Siggraph

Expect mobile workstations (and the IO to go with them) to become an increased area of focus in the coming year. For example, after spending much of this year deploying and supporting a range of new multi-core chips for powerful new generation workstations, Intel says they will next increase the spotlight on mobile.

You just need to look around Siggraph to see the power of fixed workstations–the Autodesk and Softimage user groups literally gasped at the level of realtime and near realtime rendering they were seeing on stage. Guerilla Studios provides a hands-on chance to see for yourself. And the 32-hour animation contest at the Fjorg! would have been pretty impractical even last year. So we’ll see how much power ends up hitting the mobile workforce in the coming year.

It’s already started: HP brought two new Core 2 Duo mobile workstations to Siggraph. The first thing I noticed about the new 8510W and the 8710W is IO support. HDMI port standard on both, dual link DVI when docked, adapters that allow HDMI converstion to DVI. HP has always thought about workstations in 3D and by that I don’t mean CG. I mean they think about the workstation in its physical environment. That’s how they decided to move IO ports to the front of the tower, how they went tool-less, and now how they think about the reality that no mobile workstation is an island.

Here’s the other data:

8510W 15.4″ display; 256 meg of dedicated video memory, Nvidia or ATI graphics, Vista or XP, Blu ray option

8710W 17″ display; 512 meg of dedicated video memory, Nvidia graphics, Vista or XP, Blu ray option

Note that additional video memory can be syphoned from main memory with Nvidia’s Turbo Cache or ATI’s Hyper Memory.

The workstations benefit from continued security work at HP–things like built in fingerprint id pads, as well as earlier work on motion sensoring (for parking the harddrive during a fall), scratch resistance, for impact proofing.

And speaking of real world functionality, here’s another HP-esque, detail: The Vista models ship with a Quicklook feature for Outlook that allows you to see a cached version of Outlook without running up the laptop. So if you want to check your Calendar or Contacts, you can do so easily.