M6900 - What specs are you hoping for?

It would be a shame if they discontinued the Precision Mxxxx in it's current form. True workstation/desktop replacement. No manufacturer's seem to have been able to make a true workstation in a "thinner and lighter" form with the same raw power, without serious cooling issues. The move to ULV processors and thinner form factors just don't seem to have the same ummph that you can get with a 17" Dell or HP workstation.

I'd really like Dell to take the initiative and put out at least one more great 17" workstation laptop with full voltage CPU, DDR4 memory and new maxwell GPU's. What I'd really like to see is a new precision with current generation tech, and if they really want to follow the "thinner and lighter trend" make a true workstation, but make it with a 17" screen in a 15" footprint. I think an M6900 with the footprint of an M4900, but with a 17" IPS RGB Infinity display would really sell well. The Precision line has always been really expensive anyway. It's not like they couldn't get away with charging a premium for such a machine. They've been doing it along.

Not going to hold my breath though.

 

Well, I personally wouldn't mind a redesign of the Precision chassis. I too am pretty sure there is room to downsize them slightly and keep the hardware. Thinner bezels would be nice, shave a quarter of an inch in thickness and that's about it. You get something that is overall slightly smaller, but with enough room to keep all that sweet hardware in.

Heck, if they used a 16:10 panel, they'd have more depth to work with and we'd have more usable screen space.

 

Won't happen, and it's pretty likely given the lack of any rumors that it won't happen with Broadwell either. With luck, it will happen with Skylake.

 

Thinner and lighter successor to the m6800/m4800 would be wonderful. But not too thin because I also would like to see a successor of the quadro k5100m. And I can't imagine something like that being happy in an extremely thin chassis. Not all users would opt for the higher end GPU, but Dell needs to build the chassis to accommodate those that would. All other tech advancements point to a thinner chassis...

- M.2 PCIe SSDs (requires very little space and they are currently the fastest.. ie Samsung sm951). Imagine four (or more) M.2 PCIe 512GB capacity SSD cards (maybe 1TB is available or soon?). No more mechanical internal HDDs (an external array if HDDs are needed).
- Nvidia Maxwell and Pascal architecture (assuming we can get Maxwell in successor to quadro k5100m)
- power efficient CPU (speaking of skylake vs haswell)
- No internal optical drive. Use any $20 external optical drive on the rare occaisions you need one. If you use one often then a high end external optical drive would likely be better than a slim one made for a laptop anyway. My opinion of course.

*edited: Cleaned up and added a new point or two.

 

This sounds good, I would also like to see a Higher Res screen 4K or 3K or close to it (as an option because I realize some people may not want it) , DDR4, Thunderbolt3, USB 3.1 and type-c connector. I don't know may all this is too much to ask in one notebook or mobile workstation though. I don't think so though there is a 15 inch ASUS machine that close to this minus Skylake and maybe one or two other features I have look it up.

EDIT: It is the ASUS g501 its not quite there but then again I believe it appeared in March. But most importantly it is not a 17 incher which is what I plan on purchasing.

 

Those sound like reasonable expectations. Some of those are attributes of Skylake as shown below (taken from Intel Skylake wikipedia page *they were speaking mostly of desktop variant but I think most these apply to high end and extreme mobile Skylake CPUs), just depends if DELL will incorporate the features in the hardware (adding thunderbolt ports, etc).

• Support for both DDR3 SDRAM and DDR4 SDRAM in mainstream variants, using custom UniDIMM SO-DIMM form factor[23][24][25] with up to 64 GB of RAM on LGA 1151 variants.
• Support for 20 PCI Express 3.0 lanes (LGA 1151)
• Support for Thunderbolt 3.0 (Alpine Ridge)
• 64 to 128 MB L4 eDRAM cache on certain SKUs
• Up to four cores as the default mainstream configuration
• Support for SATA Express
• AVX-512 F, CDI, VL, BW, and DQ for the Xeon variants
• Intel SHA Extensions: SHA-1 and SHA-256 (Secure Hash Algorithms) for the Xeon variants
• Intel MPX (Memory Protection Extensions)
• Intel ADX (Multi-Precision Add-Carry Instruction Extensions)
• Skylake's integrated Iris Graphics GPU supports Direct3D 12 at the feature level 12.0

 

16:10 1920x1200 would be nice, but will not happen. Who make 1920x1200 panels this days?

 

There's lots of possible suppliers. A little-known company by the name of Apple uses these panels.

 

If so, than I am looking forward to see 1920x1200 in M6900.

 

I wouldn't get my hopes up, but I too would be very happy to see 16:10 make a come back. It felt like the perfect balance between vertical and horizontal real estate.

Lenovo is likely to make a retro style Thinkpad and most of the comments I've seen here, on ArsTechnica and the Thinkpad forums point to a massive push from those who took their surveys for the return of 16:10. I hope Dell is taking notes from what Lenovo's doing with their retro thinkpad initiative. I'd bet it will be pretty good insight in the preferences of the business world.