Siggraph

Continuing on from my earlier posting on mobile workstations, ran into David Critchley and Jon Heim of Lenovo–the market leader in China for workstatsions. Lenovo’s purchase of the IBM ThinkPad division continues to bear modest fruit for the DCC space with a new addition to the T-line of mobile workstations.

Critchley brought two machines to the show, a laptop running Novell’s Linux SLED 10 and the new T61p. The SLED laptop is a business laptop but the SLED component is nonetheless fun to see, especially on the heels of the Monday’s Linux World announcement of the Novell/Lenovo partnership to pre-load Lenovo’s T series enterprise notebooks with SLED.

Apart from this Linux-savvy demonstration, Critchley was also showing a Centrino Duo/Vista-based ThinkPad designed to compete for the entry-level mobile workstation market. Dedicated 256 meg of video memory, Nvidia 570 with Turbo Cache (so the ability to take video memory from main memory). IO is best docked–that’s how you get the DVI features. Also VGA out. Of note: no HDMI port; Critchley says the company is taking the Display Port/HDMI debate seriously before making a decision.

It’s got that thin, elegant ThinkPad look and the magnesium skeleton top and bottom for strength. Price? “Competitive with equivalent Dell and HP mobile workstations,” Critchley says, but I don’t know what that means at this point. No Blu-ray of course but that’s due to the thin design.

Again, I’ll say to look forward to an interesting year in mobile workstations. We’ll be doing some reviews in the coming months.