Research Triangle Park (NC) – A new 17” mobile workstation will join Lenovo’s Thinkpad family in September: The W700 is Lenovo’s first 17” workstation notebook, the first with a palm rest digitizer and one of the first notebooks on the market that is available with Nvidia’s brand new mobile workstation graphics chips with up to 128 “CUDA parallel processing cores.”

Mobile workstations - essentially high-end notebook computers that often are built into desktop replacement form factors - have been gaining traction for some time and new products such as Lenvo’s new Thinkpad W700 are conclusive product decisions.

This segment has been showing signs of expansion especially since workstation graphics chips have become available for notebooks. The W700 will ship with Nvidia’s Quadro FX 2700M and 3700M graphics chips, which offer either 512 MB or 1 GB of GDDR3 memory and 48 or 128 CUDA parallel processing cores – Nvidia’s new marketing name for the graphic chip’s processor cores (AMD calls its graphics processor units stream processors.)

Lenovo said that the W700 can be equipped with Intel’s upcoming Q9100 and Q9300X mobile quad-core processors, up to 8 GB of memory, dual hard drives with RAID 0 or RAID 1 configurations as well as a Blu-ray drive. What makes the W700 special is an optional built-in palm rest digitizer and color calibrator. The company said that the digitizer helps graphics designers to “easily configure an image, either mapping it to the entire screen or to an area defined by the user”. The color calibrator automatically adjusts the display’s color in up to half the time of many external calibrators and with higher accuracy, resulting in the most accurate, true-to-life images in an integrated package, Lenovo promises.

The option list also includes a high-end 400-nit WUXGA display that provides up to twice the brightness of earlier ThinkPad mobile workstation models as well as a 72% wide color gamut with more than 50% greater color intensity.  Also available is a mini-dock that extends the mobile workstation’s capabilities with eSATA and digital audio ports as well as cabling for power, external monitors and peripherals.
 
Pricing will start at $2978 when the W700 becomes available. There is no word on options pricing yet, but expect the W700’s price to extend well above $6000 for a fully loaded model.