Unique Dell XPS M1710 Review

Searching4Sasquatch writes "Hot Hardware has just posted a unique review of Dell's flagship XPS M1710 notebook. They stumbled across some very interesting information within the BIOS which seems to indicate Dell is working on a docking station with its own discrete graphics. 'The user is given the option of using either the integrated GeForce Go 7900 GTX GPU found within the system or the extremely interesting option of using the graphics card found within a docking station. Could Dell be planning on releasing an enthusiast dock that features a high-end GPU that could not otherwise be crammed into the confinements of the notebook chassis? Perhaps an upgrade to allow for standard or even Quad-SLI would be possible with such a dock.'"

Comments

Anything to do with Alienware?

[gasmonso]

I wonder if this project has anything to do with their recent purchase of Alienware.

http://religiousfreaks.com/

Re:How is this new?

[Erwos]

Absolutely correct. Indeed, it seems like the recent trend has been to move away from docking stations with real PCI/PCIe slots, and instead have these awful USB docks. That's a real shame, because I think it would appeal to a lot of folks to have a 12" laptop with good CPU, lots of memory, and a very low-power GPU plug into a docking station with a PCIe x16 slot and maybe a couple of PCIe x1 or PCI slots. Your 12" laptop doubles as a full-blown desktop, but doesn't sacrifice on either end - that's a nice selling point.

-Erwos

Display Hardware Objects

[Doc Ruby]

Why don't monitors include graphics cards tweaked for exactly their performance specs? Self-powered speakers offer better performance and flexibility for upgrading the "processor" and "UI" components that drive them. Notebooks would include LCD cards, but not have to drive external monitors/projectors directly. That would make the notebooks smaller, lighter, cooler, cheaper, and the external display higher quality.

Give me an optical digital display output instead of VGA.

I could put that display output into a breakout box to any number of different displays, including multihead where I have them, without and extra HW. The differences could be entirely in software. Outputting OpenGL for display would let even simple HW and relatively simple SW exploit practically any display environment. Including the long-anticipated immersive goggles, or better.

Dell's BIOS seems to go a single step in the right direction. When will we sprint down the path?

Re:Display Hardware Objects

[Doc Ruby]

Actually, both the video and audio compartmentaliztion you mention are mainly the result of momentum and evolutionary design, defined by backwards compatibility. People don't spend much money on speakers, even though that's where the sound value lies, either in stereo equipment or PC audio. Onboard audio electronics are cheap because their development cost has been amortized, including the cost of designing them into new PCs. Likewise with displays.

But displays do have enthusiasts, so there is a bigger niche for better display than for better audio. (FWIW, USB is not a great audio interface, dealing poorly with interrupts in its realtime data, and FireWire etc is a more expensive extra.)

The architecture I propose sends high-level graphics symbols, like OpenGL, from the CPU to the GPU. An optical cable is plenty to load textures.

I worked with a team in 1990 to produce hirez (1-64Mpxls) digital cameras with such a cabled interconnect - though not even optical. That team had just produced a dual-CPU RISC workstation, with one RISC dedicated to rendering graphics from apps running on the other RISC. 20 years later, those architectures can make flexible, economical, high-performance displays.

I like the idea of the renderer tightly coupled to the display. The notebook reviewed in the story we're discussing is a good example. Why carry something that can drive a display much heavier-duty than the onboard LCD? If you've got dual monitors, you're using a dual monitor card, which isn't necessary for the much more common single monitor, and therefore much more expensive in small production quantities. Instead, each monitor could have a much cheaper card, driven by its instructions over the cable. In other words, distributed GPU provides the same economics and efficiencies as distributed networks of host computers. There's no reason those benefits can't apply to GPUs, except that the old way is "good enough" not to invest in the "new paradigm". The same reason many minicomputer companies continued to make and sell so many units, even through the late 1990s, and even today. But that doesn't make them better, except in some remaining specific massive applications that are best supported by massive centralized HW.

Hot swappable hard drives?

[nick_davison]

LCD screen... swaps out for the monitor plugged in to the docking station.
Keyboard... swaps out for the monitor plugged in to the docking station.
Mousepad... swaps out for the monitor plugged in to the docking station.
Graphics system... swaps out for the monitor plugged in to the docking system.

About the only remaining parts that don't swap out are the hard drive, CPU and memory. In exchange for that, you tend to get a clunky docking station that takes up way too much desk space rather than discretely sitting under your desk like a dedicated tower. Given laptop memory and CPUs tend to be underpowered compared to desktop equivalents, replacing them for a typical laptop would run, what, $150 at the outside?

At what point does it become a much better idea to make your laptop hard drive hot swappable and then have a dedicated tower with all of the better priced components the desktop allows with an open bay in the front to move your data and OS setup over? By the time you have a docking station with a high end graphics card in it, the additional components are pretty trivial.

Latitude D410/610 have this already

[LoadWB]

Unfortunately, I cannot get to the article, so I cannot see exactly what they are talking about.

But to be short, the D410 and D610 BIOSes I work with have an option to default to the docking station video as well. IIRC, Dell produces docking stations (not just the advanced port replicators we use in the field) which have PCI and AGP slots. It seems only reasonable that they also intend to produce models with PCIe slots (none currently show on the website.)

So, this may not be anything new or stunning.

As an aside, I am disappointed that the newer Latitudes do not have docking ports. The USB port replicators are crap, and the drivers constantly crash on at least two models I have in customer sites (not my purchase, mind you.) I believe that the ability to dock could be viewed by home users as a replacement of the desktop. Of course, that would mean that people would not buy a desktop AND a laptop, so lower bottome line, eh? :)