What else is coming for the T61?

I've been keeping pretty good tabs on the forums, but I'm just curious if I missed anything. I've been waiting for the 15.4 that was released today, but I wouldn't mind waiting another few weeks if something big is coming.

From what I can tell everyone is now waiting for the T61p (Which I don't need because my idea of computer games ends at Minesweeper and Solitaire) as well as discrete graphics (same situation).

Besides these two, anything else really?

In regards to the current 14.1 with discrete graphics, everyone mentions that the nvidia is a business-class chip, mostly designed for 3D rendering. Are we talking about people who do graphic design and such for a living? The reason I ask is that I'm getting ready to start my first job and I'm weighing what I need. I don't expect to do much 3D rendering, but is there anything else that this chip might be useful for?

 

dont be mislead by the "business" label. Just think of it as a decent discrete GPU, thats all. The T61p will have a more powerful GPU, that is not only of interest to gamers. I do a lot of video and photo editing, and these are highly dependent on a good GPU.

 

Graphics chips only do 3D rendering.

Photoshop is almost all 2D work. I don't think a GPU does anything when you use Photoshop.

Video encoding is primarily the job of the CPU. Again, I don't think a GPU does anything during video encoding.

But please correct me if I am wrong.

 

Id be HIGHLY surprised if a dedicated GPU has nothing to do with Photoshop and Video enditing performance! That would be a new one to me.

 

The GPU is a highly specialized vector processor that does extremely fast floating point calculations on matrices and the like. There are some things that photoshop or video encoding could take advantage of in a GPU but they are limited and most implementations do not because the relative benefit compared to the time to implement is small.

You are not likely to notice any difference in photoshop or programs like that. It's much more likely to affect the performance of games, 3d GIS clients like google earth or nasa world wind, the Aero user interface in Vista, etc. You might also use a GPU to accelerate some scientific calculations--there's a certain class of problems that can run at speeds like 80x faster than a regular cpu could.

 

From previous posts in other threads, I'm not too worried about Aero and the such. I certainly hope that the newest C2D along with integrated graphics could handle that as well as google earth. I also don't do nearly enough Photoshopping and zero video editing to make those the deciding factors. We shall see.

This here is actually very interesting to me. What kind of stuff are you talking about? I actually work with programs like Mathematica and Matlab on a very regular basis, so depending on what you're talking about this might be useful.

 

interesting info, thanks.

 

Anybody have any information on this? I did some googling, and while they mention the theory is solid, I couldn't find anybody saying that the capability is out there or is expected any time soon.

In this case I'd probably just go with the integrated graphics and if milestone developments happen in the future just get a new computer along with the latest chipset from Intel.

 

I am going to use my laptop for some mechanical design tools such as Pro/Engineering, Solidworks etc. Photo editing will be very frequent for me especially the RAW processing of DSLR photos. I wonder if the current 140M is enough for me or the later one in T61P better?

 

You know something else interesting? In 30 years or research, it can NOT be proven that job satisfaction ALONE directly impacts work performance.

 

other than 3D rendering related activities by plugins and filters designed to use the GPU, the GPU does not imporve the performance of Photoshop since even the worst integrated graphics card these days can fulfill the needs of 2D rendering by photoshop.

it's more likely that you'll want a dedicated GPU to drive multiple monitors at high resolutions for a larger working space in photoshop.

http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/systemreqs.html

video work is also CPU related, unless you're using specific plugins and renderers that can utilize the GPU.

in any application, scientific or artistic, the software must specifically ask the GPU to help out, otherwise GPU won't just jump in and make the calculations faster.

 

Glad the info was useful to you. Unfortunately I don't believe that there are any math packages like Matlab or Mathematica that currently support this. I know Mathematica 6 just recently came out so it might have some of this but a quick look over the features didn't indicate anything.

This isn't all that surprising though as it takes a bit of effort to program the GPU's and get the kind of stellar performance you want.

If your still interested here's some links with more info:

http://www.gpgpu.org/ - General discussion of projects using gpu's for acceleration of general purpose tasks

http://developer.nvidia.com/object/cuda.html - CUDA is Nvidia's attempt to make programming the cards easier (in my tests using this made development much easier but it took a significant hit on performance, it went from 80x to 10x)

http://www.rapidmind.net/ - A development environment that tries to do the same thing that CUDA does but works with ATI as well. This is a really nice package and makes things pretty simple. It doesn't seem to have the speed issues CUDA does either as I was able to achieve the 80x improvement with this package (and the source code was only 2 pages!)

http://sourceforge.net/projects/gpufft/ - A library for doing FFT's on the GPU, I think the maximum FFT is 16k.

Hope this helps!

 

here is what a photoshop engineer on blogs.adobe.com has to say about GPUs and photoshop

http://blogs.adobe.com/psperf/2006/06/some_tips_and_stories.html

 

Thanks to everybody that responded. I think I've got my gpu choice figured out. Anybody else want to weigh in on what Lenovo might offer (besides the expected T61P) in the coming couple of weeks?