Dell Precision 7560 & Precision 7760 pre-release discussion

We are waiting for Intel Tiger Lake-H (45W+) CPUs to launch before there is any hope that we will see these systems on sale. (I'm thinking that it will be June or maybe July when they go on sale, though there could be an announcement at any time.) Dell launched Inspiron systems with Tiger Lake-H CPUs today, but they are just 35W models.

The pro mobile NVIDIA GPUs were announced today ...

Spoiler

Digesting, I will edit this post in a bit with observations & comparisons to other GPUs.

[Edit]
OK, first of all it is encouraging that the RTX A5000, RTX A4000, and RTX A3000 have a TGP range that goes higher than 110W. I wonder if the Precision 7760 will allow the GPU to use more than 110W. Previously, mobile Quadros have been limited to 110W, period (except for that oddball RTX 6000 GPU). Depending on how Dell implements these, maybe there will actually be a performance difference between the RTX A4000 and RTX A5000. (The prior two generations, RTX 4000/RTX 5000 and P5200/P4200, have had similar performance despite the $1,000 price difference because they had the same power limit.) But really, it is the OEM (Dell) and not NVIDIA that sets the final max power limit.

It seems like Dell should be able to go over 110W. I've previously complained that under most loads, the temperature doesn't come close to the breaking point even when the GPU is operating at the 110W power limit, so it seems like there is thermal headroom. Also, it is likely that NVIDIA Lovelace GPUs won't be ready in time for the 2022 Precision 7X70 systems, so those systems may launch with this same set of Ampere mobile GPUs. If the 7X70 gets a redesigned chassis, then the power limit could be raised in those systems over the 7X60 systems.

New GPU comparisons to GeForce chips:

RTX A5000 = 6,144 CUDA cores ≈ GeForce RTX 3080 (mobile), GeForce RTX 3070 Ti (desktop)
RTX A4000 = 5,120 CUDA cores ≈ GeForce RTX 3070 (mobile), no desktop equivalent (between 3060 Ti and 3070)
RTX A3000 = 4,096 CUDA cores ≈ No mobile equivalent (between 3060 and 3070), no desktop equivalent (between 3060 and 3060 Ti)
RTX A2000 = 2,560 CUDA cores ≈ GeForce RTX 3050 Ti (mobile), no desktop equivalent (a little better than 3050)
T1200 = 1,024 (Turing) CUDA cores ≈ GeForce GTX 1650 Ti (mobile), no desktop equivalent (between 1650 and 1660)

Note that the chips will perform worse than their desktop counterparts because of a lower power limit in most cases. Some of those GPUs, like GeForce RTX 3070 Ti (desktop), have not been formally announced. I'm using leaked specs from TechPowerUp.

A5000 has the same specs that I speculated back in October... but they did not raise the vRAM.
It has double the CUDA cores compared to the Quadro RTX 5000, so it should be quite the upgrade (especially if the power limit is raised). It's also interesting that the Tensor core count has decreased, but I am not sure what the performance difference is between 2nd and 3rd-gen Tensor cores.

Personal wishlist for Precision 7X60:
* Fix the keyboard (dedicated Home/End buttons please)
* Option for variable refresh rate display panels
(Thinking that both of these are unlikely.)

 

Here is information about a new Inspiron 16 which is expected in June with some Tiger Lake H CPU a bit stronger than in the 13, 14 and 15" models:: https://www.heise.de/news/Dell-Insp...Ryzen-5000U-und-Intel-Tiger-Lake-6014423.html

I recognized big XPS savings in April on the german Dell site as well - Maybe we'll see some announcements in May?

 

To add on to the wish list:

• 8:5 high-refresh-rate, wide-gamut displays (even the Inspirons get these now; come on, Dell)
• AMD CPUs (though the mobile Tiger Lakes seem to do very well this time around, with the AMD notebook CPUs possibly being held back by their smaller caches compared to the desktop CPUs; also note that Tiger Lake-H has PCIe 4.0 lanes, whereas AMD Cezanne-H doesn’t)
• Please maintain the DGFF, no soldered GPUs

 

Tiger Lake-H has 20 PCIe4 lanes and I am wondering how they will be allocated. I expect 16 of them will go to the dGPU... NVIDIA is advertising PCIe4 support for the Ampere mobile GPUs in the table above.

Will the last 4 go to one of the NVMe slots? Or is there something else internal that would need them?

 

I think this will be the setup. It'd be good if those PCIe lanes were bifurcated in the Precisions, so we could get full bandwidth from disk drives.

I've also felt that PCIe 4.0 x8 would suffice for the lower-bandwidth notebook GPUs, so we could have even more lanes for peripherals.

It'd also be somewhat nice to see a 2.5 Gbit NIC in the Precision.

 

I was reading that the 20 lanes are split up into 16 and 4, so I'm not sure if they could be divided up in any other way. (12th gen Alder Lake will improve the situation with some PCIe4 lanes at the PCH.)

 

My humble wishlist:

-Hardware switch for the Wifi (with all the vulnerabilities out there today, a hardware switch ensures quick control over the connection in case a machine is compromised or suspected of so).

-AMD CPU and AMD GPU options. (edited to explain reasoning: AMD has some competent products in the mobile space with their APU's nowadays, plus they seem to be at a reasonable price, good bang for buck options.)

-Fix the keyboard(like Aaron44126 has stated), I wouldn't even mind if they brought back the 7740's keyboard and layout, if they still had the tooling and machining for it, haha though I doubt they would bring it back).

-Better/wider gamut screens with no PWM(as a workstation an emphasis on color accuracy should be there, and for me personally as I work on a screen for long periods of time, I would prefer a non-PWM panel as I'm sensitive to it over time...also a why I do not like OLED, and would prefer a high quality IPS implementation instead.).

-Improved speakers, every time I hear the sound coming out of a MBP I can't help but wonder why other manufacturers won't take the sound a bit more seriously... sure built in laptop speakers will never compare to stand a lone speakers, but the less you have to carry on your mobile set up, the better.. I'm not a big fan of Mac's for reasons I choose not to get into, but I'll give credit where it's due, MBP speakers are impressive and adequate for small rooms, be it to enjoy your own ambient music, or for a presentation.

 

My Precision M6700 has a hardware Wi-Fi switch, so, they used to have it on pre-2015 models but then they removed it with the 7510/7710 generation. (That makes me doubtful that it will come back.) I actually also have a Precision 7510 and it does show the "airplane mode switch" in Device Manager, even though it is not physically present on the system... not sure what's up with that.

7730/7740 keyboard layout was perfect... not sure why they can't leave well enough alone.

 

I'm typing this on my cherished Precision M4700, with a hardware switch that I use often, . I also have a hardware switch on my older Thinkpad's, I believe for Thinkpad's they began removing them starting with the T/W 540 series, etc(530/430 series and prior still had them, generally speaking). I agree, most of what we wish for probably won't come back, however, hopefully Dell will listen to an extent.

 

Does the 7510 have a key on the keyboard for flight mode? When I freshly reinstalled Windows a while ago on the 7530 and didn't install that driver, the flight mode key did nothing, and only worked after the driver was installed.