20 years with his most recent accomplishment being the Senior Account Executive at Lenovo. 

Linkedin.com/in/chris-sutcliffe/

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Dec 21, 2020 | Cloud & IT

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