Professional designers and engineers always need power. VR for professional applications takes your thirst for power to another level. That could have chained you your desk – until now.
Enter the brand-spanking-new 17-inch mobile monster from Fujitsu, the CELSIUS H970. It sports an NVIDIA Quadro P5000, Intel Xeon processor, 64GB of memory and buckets of fast PCIe-SSD storage.
These top-level specs give a flavor of the performance to expect even before you look into the detailed engineering, testing, and certifications that the German workstation team has built into this mobile system. It is not hard to imagine how easily the CELSIUS H970 can handle VR applications with enormous datasets in simulation, oil & gas, architecture, or manufacturing and design.
The latest addition to the CELSIUS family
First of all, the CELSIUS H970 is the newest addition to the Fujitsu workstation line-up. Its larger 17-inch form-factor compliments the CELSIUS H760 in the CELSIUS product line by adding greater capacities and, in particular, more powerful graphics options with the NVIDIA Quadro P5000 mobile GPU.
As a full-sized mobile workstation, it fills a shoulder-bag with dimensions of 418.0 x 288.0 x 30.0 mm or 16.46 x 11.34 x 1.18 inches. This Energy Star compliant system can run up to 9 hours on one battery. Its 330W power supply is critical for powering the high-performance graphics, processor, storage and memory in this system. For those with a special preference on input, Fujitsu provides a 3-button touchpad and a touch-stick embedded in the keyboard. Fujitsu mobile workstations are always equipped with ample connectivity interfaces. The CELSIUS H970 has two USB Type-C connectors and an optional port replicator interface as well as a multicard reader and Kensington lock support. And professional customers have many needs for connecting to networks and displays, so the CELSIUS H970 also has an RJ45 LAN connection, a VGA connector, and a DisplayPort connector.
The big-win for professionals with high-end design demands is clearly the graphics support. The CELSIUS H970 can be configured with an NVIDIA Quadro P3000, Quadro P4000 or Quadro P5000 mobile processor. These mobile GPUs are based on the NVIDIA Pascal architecture. The Quadro P5000 and Quadro P4000 are both listed as “VR-Ready” by NVIDIA. The Quadro P4000 sports 8 GB of GDDR5 memory and 1792 CUDA cores. The Quadro P5000 has a whopping 16 GB of GDDR5 memory and 2048 CUDA cores. Both Quadro GPUs have a 256-bit memory interface and deliver a memory bandwidth performance of 192 GB per second.
A VR-Ready mobile workstation
It is no accident that Fujitsu includes NVIDIA technology for their most powerful, VR-Ready mobile workstation. NVIDIA has developed many technologies and products that support developer and application-level implementations of VR solutions.
One example, in addition to raw graphics performance, is the large GDDR5 memory size on these mobile GPUs. More memory allows loading more VR-related assets into the graphics system. NVIDIA provides a suite of APIs, libraries, and engines that help developers build better VR applications including applications for head-mounted displays. For the technically-inclined readers, this includes the ability for multi-resolution shading and context priority rendering. NVIDIA’s developer tools also deliver physics capabilities, direct video rendering, and advanced photorealism for VR.
These developer tools are made available under the brands of DesignWorks and VRWorks. The benefit for professional customers include mobile computing platforms like the CELSIUS H970 that can be combined with amazing, realistic, interactive VR solutions.
The latest Intel mobile platform
Any workstation, even a powerful graphics workstation, can be slowed down if the CPU and its platform is not up to snuff. Fujitsu is launching its new 17-inch mobile workstation with newly released Intel technology as well as newly released NVIDIA technology.
The CELSIUS H970 supports CPUs as powerful as the Intel Xeon processor E3-1535M v6. This CPU has just gone into production in 2017. It is a 4-core CPU with 8 threads. The processor’s base frequency is 3.10 GHz and its maximum frequency is a remarkable 4.2 GHz. The E3-1535M v6 supports 64 GB of memory. Memory support includes DDR4-2400 memory and the maximum memory bandwidth is 34.1 GB per second.
Such a processing system allows the CELSIUS H970 to churn through large data sets and to prepare the information to be visualized on its high-performance graphics system. It also allows designers and engineers to take complex problems in simulation, data analysis and post-processing data analysis on the road.
Easy to use with Fujitsu management solutions
Fujitsu designs and manufactures nearly all of its workstation products in Germany. The level of attention paid to details – large and small – that the “Made in Germany” approach delivers is obvious. The Fujitsu team built a handy service door into the CELSIUS H970 so that access to the workstation is simpler. And by having design, manufacturing and logistics located together at the Fujitsu facility in Augsburg, the company can provide customers with unique product-management solutions like the Fujitsu Made4You program.
Full HD display
With such a powerful mobile workstation, we have to ask ourselves “what’s the catch”? And with this workstation, it is the 1920x1080 resolution display. The reason behind this, however, isn’t a Fujitsu design issue. The market for ultra-high-resolution displays has moved to the 15-inch form-factor as the formats used for mainstream notebooks has migrated to this size. The larger 17-inch format is found today almost exclusively in lower-volume workstation markets and ultra-high-resolutions for the 17-inch displays are scarce.
Given the much more powerful graphics and computing power, connectivity to very high-resolution external displays, and the use of head-mounted displays in VR applications, the trade-off for the built-in resolution is acceptable. Given the market dynamics around 4K resolution displays, the situation is understandable. And while not ideal, the utility of this CELSIUS mobile workstation form-factor is not impacted significantly.
The PW Perspective
Fujitsu has been a leader in mobile workstation technology for many years. As such a leader, it is not surprising that the company is now delivering one of the most powerful and feature-rich mobile workstations on the market. The CELSIUS H970 is packed with the latest generation of GPU, CPU and storage technology. This gives the workstation a focus on delivering excellent performance for high-end professional visualization applications. The CELSIUS H970 lets designers and engineers take their VR applications on the road.
