How can workstation designs improve? When the design engineers think through their product design again and again, they find innovative improvements. Design changes in this workstation allow you to remove and replace parts fast.

Tool-free designs, color-coded access, and multi-channel cooling for professional workstations are not new ideas. The Fujitsu engineers clearly considered all of these improvements when designing the CELSIUS M770. This new workstation was announced in October 2017 and the new design goes a step - or two - further than many other advanced designs on the market today.

Look Mom, no cables

Well, almost no cables. Cables are needed to bring power to ultra-high-end graphics cards like the dual NVIDIA Quadro P6000 GPUs in this model. And you need cables to take power to optical drives. Beyond that, the Fujitsu engineers used innovations in the mechanical design to develop a cable-free design. In many cases, this is achieved by combining mechanical design changes with specialized PCBs. 

The CELSIUS M770 benefits in multiple ways from this design approach. First of all, not all of Fujitsu's competitors have the means to easily invest in this style of design. But the Fujitsu team in Augsburg routinely develops custom PCBs like the motherboard in their SFF workstation, the CLSIUS J550/2. And the custom PCBs remove the need for cables. Beyond that, custom PCBs in the workstation make it possible for Fujitsu to add more functionality. An example is the addition of additional SSD memory board on the custom I/O board.

Seeing is believing

How simple is this design? The easiest answer that question is simply to watch the video. You will see the product manager take apart the workstation in one minute without any effort. 

The PW Perspective

The major workstation vendors reinvent their workstations every 3 - 4 years. At PW we are used to seeing new industrial designs & the effort that workstation vendors put into the designs typically deliver benefits to customers. This new design takes the ease of access to the workstation to a level that we have not seen before. For Fujitsu, the new design applies only to the M770 model at this time. We expect to see advances like this in other models in 2018. Maybe the successor to the dual-processor R970 will be next.