Dell Precision 7560 & Precision 7760 pre-release discussion

The 7560 is a very different system from the 17". You just can't get the same thermal capabilities in a 15" as you can in a 17". It is physics.

 

That's very interesting, I previously thought the cooling was the same as the 7550/7750. Nice to know that in addition to the huge IPC improvements, power will go up.
We will have to wait and see what wattage the new systems can handle. I'm hoping for at least a 5% improvement in sustained power. The argument for the A5000 might slightly change this year, though the difference will likely still be miniscule.
The 180W sustained combined power quoted for the 7760 would mean roughly 15 more watts compared to the 7750. That's not insignificant considering that 11th gen tiger lake H scales with more power better. However, we still don't know what temperature the 180W sustained load will be at.
Not gonna lie, I'm a bit impatient for a new computer since my XPS is pretty unstable under 100% CPU and GPU load.
(new card slot is a bummer for 7550/7750 owners; I hope the GFX format stays until the 4000 series GPU's, and until the 5000 series which is very unlikely)

 

If this is true then Ampere upgrades for existing 7X50 systems seems unlikely to work out. There is still a chance that if the difference is not too significant, it could still work. (See RTX 4000/5000 cards working in the Precision 7530, which required sourcing a new Precision 7540 heatsink in addition to the GPU card.)

I also think that it is quite unlikely that the card format will remain unchanged until we see NVIDIA Lovelace GPUs (which probably won't appear in the Precision until 7X80 systems in 2023). They're sure to do a chassis refresh by then and I don't see them leaving the GPU card alone when they do that.

 

3 years between GPU upgrades? I thought it was once every 2 years so the new ones would be in the 7x70

Edit: Whoops had a little brain fart.... Aaron is correct and I'm wrong

 

7X80 would just be two years between GPU upgrades. NVIDIA is on a two-year cycle. 7X60 is the first generation with Ampere so we'll probably get Ampere for 7X70 as well, which would put Lovelace at 7X80.

(If Lovelace starts appearing in late 2022, which would follow the two-year cycle, it won't be ready in time for 7X70 systems which would be ready in summer-ish 2022 — maybe sooner, because it looks like the turnaround for Alder Lake could be a few months faster than normal. Even if rumors putting Lovelace at April 2022 are accurate, NVIDIA has been trickling the cards out so the timeline to get laptop GPUs available by summer would be really tight. And we haven't seen mid-generation GPU refreshes with the mobile workstations.)

They could potentially have refreshed Ampere GPUs for the 7X70 systems. NVIDIA has done that before (Quadro K5100M, Quadro P5200). However, RTX A5000 is a full GA104 chip. I don't know what they could do besides maybe bump it up to 24GB vRAM or PCIe5.

 

I guess they got a year behind with their schedule. Edit: I'm stupid... I can't count whoops. Don't know how I didn't see 7750 (turing), 7760 (ampere), 7770 (ampere +), 7780 (lovelace). Guess I should get some more sleep
Still annoyed that they only put 8gb in the A4000.... (rendering needs lots of memory, and swapping to system memory makes it considerably slower)
But other than the few minor booboos in the otherwise great spec, the 7x60 seems like the upgrade and potentially the biggest single generation improvement ever in a long time, especially if we are talking about ray traced graphics. It was even more so when the starting price of the 7760 was $1800 USD, but now the starting price has increased to $2000 USD.
Pretty sure going from dual core to quad core CPU's would be one of the only times when there has been a bigger generation improvement. Waiting 2 more years for Lovelace GPU's is a long time for an IPC improvement. We also can't count on future systems being able to sustain more power since Dell is going in the direction of thinner, lighter, and slightly flimsier.

 

Even though they've been trending thinner, each generation has seen the CPU and GPU power limits either raise or stay the same (not lower). Don't count them out there...

 

That's true, however, I think the power limits have reached the practical limits of what these components can handle. A further 10% power increase might only translate to a ~3-4% performance increase (desktop 3070 has 7% more everything and has 95% higher power limit, at 140W, the mobile A4000 will be at greatly diminishing performance returns per extra watt. Though with a combined CPU and GPU load, the GPU still has some power left in it). However, even if the power limits stay the same, Alder Lake's hybrid architecture will mean that the CPU and GPU can operate at effectively higher wattages (background tasks take less power, leaving more power to important tasks). I think the big and small cores for Alder Lake use different instruction sets so I don't think multithreaded apps will take advantage of every single core. But still, hybrid architecture might be enough to redeem mobile intel CPU's... about time

 

Also, assuming that the 360 view of the 7750 and the 7760 in the product photo are 100% accurate, the cooling system looks identical between the 7750 and 7760 (the 3d model doesn't show the heat fins on the 7750 but that's an error in the 3d model). Speculating here, but seems like the improvements are coming from the new card layout (better positioning of stuff?). They could have also revised the fans. It should be a minor improvement, albeit an improvement, because a large improvement is likely not possible without revising the chassis.
Water cooling the CPU and GPU theoretically means desktop level performance, but there are likely power limits to prevent that from happening (CPU in the 7750 has a bit of room to meet the PL1 limit though)

 

Not a chance. They use different architectures (internally) but they both use the x86-64 instruction set so they can execute the same types of programs. Intel has stated that both types of cores will be able to work together for multi-threading.

(We might see the "big" and "small" core groups running at independent/separate clock speeds. That'll be interesting...)

Not sure from your comment if you are inferring that the cooling system in the Precision is not liquid-cooled. In the case that is true, I will comment: the Precision systems (and most laptops in general) have been liquid-cooled for ages, or as close to it as you can get within the physical constraints of a laptop. A liquid cooling system is just a heat plate on the hot chip, a (probably copper) fin stack with fans blowing air over it for heat release, and a pipe or tube of sorts with liquid inside that connects the two. Liquid near the chip heats up and moves towards the fin stack, where it is cooled off and then flows back to the chip. The Precision cooling system totally fits this criteria (the copper pipes running from the CPU/GPU to the rear fin stacks do have liquid inside). Desktop liquid-cooling systems come with a much larger fin stack, because there is room for it, and that means more physical surface area for heat dispersion and lower fan speed / less noise required to maintain higher temperatures at the chip. However, these days, many "stock" desktop CPU coolers also include fluid-filled cupper heat pipes so they are basically "miniature" desktop liquid cooling systems.

There's not really much room to increase the size of the fin stack in a laptop; you could make the laptop physically larger, or you could do what you see on some gaming laptops like the Alienware 51m with a protrusion behind the display where they put larger heat fins. I think that Dell knows their audience for these systems, and while it is not the case for everyone, most people buying these systems wouldn't want them to bulk up their business laptops to that degree.