DEVELOP3D June / July 2023

EDITORIAL Editor Stephen Holmes stephen@x3dmedia.com

+44 (0)20 3384 5297

Managing Editor Greg Corke greg@x3dmedia.com

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Staff Writer Claudia Schergna claudia@x3dmedia.com

Consulting Editor Jessica Twentyman jtwentyman@gmail.com

+44 (0)20 7913 0919

Consulting Editor Martyn Day martyn@x3dmedia.com

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DESIGN/PRODUCTION

Design/Production Greg Corke greg@x3dmedia.com

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ADVERTISING

Group Media Director

Tony Baksh tony@x3dmedia.com

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Deputy Advertising Manager Steve King steve@x3dmedia.com

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US Sales Director Denise Greaves denise@x3dmedia.com

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SUBSCRIPTIONS

Circulation Manager Alan Cleveland alan@x3dmedia.com

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ACCOUNTS

Accounts Manager Charlotte Taibi charlotte@x3dmedia.com

Financial Controller Samantha Todescato-Rutland sam@chalfen.com

Summer his finally here, and with no major international sporting events scheduled to keep our eyes glued to screens and our behinds stuck to couches, we have the perfect opportunity to get out and actually participate in some activities ourselves. This issue, we take a look at how the design of sports equipment has benefited from new technologies. As you’ll see, when designers get new tools, sports players, competitors and enthusiasts get new, performance-enhancing kit.

First off the starting blocks is Selle Italia, a 125-year old legacy cycling brand and devotee of true craftsmanship, which has used CAD, 3D printing and other technologies to entirely refresh its brand and introduce some truly cutting-edge saddles.

By the company’s own admission, it’s not the first cycling brand to use 3D printing in saddles, but what’s interesting is that it has worked with local manufacturers to ensure that its newer models maintain the look and feel of its more traditional products, while still offering whole new levels of comfort and practicality for riders.

Next up: ballet. Anybody who has ever trained alongside a professional dancer knows that these are some of the most physically fit and most dedicated athletes out there. My calves still hurt years on. But the footwear available for professional ballet dancers has remained relatively unchanged for centuries, so it’s exciting to see what Act’ble, a German start-up led by a former dancer, is doing to help wearers of pointe shoes avoid pain and injury.

There are a host of other sports covered in this issue, too — ice hockey, sailing and padel, to name but a few. In all these fields, designers are using new ideas, new technologies and new materials in ways that will likely impact other sectors.

And before we all head for the beach, I’d be mad not to mention our bumper Workstation Special Report, crammed to the brim with all the specs and info you need on the very latest technologies, desktop and cloud, complete with full reviews and round-ups.

Perhaps take the magazine outside for a read. It still counts as working, right?

Stephen Holmes Editor, DEVELOP3D Magazine, @swearstoomuch

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NEWS

PTC takes Creo to the cloud, Stratasys and Desktop Metal megadeal forges ahead, nTop announces v4 release, plus lots more

FEATURES

Comment: Laurence Marks gets real about simulation

Comment: SJ on workplace wellbeing for Pride Month

Visual Design Guide: CCM hockey gloves and helmet

COVER STORY Selle Italia gets back in the saddle

Sporting goods design round-up

Event report: PTC Liveworx 2023 in Boston

Bold colours: Asics races ahead with scanning tech

En pointe: Act’ble brings new comfort to ballet shoes

THE LAST WORD

Artificial intelligence is hitting the headlines everywhere, but has still been relatively slow to make its impact on product design and engineering, writes Stephen Holmes

Comment: flexible workstations for flexible working

Intel ‘Sapphire Rapids’ vs AMD Threadripper Pro

Review: Lenovo ThinkStation P7 / PX workstations

‘Sapphire Rapids’ workstation round-up

Review: Scan 3XS GWP-ME A1128T workstation

Review: Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation pro GPU

Preview: AMD Radeon Pro W7800 / W7900 GPUs

Cloud workstations – how the major providers stack up Reimagining the desktop workstation

UsingFrame,theDesktop-as-a-Service(DaaS)solution,wetest23GPU-accelerated ‘instances’fromAmazonWebServices(AWS),GoogleCloudPlatform(GCP),and MicrosoftAzure,intermsofrawperformanceandenduserexperience

PTC TAKES ITS CREO PLATFORM TO THE CLOUD WITH CREO+ LAUNCH AT LIVEWORX EVENT

» The company continues on its journey to offer its industrial software products on a software-as-a-service basis with PTC Atlas as a common cloud platform

At its Liveworx event in Boston in mid-May, PTC announced the release of Creo+, the company’s first software-as-aservice (SaaS) version of its Creo CAD software, as well as the version 10 update to older sibling Creo.

Brian Thompson, general manager of Creo at PTC, was welcomed on stage to make the announcement by PTC CEO Jim Heppelmann during the latter’s opening keynote. “This is one of the most exciting developments I’ve seen in my 15 years in the CAD business,” said Thompson. “We called it Creo+, because it’s everything you love about Creo, plus a lot more.”

Creo+ is the latest in a string of PTC products to receive the ‘plus’ treatment and be released as a SaaS version on Atlas, PTC’s common cloud platform. They include Windchill+ (a SaaS version of the company’s product lifecycle management software), Vuforia+ (for developing and managing virtual and augmented reality applications), and Kepware+ (for industrial connectivity).

“We chose the name Atlas because, like in mythology, our Atlas is designed to carry the whole PTC SaaS world on its shoulders,” said Heppelmann.

The big talking point for Creo+ is its support for dynamic real-time multi-user collaboration. To illustrate this point, Brian Thompson showed a demo, depicting four engineers working simultaneously on a design for the main rotor assembly of a helicopter.

“They’re designing. They’re reviewing the changes of other team members. They’re branching designs to evaluate possible changes they want to make. And then they’re selectively merging what changes they want to keep,” he said.

These branching and merging capabilities are taken from Onshape, the SaaS CAD supplier acquired by PTC in 2019. (For more on this, see the box below.)

Creo+ is fully upwards compatible from on-premises versions of Creo and is built on the same core technology as Creo, so no data translation is needed.

In terms of Creo 10, the big talking points were the ability to design and simulate with composite materials, for lighter products that maintain strength and durability. These features enable users to design plies and cores, including cross sections and resulting geometry properties; simulate draping and composite structures for analysis; and manufacture drape and flat patterns, with automated ply book creation and digital work instructions.

Creo 10 also includes new simulation capabilities, thanks to PTC’s ongoing partnership with Ansys, including thermal stress, non-linear materials and contact simulation. The inclusion of these capabilities, according to PTC, “significantly broadens addressable simulation-driven design use cases in Creo.”

However, it’s fair to say that it was new arrival Creo+ that received the most attention from executives — and there

is good reason for that. As Heppelmann explained, it is clear to him and his team that SaaS is the direction in which the industrial software market is undoubtedly moving, albeit some years behind more generic enterprise application software such as ERP (enterprise resource planning) or CRM (customer relationship management) software. And he and his team have learnt a great deal from the acquisitions of Onshape and Arena Solutions, which he describes as “best-in-class examples of the power of SaaS and poster children for how SaaS should be done.”

In short, this is clearly how PTC sees the future. “At PTC now, a full 25% of our business is delivered as SaaS, and this part has been outgrowing the on-premise part by a significant amount,” Heppelmann told attendees. “If you want to digitally transform your business to capitalise on the strategies I’ve been discussing today, and you want to do it in the easiest, fastest and most efficient way, then you will ultimately want PTC’s powerful technology delivered to you as a service.”

www.ptc.com

WHAT OTHER ONSHAPE CAPABILITIES MIGHT MAKE IT TO CREO+?

Given that the branching and merging capabilities seen in Creo+ are taken from Onshape, what other Onshape capabilities might

be coming to Creo+ soon?

DEVELOP3D posed that question to Brian Thompson, PTC’s general manager of Creo, at the Liveworx event.

His response was unequivocal: product data management. With Creo+, users can store their data locally, or they can use Windchill. “We don’t really

have anything in between. Onshape does,” he says.

Onshape’s built-in product data management is a very interesting concept, he

continued, particularly to organisations that are not ready for Windchill, but want better control and management of product data.

PTC CEO Jim Heppelmann gives his keynote speech at Liveworx 2023 in Boston

STRATASYS/DESKTOP METAL MEGADEAL FORGES AHEAD

New options from Zortrax

Zortrax has introduced new metal 3D printing options for its desktop M300 Dual 3D printer: Full Metal Package 316L and Zortrax Full Metal Package 17-4 PH.

The company said both solutions include all the essentials for desktop metal 3D printing, thanks to metal-polymer filaments BASF Ultrafuse 316L and BASF Ultrafuse 17-4, provided by BASF Forward AM. Alongside the introduction of the metal printing options, Zortrax executives said that the company has also made several improvements to its Z-Suite slicer software in the Beta version 3.2.0.

www.zortrax.com

Stratasys is to acquire Desktop Metal for around $1.8 billion, in a deal that will see the global polymers leader acquire a strong market player in the growing metals additive manufacturing sector.

Yet beyond this first-glance appraisal, there’s a lot going on in the background. While bolstering its metals additive manufacturing footprint is a key driver for Stratasys, it is also bringing in many of Desktop Metal’s other technologies, namely its sand casting, ceramics and the intriguing Free Foam technologies, not to mention its wood 3D printer, Forust.

Desktop Metal has been producing some of the most interesting 3D printing R&D, with varying success in bringing products to mass market adoption. If Stratasys is able to have more success here, it will

open up some interesting new avenues for additive manufacturing.

The transaction brings together complementary intellectual property portfolios, with more than 3,400 patents and pending patent applications deriving from a combined investment of some $500M over the last four years.

Stratasys executives have said that some 800 scientists and engineers from both sides will combine as a result of the deal.

For Stratasys, the deal builds a portfolio unrivalled in the sector, positioning the company as a catch-all brand in the additive sector, at a time when many other firms are downscaling and/or focusing on building user-focused solutions, rather than generic systems.

The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2023.

www.stratasys.com

The acquisition of Desktop Metal should seriously boost Stratasys' metals 3D printing credentials

Ultimaker intros Method XL U

ltimaker has announced the launch of Method XL, an advanced 3D printing solution specifically designed to provide precision printing using industrialgrade materials, while accommodating larger part sizes.

With a generous build volume of 305 mm x 305 mm x 320 mm, the Method XL aims to bridge the gap between desktop and industrial 3D printers. Users should be able to undertake projects ranging from functional prototyping to producing end-use parts.

www.ultimaker.com

NTop 4 launches with field optimisation

Ntop 4 has launched and is aiming to bring additive manufacturing to mainstream production for complex, high-performance parts, by reducing the number of impractical and time-consuming manual interactions needed when creating a part.

That’s down to a headline new feature, Field Optimization, which the company describes as a new generative design technology that helps engineers navigate the overwhelming number of design parameters introduced by complex engineering problems.

Field Optimization layers a multi-scale, multi-objective optimisation engine on top of nTop’s core technology, resulting in a design tool that it claims is both extremely powerful and easy to implement.

“At nTop, we have always believed that design is at the core of solving the world’s hardest engineering problems,” said CEO Bradley Rothenberg. “NTop 4 marks the next stage of our journey enabling engineers to deliver highly engineered AM parts to reach new levels of performance.”

www.ntop.com

Fusion 360 RE app unveiled

ReverseEngineering.com has announced the launch of its latest software application, the Fusion 360 RE App, which aims to seamlessly integrate the cloud CAD environment of Fusion 360 with Faro Quantum Max ScanArms and Hexagon (Romer) Absolute arms.

According to company executives, the app was developed in order to offer engineers a range of features and capabilities that streamline the user experience and functionality associated with reverse engineering, 3D measurement and 3D scanning on the shop floor, introducing more ease and accuracy into the process.

www.reverseengineering.com

Ntop 4 aims to help engineers navigate complex design decisions more easily

NVIDIA AND WPP COLLABORATE ON GENERATIVE AI VIZ TOOL

WPP, the giant global marketing and PR company, has partnered with Nvidia to create a generative AI ‘content engine’ that it will offer its clients so they can create large volumes of brand advertising content.

Capable of creating images, videos and experiences, such as car advertisements or 3D product configurators, the goal is to build more tailored and immersive options faster and with lower need for human input.

The new engine connects an ecosystem of 3D design, manufacturing and creative supply chain tools, including those from Adobe and Getty Images, enabling WPP’s artists and designers to integrate 3D content creation with generative AI. WPP says this will enable its clients to reach consumers in highly personalised and engaging ways, while preserving the quality, accuracy and fidelity of their brand identities, products and logos.

“The world’s industries, including the $700 billion digital advertising industry, are racing to realize the benefits of AI,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. “With Omniverse Cloud and generative AI tools, WPP is giving brands the ability to build and deploy product experiences and compelling content at a level of realism and scale never possible before.”

The new content engine will have Omniverse Cloud at its heart, Nvidia’s platform for connecting 3D tools as well as developing and operating industrial digitalisation applications.

With this it is claimed that WPP will be able to seamlessly connect its supply chain

New

materials

of product-design data — demonstrated at launch using Adobe’s Substance 3D tools — to create brand-accurate, photoreal ‘digital twins’ of client products.

Using text prompts, the models can then be placed in surroundings or have text placed around them using tools like Adobe Firefly generative AI models and what WPP says is exclusive visual content from Getty Images created using Nvidia Picasso, a custom generative AI software.

“This new technology will transform the way that brands create content for commercial use, and cements WPP’s position as the industry leader in the creative application of AI for the world’s top brands,” said WPP CEO Mark Read.

The new content engine will be made available soon exclusively to WPP’s clients around the world. www.wpp.com | www.nvidia.com

for the Mayku Multiplier

Mayku has announced the launch of three engineering materials for the Mayku Multiplier: ABS, PMMA and UHMW. The manufacturer of desktop vacuum formers explained that, traditionally, working with these materials has involved complex and costly processes or limited moulding methods.

However, by seamlessly integrating ABS, PMMA, and UHMW into the Multiplier workflow, users can now capitalise on their properties, such as heat resistance, transparency and friction reduction.

Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene (ABS), is a widely used thermoplastic polymer in the manufacturing industry. Polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) is a transparent thermoplastic commonly referred to as acrylic. Ultra-high-molecular-weight

ROUND UP

Vrgineers and ManoMotion have announced they are introducing an AI hand-tracking algorithm exclusive to XTAL Mixed Reality headsets, which was developed to enhance the immersive experience of pilot training in virtual and mixed reality environments www.vrgineers.com

Formlabs has announced the release of a new Flame Retardant (FR) Resin, the company’s first selfextinguishing material as well as its first UL 94 V-0 certified resin, for creating stiff, creep-resistant and functional plastic parts that perform well in hightemperature environments www.formlabs.com

With a new integration between Materialise Magics and CO-AM, users can benefit from enhanced traceability in the 3D printing process, thanks to a revision tree that logs every action that is performed on a part or build, including tracking which user carried out a particular action www.materialise.com

Based on Massivit's Cast In Motion technology, the company's new 10000-G machine should facilitate the digital production of complex moulds, mandrels, master tools, jigs and fixtures for a range of industries including automotive, rail, marine and defence www.massivit3d.com

polyethylene (UHMW) is a thermoplastic renowned for its exceptional strength, durability and wear resistance.

Integrating these engineering materials into the Mayku Multiplier workflow should be seamless, said the company, thanks to the thorough testing already conducted.

www.mayku.me

ABS offers high levels of resistance to impact, heat and chemicals

Coloro and KeyShot have said they will integrate a library of 3,500 standard Coloro colours with the KeyShot platform, in order to enable product designers to accurately visualise colours on 3D models and facilitate precise colour specifications with production suppliers www.keyshot.com

WPP and Nvidia have teamed up on AI-driven ad creation

What’s happening in the world of simulation? In short: nothing much, but it’s been a long time coming.

I’ve been in the simulation business for a while, since the 1980s in fact. That’s the best part of 40 years, during which I’ve generally worked in the mid-market sector. There isn’t really a low end for simulation, and I’ve never been a part of the big industrial aero and auto worlds.

From this, you can neatly divide my career into two halves. During the first half, I spent all my time having to explain to people that they couldn’t have what they wanted, and certainly not at a price point that made any sense to them.

And what did they want? They wanted CFD of rotating components, integrated vibration and durability workflows, fluid structural interaction, rapid analysis of bolted connections, achievable optimisation technologies, models which considered the structure of the material in the overall representation of the part — I could go on.

But these things just weren’t possible, not unless people were tackling truly high-end problems and were equipped with high-end budgets to match.

Yet oddly, the second half of my career has been spent trying to get these same people to invest in these same simulation technologies — only now, those technologies are far more usable and affordable. They’re within reach.

You might imagine that, as a result, there should have been some golden era of simulation technology adoption, when people could suddenly have what they wanted and were prepared to pay for it. If there was, I don’t remember it.

There’s no better demonstration of

where we are today than the abundance of pointless simulations that are regularly shown off across the internet. These, and the promotion of ‘new’ workflows that would actually seem to hail from the 1990s. They are the equivalent of people who’ve just discovered ‘exciting new bands’ like Oasis and Blur. The world needs a lot of things, but fluid–structure interaction (FSI) simulations of cows falling over simply aren’t on the list.

REAL WORK, VALID USE CASES

What all this shows is that we’ve now got technology in abundance. It’s usable and it’s available at a price point where it is prone to waste (in other words, it doesn’t take a lot of costly compute power in relative terms).

But at the same time, it isn’t being used much for real work, because if it was, people would be busy actually selling, supporting and using it in proper, real-life industrial cases.

There would be no time for worthless bovine digital twins and nor should there be, in my opinion. Today, it’s arguable that for a lot of simulation work, cost isn’t a factor at all. I’ve got perfectly usable FEA and CFD systems that I downloaded cheaply from the internet. I’ve even got a pretty serious smoothedparticle hydrodynamics code that was a free download.

There are also systems out there like Altair OpenRadioss, a publicly available, open-source code base for non-linear problems, which is being worked on by a global community of researchers and developers. While I can say that I’m pleased I have this, I still can’t work out

quite why they built it.

Twelve-core workstations and a decent GPU are achievable for many, allowing most tasks to be tackled in-house, and doing a respectable job of crunching the numbers without much of this having to head off into the cloud.

With Python now around, capable of stringing everything together into usable workflows, you’d expect every technical operation worth its name to be running extensive simulations wall-to-wall, night and day, chasing an ever-deeper understanding of the fundamental processes of their product’s make-up and function.

However, all the available evidence tells me that this isn’t happening.

LACK OF VISION?

I wish I knew why. For a long time, I ran a fantastic team of simulation engineers with extensive skills in composites, fracture and damage, FSI, biomechanics, CFD, production processes and much more. And what did they spend most of their time modelling? Machined, bolted and welded structures, mainly made of steel.

It strikes me that what we are up against here is not a failure of simulation itself, but more a lack of vision across the board when it comes to applying simulation to engineering challenges.

So now it must be, as it possibly always was, about the people. As I’ve made clear, the technology is out there, literally for the taking.

We need to lose the trivial stuff, to focus on real engineering simulations that will improve products, our understanding of how they work and of how they might be made better. Because if we don’t, nobody will – and that’s a scenario almost as depressing as those FSI cows.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Laurence Marks has spent more than three decades working with simulation technologies and is currently a visiting research fellow at Oxford Brookes University working on projects that combine two of his passions: life sciences and motorsports

Simulation technology is more accessible than ever before, writes Laurence Marks, so it’s a shame that we humans continue applying it to use cases that focus so much on the pointless and the trivial

 What we are up against here is not a failure of simulation itself, but more a lack of vision when it comes to applying it to engineering challenges

Creo 10 includes numerous enhancements to help you deliver your best designs in less time, with new tools for designing with composites, additive, and subtractive manufacturing. There are also improvements in electrification and ergonomics. Creo also continues to add simulation-driven design capabilities. Creo 10 provides an on-premises solution, while Creo+ delivers a SaaS solution, with cloud-enabled collaboration and license management tools. To learn more about Creo 10 to go www.ptc.com/creo

https://www.ptc.com/hill-helicopters ptc.com

June is Pride Month, but for LGBTQ people working in design and engineering, the ongoing culture war around trans rights is impacting workplace safety and the professional opportunities open to them, writes our columnist SJ

As Andrea Gibson, one of my favourite poets of all time, once said, “Fear is only a verb if you let it be.” This is a phrase I often whisper to myself, before I give a big conference presentation, take my longboard down an impossibly steep hill, or ask my wife if it’s my turn to walk the dog again.

But lately, I’ve been chanting it before entering the restroom — which, if you haven’t heard, has become the new battlefront for members of the so-called ‘alphabet mafia’, or the LGBTQ community as it is also known.

Last year, I quit my stable job working for a big energy company to try my hand at sales engineering. Everyone told me that the money was great, it was an invaluable opportunity to hone my soft skills and I’d get a chance to finally travel and see the world a little bit.

I remember I was so excited the first week in, because I’d been asked to travel on my third day on the job. And I also remember how that excitement turned to cold dread as I entered the women’s restroom and heard a distinctive ‘Karen’, monotone voice from behind me say, “I’m sorry, hon. You’re not allowed in here. The men’s room is across the hall.”

In fairness to this woman, I commonly wear masculine clothes and, in a N95 mask, it can be hard to see my softer, more feminine facial features. But I remember being so scared that this woman would cause a scene that I ended up apologising and running out of the restroom with my head down.

UNDER ATTACK

This kind of incident is a frequent one for me. But in 2023, a small issue of mistaken gender could have life-threatening consequences as trans and wider LGBTQ rights come under attack.

In April, the Equality and Human

Rights Commission published a letter recommending the UK Minister for Women and Equalities change the legal definition of ‘sex’, which would strip trans people in the UK of many rights and protections, excluding them from single-sex spaces without the need for proper justification.

In the US, it’s even worse, with many states instituting drag bans, felony charges for providing gender affirming care to both adults and children, and book bans that target literature that “promotes gender fluidity or gender pronouns to groom children.”

I’ve watched in horror as many states passed laws criminalising dressing as a gender that does not align with your biological sex. In my new sales role, one that requires I spend a minimum of 20% of my time travelling, I became increasingly aware of the potential danger associated with not presenting as my affirmed gender. One mistaken bathroom incident could have me not only charged with a minor felony, but also labelled as a paedophile, which might make finding future job opportunities next to impossible.

I’m sad to say that I ended up leaving that sales role. I’m also considering leaving that industry as well. Many conferences are held in conservative, far-right states. And most of those states intent on attracting and fostering manufacturing and big tech companies, new space start-ups and so on.

As companies and the ensuing job market start to concentrate in these conservative regions of the United States, minority voices and representation will inevitably be pushed out. Sadly, much of the progress on diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) made during the pandemic could be lost.

TAKING ACTION

I want to be very clear that this is a major workplace issue, with important implications for all sectors, including (but by no means specific to) product

design and manufacturing.

Fear can be a verb, but a verb denotes action — and there are many actions that allies of the LGBTQ community can take, including those companies in the engineering and manufacturing sector updating their logos for Pride Month.

First, you can make efforts to track where anti-trans legislation is being passed and ensure that you don’t organise your conferences in US states where marginalised groups feel unsafe to travel.

Second, respect people’s pronouns by asking for them during introductions and gracefully correcting yourself if/when you forget or misspeak.

Third, install or provide more access to individual bathrooms in your workplace or at future conferences to prevent any awkward restroom conversations.

And, on a personal note, I’d like to add that if you feel weird or uncomfortable reading this, please be assured I feel even more uncomfortable sharing my awkward restroom interactions here.

But the civil rights movement started with a woman refusing to give up her seat on a bus. The battle for trans rights starts with us refusing to give up not just our place in the restroom, but also in the conference room, the boardroom and other places where major business decisions are made.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: SJ is a metal additive engineer, aka THEE Hottie of Metal Printing. SJ’s work involves providing additive manufacturing solutions and #3dprinting of metal parts to help create a decarbonised world.

Fear can be a verb, but a verb denotes action — and there are many actions that allies of the LGBTQ community can take, including those companies updating their logos for Pride Month

VISUAL DESIGN GUIDE CCM TACKS AS-V PRO GLOVES AND SUPER TACKS X HELMET

These lightweight hockey gloves and helmet offer a great way for ice hockey players to stay protected from stray pucks, so that they can keep hustling and passing, all game long

JUST BREATHE

Designed and 3D-printed using Carbon technology, Vent-Tech sections provide lightweight breathability, allowing for better airflow that helps hands stay cool and protected, while reducing the risk of bacteria growth inside

GET A GRIP

The palm uses a soft yet durable AX-SUEDE material to keep hands comfortable with a durable grip

STAY PROTECTED

Backplate and knuckles get extra protection from a plate made from D30, a shearthickening, non-Newtonian colloid that hardens on impact

MAXIMUM VISIBILITY

The helmet design allows for maximum visibility, while protecting the wearer’s head from multiple angles with a reinforced side-impact frame

3D-PRINTED LINER

Inside the helmet, a Nest Tech 3D-printed liner produced using Carbon’s technology offers increased protection, no matter the direction of impact. A customisable upgrade is available in the form of a bespoke liner — just like the pros

FIT FOR ACTION

Tool-free clips allow for better front-to-back fit on both sides of the helmet

BACK IN THE

» Selle Italia has launched two new flagship bicycle saddles that showcase the historic brand’s adoption of new technology, taking the company to the front of the pack. Claudia Schergna spoke with the team at Selle Italia and its manufacturing partner Prototek about how new technology got it across the finish line in style

THE SADDLE

Cyclists are connected to their bikes by only three points of contact: the handlebars, the pedals and the saddle, making it essential that each is developed to fit the ergonomic needs of the cyclist.

The foams and gels used in a saddle start to break down after about a year of normal use, due to the effects of sweat, friction, water and sunlight. Yet these are not the only things that take a toll on your posterior. The design and manufacturing of the saddle itself plays a major role.

Saddle maker Selle Italia began life outside in a village on the outskirts of Milan back in 1897, producing seats for everyday bicycles used as general transportation. In the late 1970s, cars became common and cycling became more about sport than anything else.

With traditional manufacturing methods, saddles can only be produced with a consistent density of material throughout the whole piece. The only way to work around this is to break the saddle into separate parts, which are then sewn together, but this creates other problems, such as seams and void areas that hinder comfort and introduce production complexity.

For road cycling, greater support is needed in the central part of the saddle, while the front and side elements require more perceived cushioning. While this would be impossible to achieve using traditional manufacturing methods, 3D printing makes it possible to produce as a single form.

Many 3D-printed bike saddles are already on the market, designed for both elite athletes and passionate amateurs willing to pay for the latest accessories.

Late to this technological upheaval, the Selle Italia team decided to turn this disadvantage into a strength. “We weren’t in a rush to be pioneers, as we weren’t the first. Carbon technology had already been tested on other products and industries. So, we allowed ourselves the luxury of trying to raise the bar and apply it according to our needs. Trying to make the technology adapt to the product, not the other way around,” explains Selle Italia marketing manager Enrico Grando.

LONG-LASTING PERFORMANCE

Saddles produced with 3D printing do not only last longer, but if printed with some kinds of resin, they also improve their performance the more they get used.

Grando says that a saddle produced using an elastomer resin achieves better results when pedalling because it

Selle Italia has been producing saddles since 1897, moving from everyday bikes to high-end professional road bikes

adapts to the cyclist’s needs, “as if it were a live material, that adjusts to the cyclist’s body and pedalling style.”

Depending on the riding style and the physical features of the user, saddles best perform with different densities and stiffnesses, which 3D printing allows.

The design process at Selle Italia starts with its sister company, specialist bike fitting service ID Match, gathering information, feedback and requirements from a range of elite cyclists.

“Longer, shorter, wider, narrower, central hole, no central hole, frame type, material type. There are countless options for a cyclist, and making a decision is not easy,” explains Grando.

“So cyclists often ask, ‘How do I choose the right saddle for me?’ To answer this question, ID Match was created, initially with more experimental tools and now much more advanced.”

ID Match has more than two hundred branches worldwide, conducting thousands of bike fitting sessions every month. As this entire system is cloud-based, it provides an exceptional database for the Selle Italia design team.

“After having collected the data, our design office receives a brief and starts designing a saddle, usually starting with a hand sketch. From there, an in-house prototyping process begins,” says Grando.

The nature of the organic forms sees the design team use Rhino 3D to create an initial CAD model, from

which early prototypes can be built and assessed. Then a mechanical model is produced in Solidworks, allowing the team to assess assembly modelling mould flow simulations. For some simulation phases, Selle Italia’s designers use the embedded software within Solidworks, but for more advanced validation simulations, they rely on specialist external studios that use Ansys.

The team relies heavily on outsourcing, although has acquired a Photocentric machine inhouse, while outsourced HP Multi Jet Fusion 3D-printed parts are used for hard shells and parts that will later be injection moulded.

A FULLY ITALIAN JOB

Once the design team produces its final prototype, the process moves outside of Selle Italia’s facilities to experts in Carbon’s DLS 3D printing process at Prototek.

Originally founded as a 3D printer reseller and service house, Prototek’s location in the goldsmiths’ capital of Italy, Valenza, meant it has a long history in serving the country’s jewellery industry.

Printing directly in wax allowed jewellery artisans to skip a step in their process. Instead of drawing a model in CAD, printing it in stereolithography and using it as a master to make a silicone mould, they can just draw the model in CAD and print directly in wax for metal casting.

“Valenza, which is extremely artisanal and linked to the traditional way of making models, was actually one of the first areas to adopt this technology,” says Andrea Barchi, head of the 3D printing department at Prototek.

“At first, it was met with extreme scepticism by master goldsmiths, who saw it as a loss of creativity on their work,” he goes on, explaining how its history of helping skilled craftsmen adopt a new process did not begin with saddlemakers.

With time, the company expanded to serve different industries and different additive manufacturing technologies. Moving beyond casting moulds and prototyping, and adding SLS and HP Multi Jet Fusion technologies, it began working with the automotive, sport and industrial machinery sectors.

“Obviously, in 2006, when we started, 3D printing was used 99% for prototypes, because the materials did not have the strength and durability required for a product used in part production,” says Barchi.

Then, an encounter with Carbon’s technology shook things up, accelerating Prototek’s move into 3D printing end-use parts.

“The first time I saw Adidas soles [printed using Carbon’s technology], I thought, ‘These guys are crazy! It’s not possible for the elastomer to support a person’s weight repeatedly when all the other thermoplastic elastomers I’ve seen break immediately and are only suitable for a few uses in prototypes’.”

‘‘ We allowed ourselves the luxury of trying to raise the bar and apply these new technologies according to our needs, trying to make the technology adapt to the product, and not the other way around ’’

Taking a chance on the technology and acquiring a Carbon M2 3D printer, the bureau immediately began to target the sports industry, and in particular, the flourishing cycling industry in northern Italy.

“We received much more response than we expected!” says Barchi. Selle Italia was one of Prototek’s first customers for the M2 and, as the ideas started to flow, it became apparent that the M2 was too small for some applications, including saddles. So Prototek quickly installed two larger Carbon L1 machines.

Prototek produced two models for the company: the SLR Boost 3D for the Selle Italia brand, and Shortfit 2.0 3D for its sister brand, Selle San Marco.

“We are very satisfied with the results,” says Grando. “Above all, we have managed to maintain the essence of our products. Like all brands, we have iconic products. For example, Selle Italia’s SLR is our flagship saddle. Many cyclists are more familiar with the SLR model than the Selle Italia brand itself,” he says.

“Over the years, we have adapted it to the needs of modern cycling, but without altering its distinctive features, such as the shell, the saddle base, which are much loved by cyclists.”

The design was adapted for 3D printing by Selle Italia’s in-house design team with the help of Prototek, so that it offered a new cushioning experience while maintaining the classic form. The challenge was that the saddle is formed close to the shape of the rider, with many curves in different directions, including the lateral sections. “I think these shapes drove Andrea and the Prototek team crazy,” Grando laughs.

The finished product, he explains, offers improved aesthetics, strength and performance. Moreover, this method allows Selle Italia to design its own lattice structures. Carbon offered one of its own lattice patterns, but Grando explains that the team wanted to develop their own,

● 4 Designers at Selle Italia decided to develop their own unique pattern on the SLR saddle for both practical and aesthetic reasons

● 5 Prototek, a Selle Italia design partner, employs Carbon technology for different applications, especially in the sport industry

● 6 Using Carbon DLS technology, Selle Italia boosted SLR with cushioning zones that provide progressive shock absorption

‘‘ Above all, we have managed to maintain the essence of our products ’’

not only to improve aesthetics and differentiate the models, but also to boost the functional properties of the saddle.

“The aesthetics are obviously important: this saddle costs €450 and is mounted on bicycles that may cost €10,000,” explains Grando.

“It could have worked with Carbon’s [lattice] as well, but the purpose of applying this technology is to provide much greater comfort by allowing for differentiated cushioning zones.”

LOOKING AHEAD

The new line of 3D-printed saddles has been extremely well received by Selle Italia customers, despite the fact

that many of them are traditionalists at heart. “It’s still a new technology in the industry, which requires some adaptation time for cyclists to understand the advantages,” says Grando.

Despite the success of this project, however, he doesn’t see 3D printing replacing traditional manufacturing on the whole production line at Selle Italia just yet, primarily because 3D printing with this technology is simply not economically viable yet when you’re dealing with large production volumes.

“Currently, Prototek is able to print approximately three saddles per hour with a Carbon L1. Production volumes are limited, because the timeframes are considerably longer compared to traditional saddle production. Currently, 3D printing is still slower than traditional production,” he explains.

This is not a problem for Selle Italia when it comes to more expensive saddles, he says. “Production volumes are lower, but the quality is higher, which gives us the highend product we wanted to achieve.”

What is undoubtedly true is the success of the collaboration between Prototek and Selle Italia, even at a time when, post-pandemic, the cycling market has plateaued.

“We experienced two years of very high sales volumes during the pandemic, and now everything has come to a halt. Obviously, it’s a period of recession, of high inflation. But even in this less-than-optimal period, our 3D printed series is selling very well.”

According to Grando, the key to the project’s success was the union of different experiences and know-how shared between Selle Italia and Prototek, enhancing the former’s 125-year tradition with a technology-led saddle that sets the standard for others to try and catch for years to come.

www.selleitalia.com

www.prototek.it

● 7 Selle Italia decided to adopt the Carbon technology mainly because of its wide range of materials

● 8 Designers at Selle Italia use a range of software including Photoshop, Rhino, Solidworks and Ansys

Production volumes are lower, but the quality is higher, which gives us the high-end product that we wanted to achieve

INTRODUCING ULTIMAKER’S METHOD XL –For Large Production Parts Straight From your Desk

UltiMaker’s latest breakthrough in the world of 3D printing –the Method XL – allows users to 3D print large production parts right from their desktops, using manufacturing-grade ABS.

“We saw that there was a lack of production-level industrial capabilities in more accessible and easy-to-use 3D printers,” stated CEO Nadav Goshen when asked about the strategy behind UltiMaker’s launch. “With Method XL, we believe we are bringing customers the best 3D printing solution in the market for engineering applications.”

WITH AN EMPHASIS ON PRODUCTION

The Method XL launch is part of UltiMaker’s mission to accelerate the adoption of 3D printing for true manufacturing applications. To do this, the XL boasts an expansive build volume of 305 mm x 305 mm x 320 mm. The system also includes a temperature-controlled heated build chamber and a heated build plate which, alongside a water-soluble support material, enable precise and durable parts in a range of industrial-grade materials including injection molding plastics like ABS. All with the affordability of a desktop system.

Since UltiMaker’s merger with MakerBot last

year, Method XL is the second product launched under the newly formed brand, following the UltiMaker S7 introduction in January. The transformation of its brand has reaffirmed the company’s commitment to manufacturing and product development, with a powerful and comprehensive professional offering. The Method series will particularly focus on specific manufacturing applications which benefit from the heated build chamber, specialty thermoplastics materials, and high levels of dimensional accuracy.

REDEFINING THE ACCESSIBILITY OF PRODUCTION

Method XL can print production plastics at a fraction of the cost of the incumbent industrial machines used today, with the ease-of-use of a desktop system. Synching directly with CloudPrint, a seamless CAD file-to-printed part workflow is enabled. This allows customers to easily upload, monitor, and track print jobs directly on their web browser, streamlining 3D printing journeys and improving efficiency. As a result, Method XL is poised to transform manufacturing with 3D printing and better serve professionals across sectors.

“Method XL is a game-changer in terms of making manufacturing accessible to all kinds of people, businesses and industries,” Goshen commented.

“It allows engineers and designers to bring their ideas to life right from their desktops with a simple workflow

and high-quality, long-lasting parts. It’s an important step forward in democratizing the production process.”

Method XL also comes equipped with a HEPA filter and an activated carbon filter for safer 3D printing indoors.

PRECISION AND DURABILITY

The heated build plate featured in the Method XL is a new addition to the Method Series. It enables more precise and durable parts by maintaining a stable environment during the printing phase, resulting in an avoidance of warping or layer adhesion issues and a seamless printing experience for customers.

To further ensure accurate printing of strong parts of any size accommodated by the Method XL, UltiMaker has designed the heated building plate to work in tandem with a temperature-controlled heated build chamber. This ensures temperatures remain constant throughout the production environment, parts aren’t subjected to fluctuations, and consistently and reliably meet a dimensional accuracy of ± 0.2 mm .

Method XL, the ultimate 3D printing solution, offering precision printing with industrialgrade materials without compromising on part size

INDUSTRIAL-GRADE MATERIALS UNLOCK NEW POTENTIAL

Not only is the Method XL specifically engineered to create large, complex, and durable parts, but it also offers professional printing applications using industrial-grade materials like ABS-R and ABS Carbon Fiber materials. Throughout the entire design and engineering process of the Method XL, a key objective for UltiMaker was to ensure optimal results when printing with ABS. ABS is one of the most popular materials to 3D print with on a professional scale yet poses a challenge for successful desktop 3D printing due to its tendency to warp and deform. However, the innovative heated chamber of the Method XL can reach up to 100°C and prevents warping and deforming, accomplishing spectacular 3D printing results.

Combined with RapidRinse, a fastdissolving, water-soluble support material, Method XL makes ABS parts with a more refined surface finish and enables one of

the fastest support removal for complex FDM parts, as the support material simply dissolves away. Method XL also offers an external moisture-controlled material case, ensuring peak performance from professional-grade materials.

UltiMaker ensures customers have access to the optimal materials whatever the application. Customer choice is expanded through UltiMaker’s open materials platform and the LABS Experimental Extruder. Four of the most popular materials available through the LABS program include Jabil SEBS, a soft material with flexible, rubber-like properties; Polymaker PolyMax™ PC, a polycarbonate material that combines strength, toughness and heat resistance, and LEHVOSS PAHT 9891, a carbon fiber-enforced nylon able to withstand high temperatures.

AN ATTRACTIVE PRICE POINT

With a choice of industrial-grade materials now available on a desktop 3D printer, UltiMaker offers a pragmatic alternative

to the expensive industrial systems such materials were previously exclusive to.

In fact, a large attraction of the Method XL for many is the price point – it is currently the only 3D printer in its price bracket with a heated chamber and heated build plate, and consequently offering large, accurate parts with injection molding plastics like ABS.

Goshen believes that Method XL will deliver game-changing economics and productivity to many customers: “With the ability to print large form parts on an accessible platform, Method XL will enable customers to scale up their 3D printing output efficiently and effectively. The addition of Method XL to UltiMaker’s portfolio catapults the company ahead in its pursuit of building the world’s leading 3D printing ecosystem and shaping the future of manufacturing.”

1 ± 0.2 mm or ± 0.002 mm per mm of travel (whichever is greater). Based on internal testing of selected geometries.

Method XL combines the precision and performance of industrial production with the flexibility and affordability of a desktop 3D printer

GAME ON

KASK

Kask has officially launched its new high-end helmet, the Elemento. This was worn in the Giro D’Italia cycling competition by the Ineos Grenadiers riders, the team led by 2023 runner-up, Geraint Thomas.

Elemento gets its name from its use of carbon, specifically Kask’s Fluid Carbon 12, an injection-moulded composite technopolymer containing 30% carbon fibre and 70% reinforced plastic.

Kask says its design team focused on four key areas for the helmet: safety, comfort, performance and design.

The Elemento features an injection-moulded thermoplastic shell consisting of two parts. This shell is designed to enhance strength during impacts, while a reduction in EPS thickness in certain areas allows for improved airflow and ventilation.

The helmet also boasts 3D-printed ‘Multipod’ helmet pads, which compress and move upon impact. Kask says this technology will better withstand linear and rotational impacts, regardless of which direction they come from, keeping a rider safer in case of collision.

Combined with Fluid Carbon 12’s increased resistance to stress and heat, plus the geometric, open-cell 3D-printed pads, smaller holes are needed for ventilation, which Kask says boosts the helmet’s allimportant aerodynamics.

According to Kask, its team utilised the same NablaFlow Aerocloud software for CFD testing that is used by the Ineos Grenadiers team. This software allowed it to simulate and test thousands of designs, while its use of HPC computing gave it faster testing and greater confidence in prototype performance.

www.kask.com

Fancy, hi-tech gear is creating a stir in the sports industry, pushing boundaries while prioritising athletes’ comfort, style and confidence. From high-tech swimsuits to supercharged golf balls, manufacturers are constantly pushing design boundaries in order to help athletes perform better. Here is some of the latest kit currently under starter’s orders.

Headquartered in Tolentino, Italy, Arena is one of the most recognised swimwear companies in the world. Its mission is to produce premium swimwear, equipment and accessories that fit like a second skin while giving wearers a winning edge.

Recognising the need to streamline the prototyping process and to reduce carbon emissions, Arena CIO Andrea Mazzanti decided to implement a 3D printing model for hard goods such as swimming goggles.

By adopting the Solidworks 3DExperience Works platform, which includes Solidworks, 3D Sculptor and Simulation, Arena’s designers get the real-time feedback they need to create, test and optimise models efficiently. They can create prototypes on in-house 3D printers and quickly iterate their designs.

As Mazzanti explains, the 3DExperience platform has helped create an ecosystem that connects a product’s stakeholders with its designers.

The integration of 3D technologies, such as Solidworks and Simulation, has enabled Arena to reduce its prototyping cycle by 70%, resulting in decreased time to market and improved product quality with fewer defects.

In addition to this significant reduction in prototyping time, Arena says the shift to digital simulations has also had a positive impact on sustainability, because eliminating the need for multiple physical product samples and third-party samples has significantly reduced the company’s CO2 emissions.

Looking ahead, Mazzanti believes that digital technologies will continue to play a crucial role in product development at Arena, particularly when it comes to capturing images, measuring and tracking the performance of fabrics in water and exploring the potential of smart fibres.

This transformation of Arena’s workflow, where a single environment now enables designers to exchange information quickly, has greatly enhanced collaboration and improved overall efficiency, while ensuring that performance in the pool never misses a stroke.

» DEVELOP3D takes a look at sporting equipment designed to boost an athlete’s game, from the pool to the padel court

INEOS BRITANNIA

Additive manufacturing and metrology specialist Renishaw has renewed its partnership with the British sailing team INEOS Britannia as it prepares for the 37th America’s Cup.

As an official technical supplier, Renishaw will provide additive manufacturing and position measurement expertise in support of INEOS Britannia’s quest to become the first British team to win the prestigious trophy.

The America’s Cup is the world’s oldest international sporting trophy, dating back to 1851. INEOS Britannia, led by Sir Ben Ainslie, is the first British team to compete for three consecutive challenges in over a century. The Challenger Selection Series will take place in September 2024, where teams will compete to determine who will face the defending Emirates Team New Zealand in the final match starting on 12 October.

HEAD

Over the years, tennis equipment has evolved significantly from those original wooden rackets with natural gut strings. Today, composite rackets offer enhanced power, strength and lighter weight, improving the overall playing experience.

Engineers and designers in this field need an acute understanding of the intricate dynamics involved in ball-racket collisions. For Head, simulation has emerged as the most effective way to tackle this challenge.

The competition will feature AC75s, advanced sailing boats capable of reaching speeds four times faster than the wind. INEOS Britannia’s 75-foot foiling monohull, named Britannia, showcases British technology and can reach speeds of up to 50 knots (over 60 miles per hour).

Renishaw is on hand to provide the team with products and expertise in position measurement, manufacturing process control, Raman spectroscopy and AM support – perfect for optimising the design and manufacture of lightweight structural components for the boat.

Renishaw’s Spanish subsidiary, which has an AM solutions centre in Barcelona, will also provide support to the INEOS Britannia team during their time testing in Spain.

Since sustainability is a key focus and requirements around it are clearly expressed in the America’s Cup rules, INEOS Britannia will use recycled carbon fibre to reduce its need for new carbon fibre.

www.ineosbritannia.com

Design optimisation for tennis rackets involves numerous input parameters and countless combinations of these, including fibre type, fibre area weight (FAW), angles, component compounds and placements. Additionally, various optimisation variables and objective parameters also need to be taken into account, such as stiffness, strength, impact behaviour and production costs.

Together, there may be as many as 20 million possible combinations of variables and parameters to consider. According to the engineering team at Head, building and testing a prototype for each and every combination could take 2,750 years.

Recognising the impracticality of real prototyping, they turned to Ansys OptisLang as a non-linear optimiser. This allowed them to generate design iterations and automate Ansys Mechanical simulations in a batch process in order to identify optimal solutions. The objective of optimisation here is to find the lightest structure with the highest stiffness and strength while also meeting other design constraints. Head’s engineers can evaluate approximately one million design concepts in about a week to enhance composite structure design.

Meeting regulations and quality requirements has also become easier, as Head has developed tests that every racket must pass before entering the market, including stiffness and strength measurements. For instance, a racket must be able to withstand a drop test onto concrete without sustaining any damage.

Automatically identifying the most critical parameters empowers Head’s engineers to analyse numerous design alternatives and optimise performance to unprecedented levels.

www.head.com

ICONIC PADEL COURT

The Iconic Padel Court, designed by Pininfarina in collaboration with fellow Italians from the sports experience company Iconic, represents a ground-breaking advancement in court design.

Pininfarina, renowned for its century-long expertise in automotive, product and architectural design, has ventured into the realm of sports to create a padel court that aims to merge aesthetics and technology to optimise performance and wellness.

Based in Turin, Pininfarina says its team has reimagined the player’s experience and the playing environment by introducing an innovative and customisable interface with modular features.

The court integrates advanced technologies that enable players to review their actions and movements, gathering valuable data to enhance their game performance.

WILSON

Long associated with the game of basketball, Wilson Sporting Goods Company continues to revolutionise the sport through digital innovation.

Working with General Lattice, EOS and DyeMansion, Wilson developed the first 3D-printed airless basketball prototype.

The project drew on the expertise of each company involved. General Lattice’s computational design services, provided through its GL Labs enterprise solutions team, streamlined the design and iteration process by leveraging the company’s computational design tools and workflows. The use of 3D printing as the manufacturing method gave Wilson unprecedented design freedom compared to traditional ball manufacturing. EOS produced the prototypes using an EOS P 396 printer.

DyeMansion, known for its surfacing and colouring solutions, added the finishing touches to the basketball. The company’s VapourFuse Surfacing and DeepDye colouring technology created a smooth finished surface and a vibrant outer skin, ensuring the prototype met Wilson’s expectations in terms of appearance and quality.

Lighter, stronger and more durable sports equipment is a goal across all sports, with basketball proving that even a sport that requires very little equipment can develop new ideas and innovations through industry partnerships and specialists.

A statement from Wilson notes that, while the 3D-printed airless basketball may not be coming to a professional court any time soon, it still represents a breakthrough, because even small details can have a profound impact on performance and player experience.

The design of the Iconic Padel Court adheres to standards set by the International Padel Federation. An installation can be freestanding or fixed to the ground, according to client requirements.

The court incorporates cutting-edge materials and finishings, including a fiberglass coating, laminated tempered glass with concealed ground fixing and faux leather protectors. LED lighting, displays and cameras are seamlessly integrated into the structure. Advanced technological systems are implemented, such as net tending poles that function as access hubs with touch displays and voice assistants.

Furthermore, the court features an automatic tensioning system for the game net, recharging stations for electronic devices and cameras that analyse movements to provide in-depth game analysis. It also includes a cooling and heating system and anti-fog technology for the perimeter glass, ensuring optimal player comfort in various weather conditions.

www.iconicsportdesign.com

“There’s still work to do before it’s ready for courts around the world, but we’re thrilled by the possibilities this ball represents: possibilities for other sports and future Wilson products, revolutionary sustainability through additive manufacturing, and so much more. This is innovation made to push boundaries and open imaginations.”

www.wilson.com

PTC LIVEWORX

Following a four-year hiatus during the Covid-19 pandemic, PTC’s Liveworx conference returned to the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center (BCEC) in May as a live, in-person event.

PTC CEO Jim Heppelmann seemed genuinely delighted to be back on stage, delivering an assured keynote speech loaded with big-ticket, aspirational themes, from agile product development to the industrial metaverse.

As Heppelmann told attendees: “Every disruption creates new opportunities, and right now, we find ourselves in one of the greatest periods of change for industrial companies that I can recall. And most of it revolves around digital transformation in one form or another.”

PTC is clearly on a mission to convince customers they should be capitalising on these huge opportunities. But there’s also been a great deal of change at PTC, too, since Liveworx 2019 – not least an investment of over $3 billion in both organic development and in acquisitions, including the purchases of Onshape (2019), Arena Solutions (2020) and Servicemax (2022).

The company has also forged ahead with plans to start offering its products as cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings, starting last year with the launch of Windchill+, a SaaS version of its PLM product, and continuing at Liveworx 2023 with the announcement of Creo+, a SaaS version of its CAD system. (See more about this in News on page 8.)

It makes perfect sense, then, that the digital transformation vision laid out by PTC at LiveWorx demonstrates a notable upstep in the company’s ambitions. “Back in 2019, digital transformation was simpler,” Heppelmann told attendees.

“It meant getting to market faster, with lower costs and higher quality. But now, on top of that, there’s a push to reshore, to make your products more intelligent, your factories more efficient, to build more resilient supply

chains, and to make your companies and products more sustainable and compliant, and to accelerate growth by complimenting your products with services. Digital transformation is key to all of that.”

GETTING SERVICES-CENTRIC

If there’s one big theme guiding strategy at PTC today it’s the idea of the digital thread. And that final point made by Heppelmann, about complimenting products with services, took centre-stage at Liveworx 2023.

With the ServiceMax acquisition, a huge piece of the digital-thread puzzle has dropped into place for PTC, because it gives customers the ability to offer efficient service and support in the post-sales period for a machine or vehicle that they have designed and manufactured.

At the heart of the digital thread concept is the idea that data and information about that machine or vehicle should flow through every stage of its lifecycle, from its initial design, through production and onwards. So it therefore follows that data relating to that machine or vehicle’s performance and condition, once it’s in the hands of customers, should also be a part of that thread.

In his own keynote speech, ServiceMax CEO Neil Barua (now president of PTC’s Service Lifecycle Management business) put it this way: “For me, running SLM and our team is about service. Not only is service, in many product companies, the most important generator of sustainable, recurring revenue and profitability, but more importantly, it’s also the criticality of what service does for the world and the things that all of you design, manufacture and put out into the world for us to consume.”

That’s pretty clever positioning. There must be plenty of manufacturing companies using PTC products where executives are no longer satisfied to make a product, make a sale and then walk away. There must be just as many, if not more, that know their customers won’t stand for that in any case. These customers expect a supplier to be a

At its flagship customer event in Boston this May, PTC executives presented an updated vision of the digital thread, in which post-sales service and support of a product is just as important as its design and manufacture, as Jessica Twentyman reports

‘‘ Service isn’t an afterthought; it’s now a big part of the business ’’

partner. They expect to receive plenty of effective, efficient post-sales care, attention and support. Most importantly, they’re willing to pay for it.

That’s why new equipment-as-a-service (EaaS) business models, which shift customer investment from one-time large capital expenditure (capex) to recurring operating expenditure (opex) payments, based on usage or outcomes, are growing in popularity.

This was well illustrated at Liveworx by ServiceMax customer Schneider Electric, a company most commonly associated with the manufacture and sale of electrical equipment such as uninterruptible power supplies and circuit breakers.

But as the company’s vice president of services digital experience, Jean-Pierre Samilo, explained, Schneider Electric has been on a ten-year journey to become more services-centric. It now offers services that focus on the ongoing monitoring of equipment in the field, its maintenance and repair, reconditioning and replacement of older equipment and recycling for end-of-life kit.

“Services make us more resilient as a company, because we get recurring revenue, but more importantly, it makes us more intimate with our customers, because we now accompany them closely on the post-sales experience and throughout the lifecycle of our products,” said Samilo.

A VIRTUOUS CYCLE

Many of the earlier aspects of the digital thread are already amply provided by PTC. The lifecycle of a product, for example, might begin with its design in CAD programme Creo. Closely aligned with this, PLM programme Windchill can keep a record of all the components and materials used in its manufacture. These, along with other PTC offerings, are the ‘product’ parts of the picture.

But ServiceMax introduces a vital ‘services’ part, said Barua, and aligning the ‘product’ and ‘service’ parts of the PTC portfolio “creates new superpowers for our customers.”

In this vision of a supercharged, responsive, service-

oriented manufacturer, Windchill provides access to the Service Bill of Material for each new product, along with a detailed 3D digital twin. ServiceMax, along with coordinating field service scheduling and dispatch activities, also manages the as-maintained record of the installed product, including which customers own which products as well as details of their individual contractual service entitlements.

ThingWorx enables the monitoring of the product in the field, for predictive and preventative maintenance, often performed remotely where possible. Arbortext manages technical service documentation, such as parts catalogues and work instructions specific to the asset, and Vuforia can be used to deliver guidance to technicians on installation and repair activities. Finally, Servigistics deals with spare part costs, helping manufacturers to save money by keeping spare part inventories at the optimal level necessary to meet their service level agreements with customers.

Importantly, this vision sees the transformation of the digital thread into a closed-loop, virtuous cycle, because information regarding technical issues and engineering change orders associated with products being used by customers can be fed back into the design and manufacturing processes.

This could lead to changes to the underlying design of a product, to the materials or parts used, or the way it is manufactured. And, in effect, the end result is a new and better version of that product.

It’s a compelling idea. “ServiceMax enables PTC to bring this full infinity loop to life,” said Heppelmann, claiming that this way, a product can generate 10 times more service revenue over its life than it does through an initial sale.

“Many companies have products installed all over the world, and some employ an order of magnitude more service technicians than engineers. Service isn’t an afterthought, it’s now a big part of the business.” www.ptc.com

PTC CEO Jim Heppelmann explains to Liveworx 2023 attendees how post-sales service and support fits into the company’s digital thread vision

Fusion 360 Helps Deliver EarthCam’s View from the Washington Monument

See how EarthCam quickly brought a camera to life with Fusion 360 to provide a view from the iconic landmark.

By: Heather Miller

Every spring , more than 3,700 cherry blossom trees reach full bloom at the National Mall in Washington, D.C. But you don’t need to be there in person to experience the magic. A tiny camera near the top of the Washington Monument provides a bird’s eye view of this scene and the changing seasons and weather across the entire Mall — every day, 24 hours a day.

EarthCam is a leading network of live-streaming webcams. Its cameras manage thousands of live streams worldwide, both public and private. Want to see what’s going on in London, New Orleans, Dubai, or Miami Beach? Or take in the view from the Statue of Liberty’s torch that has been closed to the public since 1916? It’s all available from your browser at any time.

Some installations are more difficult and sensitive than others. The camera for the Washington Monument was certainly one of EarthCam’s more challenging projects. You can’t just mount a camera on the side of a national treasure. Partnering with the National Park Service, EarthCam devised an innovative solution to provide a new view of Washington, D.C.

After an earthquake struck Washington, D.C. in 2011, engineers enlisted climbers to embark on a risky mission and rappel down the Washington Monument to inspect it for damage. Their footprint

— quite literally — had to be very small. They drilled a 3”-diameter hole at the very top to hold the ropes. That tiny, secret hole is where EarthCam discovered they could install a camera.

EarthCam uses Fusion 360 to design, prototype, and fabricate a number of different solutions for their business. “We’re always innovating and challenged with new locations all around the world,” says Lisa Kelly, Vice President of New Business, EarthCam. “We are the go-to company for custom solutions for cameras.”

Designing and fabricating a custom camera enclosure with Fusion 360

In 2014, the first EarthCam camera was installed in the Washington Monument so anyone could view “Out of Many, One,” a 6-acre “facescape” on the National Mall by artist Jorge RodríguezGerada. It was a massive, composite portrait of people photographed in Washington, D.C. created with soil and sand. The tricky part? It couldn’t be viewed from the ground. EarthCam came to the rescue with the camera installation.

Over the years, it became apparent that the camera could be significantly upgraded. Last year, the team innovated a new camera with a custom lens that was designed and cut at EarthCam and then connected to a 5G modem. This new camera has superior low-light capabilities and a much

higher resolution. That allows the camera to perform well even under difficult conditions, like weather events and smoke from fireworks.

“We’re always innovating as better technology becomes available, and we wanted to find a way to provide the public with the highest quality images and video,” says David Iglesias, Product Manager, EarthCam. “The National Mall is an important part of the country. When we had the opportunity to create something that would bring a more vivid stream to the world, we brought our team together to accomplish this. That’s what led our engineers to create a custom camera housing in Fusion 360.”

Prototyping on a tight deadline

But the deadline was tight for installation last summer. It needed to be ready for the annual 4th of July fireworks show to provide the live stream to the media broadcasting the event. The team turned to Fusion 360 to quickly prototype and create the enclosure.

“First, we laser scanned the hole where the camera would fit,” a member of the EarthCam engineering team explains. “With Fusion 360, I could create a design that met our constraints without physically going to the location. We were able to do that digitally and make sure it was right the first time.”

The EarthCam team used Fusion 360 to design a total of 18 different parts for the camera enclosure. All the parts were then 3D printed and

laser cut in their New Jersey office. The EarthCam team also designed and installed a new adjustable mechanical arm for the camera. This new installation was one for the record books — it was all done in only eight days.

Diverse solutions with Fusion 360 EarthCam’s cameras aren’t just pointed at locations for a public, online audience. The company also provides solutions for construction companies to monitor progress, safety, security, and more. All images and data are pushed to Autodesk Construction Cloud, creating more efficient workflows and analyses. For custom

Oneofmyfavouritefeatures inFusion360isrendering. I’mabletodesignacustom solutionornewproductand putitinthelocationthat it’sintendedtobeused.

Seeingitgofromdigitalto realityalwaysmakesme smile,especiallywithallour innovativeproducts

installations, the EarthCam team uses Fusion 360.

“I really enjoy Fusion 360 because it allows me to collaborate with my team very easily,” the team says. “We can restrict permissions based on confidentiality, which is really important for us.”

The ease of use and ability to incorporate the model into instruction manuals so clients can install the camera themselves is also another important aspect of their workflow. “We don’t have to worry about making a line drawing until after the model is finalized,” says the team. “We can create mechanical drawings for manuals directly from the finished model, which is huge. Fusion 360 is really a fantastic tool.”

RUNNING THE

Japanese sporting goods company Asics has expanded its arsenal of digital tools and adopted 3D scanning in order to transform its workflow, as Claudia Schergna reports

When Asics decided to adopt the Artec 3D scanning technology, its main challenge was not only to capture its famous running shoe’s external and internal features, but also to retain the signature bright colours and unique textures that define the company’s products.

The vivid hues are undoubtedly a hallmark of the Japanese sports equipment manufacturer, but even the most hi-res photography didn’t do justice to their brightness and intensity.

The Asics marketing team was therefore on the hunt for a technology that would allow the company to fully digitise its products, particularly running shoes.

While 3D scanning has long been used by Asics’ design and marketing teams, previous hardware proved inadequate for capturing more detail: “We had been using a 3D scanner from another manufacturer, but the quality of the textures was not sufficient,” explains Shintaro Nagata, a member of the Asics footwear digital technology team.

“Therefore, we decided to use Artec, which utilises photogrammetry technology and can add high-quality texture information.”

When the Asics team got to try Artec’s precision bluelight based technology Space Spider, what immediately got their attention was its ability to capture smaller objects in high resolution and brilliant colour.

DataDesign, an Artec reseller in Japan, offered Asics a comprehensive demo that featured Artec Space Spider as the right solution to meet the project’s needs. With the

choice made in Artec’s favour, the design journey began. “We think that 3D scanning works very well when it comes to the editing of finished goods, such as an experiment with new products by changing the colour of existing ones,” says Nagata.

“Artec Studio enables 3D scanning and photogrammetry in a single software. It has made it possible to create a high-quality 3D model efficiently by combining the positive sides of both methods while compensating for any disadvantages.”

Asics’ workflow with Artec Space Spider is straightforward: once a pair of shoes is made and ready for purchase, the team then 3D scans a sample pair with Space Spider.

This requires virtually no preparation: The shoe is placed on a mat and scanned from three different angles, then turned and flipped for full capture. While the 3D model is being constructed from scan data, numerous photographs are taken with a DSL camera.

The pictures are then imported directly into Artec Studio, where the 3D model is mapped to the images for photo texturing. The team uses the Manual Mode in Artec Studio for maximum control and flexibility.

The resulting ultra-realistic 3D models of sports shoes are used for quality inspection, as well as for video and animated marketing content. If the model is needed for quality control, additional steps in Oqton Geomagic Control X may be required.

In that case, the model is inspected dimensionally, and a report is generated in the software, excluding any possibility of inaccuracy.

● 1 An Asics running shoe is placed on a mat and scanned from three angles

● 2 A 3D model is constructed from the scan data in Artec Studio

● 3 Photographs are taken of the running shoe using a DSL camera

● 4 Photos are imported into Artec Studio and the 3D model is mapped to the images for photo texturing

● 5 Bright colours and unique textures define Asic’s products

THE EXTRA MILE

“The bundle of Artec and Geomagic has made it possible to quickly compare 3D scan data with CAD data and eliminate variations caused by manual measurements, making it possible to perform accurate and visually comprehensible inspections, which is also helpful for improvement,” says Nagata.

“It is also possible to automate the inspection workflow, which we believe will enable us to obtain more valuable information in fewer working hours.”

The importance of high-quality texture is a priority when it comes to Asics’ scientific approach to personalised design and care for athletes of all types, and with Artec Space Spider and Geomagic Control X, the company has achieved its goals of ultra-precise 3D digitisation.

Members of the Asics team have said that the stage of the process they enjoy the most is the final segment, as they are always blown away by how quickly the final model is created and how authentic and lifelike it is.

Thanks to Artec 3D technology and its ultrarealistic digitisation capabilities, Asics can save time and resources, reduce mistakes caused by manual measurements, and focus on designing new, colourful shoes that will support athletes in achieving their goals. www.asics.com | www.artec3d.com

AN ‘EN POINTE’ REVOLUTION

Ballet is both a sport and an art form, requiring extreme dedication, punishing training and rehearsal schedules, endurance and strength. Having the right footwear makes a big difference to dancers and Act’ble intends to play a starring role in making that happen, as Claudia Schergna reports

In 2013, the New York City Ballet ordered 8,500 pairs of pointe shoes, to ensure that its 180 ballerinas were well-equipped for the whole performance season. This might sound like a dramatic oversupply, with great potential for waste, but it’s not unusual for classical dancers to require regular replacements.

Very regular, in fact. “The lifespan of those shoes is only one day in professional dance,” explains Sophia Lindner, founder, CEO and creative director at Act’ble, a German start-up aiming to revolutionise the design of pointe shoes.

If we assume that a professional dancer wears a new pair maybe five times per week, they would buy and throw away roughly 260 pairs of shoes a year.

Pointe shoes aren’t cheap to purchase, nor are they easy to dispose of. They are made of multiple materials – leather, cotton, satin, other fabrics, cardboard and glue – making them hard to recycle. Nor are they easy to manufacture. In professional dance, each pair is custommade according to a ballerina’s physical features and dancing style. No two pairs of shoes are identical. Dancing in the wrong shoe, meanwhile, can be so painful that you wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy. Lindner learnt this the hard way: “I danced ballet for 14 years and experienced all the problems myself that dancers have with finding pointe shoes – the pain, the injuries. I saw the need to solve a huge problem and wanted to make an impact in the dance world,” she says.

MADE FOR UNIQUE FEET

Lindner started working on solving the problem as her graduation project for her Bachelor’s degree in industrial design. “With the design, we created a custom fit and modular pointe shoe, matching each dancer’s unique feet for increased support, movement range and durability, as well as to reduce pain,” she says.

“The dancer’s needs are the basis of our design decisions,” she says. Regular pointe shoes need ‘breaking in’ by a dancer, typically for at least one hour, in order to prepare them for more extended wear.

These shoes, by contrast, don’t demand this kind of preparation, due to their TPU material and sole geometry. “The 3D printed structure of the sole allows

flexibility and stability simultaneously, making the shoes last up to five times longer. The box is designed to adapt to the foot width for a custom fit,” says Lindner.

Finding the right kind of pointe shoe is a challenge that can take years for many dancers, according to Violetta Keller, principal dancer with the Finnish National Ballet and an Act’ble customer. She herself has extremely arched and small feet, and struggled to find the right shoe. But the fitting experience with Act’ble was an entirely different experience, she says.

“It looked like my foot, but in a shoe. It elongated my line when I was dancing, making my foot look slimmer and prettier,” she says. “They were so comfortable, I didn’t want to take them off! They gave me the possibility to adjust in every possible way.”

Keller was one of 50 professional dancing athletes who took part in the beta phase with Act’ble. “We collected their feedback and incorporated it into the product until it was ready for the market. On top of that, we are working with experts from the performance shoe industry, research institutes and dance medicine specialists to create the best product possible,” says Lindner.

A BREAK WITH HISTORY

What’s innovative about the product – besides the fact it employs 3D printing – is the durability, the health benefits, and the unique modular system used by these dance shoes.

Anyone familiar with the ballet industry knows that pointe shoes haven’t changed much in hundreds of years. Nor have the materials used. They are typically made of satin for the outer part, with the toe box made of densely packed layers of fabric, cardboard and paper, hardened with pointe shoe pastes. The shank consists of cardboard layers, and the sole is usually made of thin leather.

So the Act’ble shoe represents a real break from history. “Our shoe is ready to wear and adapts to the foot of the dancer,” says Lindner. “The sole is recyclable and lasts up to five times longer, which means you also save money in the long run. The most important part for us are the health benefits. The pain level when dancing in Act pointes is reduced to a minimum, thanks to our hidden and patented lacing system, which helps distribute the forces in an optimal way.”

‘‘ I danced ballet for 14 years and experienced all the problems that dancers have with finding pointe shoes — the pain, the injuries

Act’ble’s pointe shoe is ready-to-wear and adapts to the foot of the individual dancer

About three years passed between Lindner’s initial idea and a dancer finally putting on a pair of Act’ble pointe shoes. During that time, her team had to find investors and partners. One of these partners is HP, which now provides Act’ble with the 3D printing equipment needed to make the shoes. “In over hundreds of iterations, we adapted the 3D-printed geometry to the feet of professional athletes,” she says.

In terms of CAD and 3D modelling, the team uses a mixture of Rhino 3D, Fusion 360, and Blender. The prototyping phase takes place both in-house using filament 3D printers and with the help of some independent bureaus, which have assisted Act’ble in identifying the right materials and technologies.

DANCER WELLBEING

Research at Act’ble is conducted by an all-female team of six designers, all with different backgrounds within the design realm and a passion for ballet and dancers’ health.

“We receive great feedback from the dancers. Some dancers get very emotional, because they thought they would never find their perfect pointe shoe,” says Lindner.

“Finally, someone is taking care of their health issues and listening to their needs and problems. We see a huge potential in shifting something for the dance community in terms of health and sustainability.”

Despite the fact Actable shoes are receiving positive feedback from customers, the company is still on the hunt for the perfect material for the outer layers, the ‘skin’ of the shoe. The most difficult part of the process, according to Lindner, has been combining all elements of the shoe – namely laces, the sole and skin – to achieve the desired effect.

Although 3D printing is not a new technology in many industries, it is very innovative to use it in ballet shoe design. It’s also an extremely convenient technology, says Lindner: “In 3D printing, we have found a tool that offers the same precision and individuality as the athletes themselves.”

Mass personalisation and motion capture also open up possibilities that were previously unheard of in this industry, she continues. “In over a hundred iterations, we 3D printed an individually generated prototype every one to two days, further optimised it, and tested it with high-level athletes from surrounding state theatres and companies, with extremely positive feedback.”

Due to the high precision of the additive manufacturing process, says Lindner, the Act’ble team has been able to develop a performance sole with rapid prototyping that never existed before and to radically rethink and revolutionise a 200-year-old history. www.actable.me

●

● 1 The ‘box’ is designed to adapt to the foot width for a custom fit

2 Act’ble studied 50 professional ballerinas as part of their product research

● 3 The team at Act’ble designs shoes using a mix of Rhino, Fusion 360 and Blender

● 4 Act’ble partners with HP for its 3D printing expertise and technology

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The

If one thing has become clear in 2023, it’s that flexible working is here to stay. AEC firms that resorted to ‘sticking plaster’ hacks to get them through the pandemic, are now looking for more robust solutions to support staff working from home.

Centralising workstations and data is key but there are many ways to skin this particular cat — public cloud, private cloud, or on-premise Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). The humble desktop workstation is becoming as much at home in the data centre as it is on the desk.

In the UK, there are plenty of specialist firms that will happily replace your office workstation resource with one in a dedicated server room or the cloud. Many are laser-focused on the AEC sector, bringing expertise in BIM-centric workflows and data management as well as the remote workstations themselves.

Inevidesk goes hard on price with its custom ‘pods’ (www.tinyurl.com/ inevidesk-AEC). CreativeITC is addressing sustainability (www.tinyurl.com/Creative-ESG), Scan is applying its knowledge of desktops to the cloud (see page WS23), while IMSCAD has its eggs in many different remoting technology baskets (see page WS42).

Then, of course there’s the major public cloud service providers. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure give firms on-demand access to a wide a variety of GPU-accelerated virtual workstations anywhere in the world. And in true public

cloud fashion, everything is elastic, so firms can upscale and downscale as needs change. This can be done directly through the cloud provider or via multi-cloud platforms like Frame or Workspot.

Performance can vary dramatically between VMs, which is something we explore in our in-depth report on page WS30. If you don’t know your g4dn.xlarge from your NC16asT4v3 and everything in between, this is an essential read.

Public cloud has many benefits, particularly when it comes to global availability and IT management, but for performance alone, it’s impossible to compete with the desktop workstation. With desktops, instead of giving each user a slice of a multi-core CPU or GPU, they get a dedicated resource, often with a CPU optimised for frequency rather than number of cores.

Firms including HP and Lenovo have cottoned on this and are now building rack mount and remote management capabilities directly into their personal workstations, blurring the boundaries between desktop and datacentre. You also get the simplicity of a 1:1 connection so you don’t need to get involved with the complexity and cost of virtualisation.

The Lenovo ThinkStation P7 and PX, for example, harness the power of Intel

‘Sapphire Rapids’ CPUs and Nvidia RTX Ada

Generation GPUs to handle some of the most demanding design, visualisation and simulation workflows (see page WS14). Meanwhile, with the HP Z2 Mini G9 you get incredible rack density in a workstation optimised for CAD (see page WS42), all managed through the HP Anyware remoting solution. Finally, cloud doesn’t always have to play second fiddle to desktop in terms of performance. UK firm Armari, through its ‘Ripper Rentals’ cloud workstation service, has the most powerful Intel Xeon W-3400 and AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro workstations we’ve ever used. With custom liquid cooling they push Intel’s and AMD’s flagship workstation processors to their absolute limits, delivering up to 19% more performance than standard aircooled desktops (see page WS11)

When it comes to workstations, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. Some firms go all in on cloud or VDI, others use a variety of desktop, mobile and virtual, wherever they make sense. Centralised workstations can offer massive benefits, delivering performance wherever work may take you, but then you’re always reliant on good connectivity. And, as a recent rail journey from London to Sheffield reminded me, sometimes you can’t even get a simple web page to load.

flexible workstation

‘Home office’ stock photo, but does anyone really have a home office that looks like this?

b y Greg Corke

Intel Xeon

‘Sapphire Rapids’ AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro for rendering, simulation, reality modelling, CAD and beyond

Rapids’ workstation

surpass AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper

Pro? Greg Corke puts these high-end CPUs through their paces

Ten years ago, it would have been unthinkable that Intel today would be playing catchup with AMD in workstation processors. But, the overwhelming success of AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro, coupled with Intel’s failure to launch a true workstation-class processor since 2019, has led us to this precise situation. Intel desperately needs its new ‘Sapphire Rapids’ Xeon processors — specifically the Intel Xeon W-2400 and W-3400 — to be a success.

The chip giant certainly has its work cut out here. With Threadripper Pro, AMD delivered the holy grail of workstation processors, combining vast numbers of cores (up to 64) with high turbo frequencies and high-memory bandwidth to deliver impressive performance wherever your workflows may take you — single threaded CAD, multithreaded rendering, or memory intensive

simulation, Threadripper Pro can handle pretty much anything you throw at it.

Not surprisingly, Intel has followed a similar tack for its new ‘Sapphire Rapids’ workstation processors — up to 56-cores, up to 4.8 GHz turbo and 8-channel DDR5 memory. It also follows AMD in terms of architecture. Like Threadripper Pro, ‘Sapphire Rapids’ processors feature a ‘chiplet’ design where several smaller chips are packaged together as one. This is in contrast to traditional monolithic designs, where all cores are on a single chip, making it more prone to manufacturing defects, and therefore lower yields and higher cost.

Intel has a much wider workstationfocused product range than AMD, with a total of fifteen models across its Intel Xeon W-2400 and W-3400 series (see chart on page WS6) . In contrast, there are only six “Zen 3” Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5000 WX-Series models, sporting 12,

16, 24, 32 or 64 cores. All have 8-channel DDR4 3200 memory.

Intel Xeon W-2400 / W-3400

Intel differentiates its Xeon W-2400 and Xeon W-3400 processor families in two main ways: by number of cores and by memory channels.

The Xeon W-2400 Series is classified as a ‘mainstream’ workstation processor with eight models ranging from 6 to 24 cores and 4-channel DDR5 4800 memory.

Meanwhile, the Intel Xeon W-3400 Series is for ‘experts’ with seven models ranging from 12 to 56 cores and 8-channel DDR5 4400/4800 memory.

The new processors are comprised entirely of ‘Golden Cove’ cores — they do not have the hybrid Performance Core (P-Core) / Efficiency Core (E-core) architecture pioneered by 12th Gen and 13th Gen Intel Core processors.

‘Golden Cove’ is not Intel’s latest CPU

Intel has launched its long awaited ‘Sapphire

processors, but do they have enough to

architecture. It formed the foundation for the P-Cores in 12th Gen Intel Core.

Beyond the cores, there are some other significant differences between the two processor families. Compared to the Intel Xeon W-2400, the Intel Xeon W-3400 has more memory capacity (4 TB vs 2 TB), more PCIe lanes (112 vs 64) (so it can support more add-in GPUs), more Intel Smart Cache (L3), and a higher max base power (350W vs 225W).

As a first for Xeon processors, certain models — those with an X suffix — are unlocked so the processor can be overclocked. A range of tuning features are available through the Intel Extreme Tuning Utility (Intel XTU).

While it’s highly unlikely that major OEMs will ever go down the overclocking route, this level of control could leave the gates open for specialist workstation manufacturers to differentiate themselves by squeezing more performance out of the platform. This might be one for the future,

however. Currently, there are no off-the shelf All-in-One (AIO) water coolers that we know of for the power-hungry processors, although UK firm Armari has developed a custom liquid cooling solution for its Intel Xeon W-3400 rack workstation (see box out on page WS11)

Among the Intel Xeon W-2400 Series, the processors that stand out are the Xeon w7-2495X and w7-2475X which combine high core counts with the highest boost frequencies. The lower-end models may be suited to certain Finite Element Analysis (FEA) or other simulation tools that benefit from higher memory bandwidth but can’t necessarily take advantage of large numbers of cores. They can also provide a platform for multi-GPU workflows, such as GPU rendering.

There’s a similar pattern with the Intel Xeon W-3400 Series, with the higher end models featuring the largest number of cores and highest boost frequencies. The range tops out with the 56-core Intel

Xeon w9-3495X with a base frequency of 1.9 GHz and a Turbo Boost Max 3.0 of 4.80 GHz.

The lower-end CPUs in the family, such as the Intel Xeon w5-3425, could offer similar potential benefits for engineering simulation, plus support for even more GPUs. You can see the full specs in the tables below.

Meanwhile, Xeon W-2400 and Xeon W-3400 supports the latest technologies, including PCIe Gen 5, DDR5 4400/4800 memory (which offers more memory bandwidth than Threadripper Pro’s DDR4 3200) and Intel WiFi 6E.

While the majority of workstations focus on the single socket, high core count Intel Xeon W-2400 and Xeon W-3400 Series, ‘Sapphire Rapids’ does not spell the end for dual processor workstations.

4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, which are primarily designed for servers, have already made their way into workstations from HP and Lenovo. The top-end model, the Intel Xeon Platinum 8490H, offers 60-cores per processor, which gives you a whopping 120 cores in a dual socket workstation. However, among the major OEMs, you’ll only see this chip in the Lenovo ThinkStation PX (read our review on page WS14) and, at $17,000 per processor, the market it somewhat limited. The HP Z8 G5 also comes with 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, but only those models with up to 32-cores.

Test setup

For our testing we focused on the top end workstation processors from Intel and AMD — the 56-core Intel Xeon w9-3495X and 64-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5995WX. We also tested the dual socket 60-core Intel Xeon Platinum 8490H.

You’ll find details of our test machines below. However, it should be noted that both Lenovo workstations were preproduction units, so they may be slightly different to the final shipping machines. Performance, for example, may increase with BIOS updates, so our test results should not be treated as gospel.

Lenovo ThinkStation P7

• Intel Xeon w9-3495X CPU (56-cores) (1.9 GHz base, 4.80 GHz Turbo Boost 3.0)

• 256 GB (8 x 32 GB) DDR5 4,800MHz memory

• 4 x Nvidia RTX A4000 GPU (16 GB)

• 2 TB Samsung PM9A1 SSD

• Microsoft Windows 11 Pro for workstations

• (read our review on page WS14)

Intel Xeon W-2400 Series processors

Intel Xeon W-3400 Series processors

Benchmarks: processor comparisons

Lenovo ThinkStation PX

• 2 x Intel Xeon Platinum 8490H CPUs (60-cores) (1.9 GHz base, 3.5 GHz Max Turbo)

• 256 GB (16 x 16 GB) DDR5

4,800MHz memory

• Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation

GPU (48 GB)

• 2 TB Samsung PM9A1 SSD

• Microsoft Windows 11 Pro for workstations

• (read our review on page WS14)

Scan 3XS GWP-ME A1128T

• AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5995WX processor (64-cores) (2.7 GHz base, 4.5 GHz boost)

• 256 GB (8 x 32GB) Samsung ECC

Registered DDR4 3200MHz memory

• Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation

GPU (48 GB)

• 2TB Samsung 990 Pro NVMe PCIe

4.0 SSD

• Microsoft Windows 11 Pro

• (read our review on page WS22)

Power hungry

To put it bluntly, Intel’s ‘Sapphire Rapids’ processors are very power hungry. Both the Intel Xeon w9-3495X and Intel Xeon Platinum 8490H processors have a base power of 350W. But this is only part of the story.

When rendering in Cinebench, for example, we observed 530W at the socket with the ThinkStation P7 and 1,000W at the socket with the ThinkStation PX. Even when rendering with a single core, the Lenovo ThinkStation P7 drew a substantial 305W.

That’s not to say that the Threadripper Pro 5995WX is that much better. With a default TDP of 280W, the Scan 3XS GWP-ME A1128T workstation still drew 474W at the socket when rendering in

Cinebench with all 64-cores. Finally, it’s important to note that all our tests were done with the ‘ultimate performance’ Windows power plan and power draw may be different with future BIOS updates.

On test

We tested all three workstations with a range of real-world applications used in AEC and product development. We also compared performance figures from Intel’s and AMD’s ‘consumer’ processors, including 12th Gen Intel Core (Core i912900K), 13th Gen Intel Core (Core i913900K), and ‘Zen 4’ AMD Ryzen 7000 Series (AMD Ryzen 7950X), although we did not have a data for all our benchmarks.

Computer Aided Design

CAD isn’t a key target workflow for Intel ‘Sapphire Rapids’ or AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro. In fact architects, engineers and designers that only use bread-and-butter design tools like Solidworks, Inventor and Revit, will almost certainly be better served by 12th or 13th Gen Intel Core processors or AMD Ryzen 7000 (read our comparison article – www.tinyurl.com/ D3D-CoreRyzen ).

Intel and AMD’s entrylevel CPU families generally have fewer cores and less memory bandwidth, but higher clock speeds and higher Instructions Per Clock (IPC), which are important for these largely single threaded applications.

But these days, CAD is often just one of many tools used by architects, engineers

and designers, some of which do benefit from having more cores or higher memory bandwidth. So, it’s important to understand how ‘Sapphire Rapids’ performs in CAD.

We used Solidworks 2022 as our yardstick, a mechanical CAD application that is largely single threaded or lightly threaded, so only uses a few CPU cores.

As expected, the Intel Core i9-12900K, Intel Core i9-13900K and AMD Ryzen 7950X had a clear lead. With fewer cores, higher turbo frequencies, and (apart from the Core i9-12900K) better IPC, Intel and AMD’s high-end workstation processors simply can’t keep up.

The Xeon w9-3495X did show a small but significant lead over the Threadripper Pro 5995WX in the rebuild, convert and simulate tests. But the Xeon w9-3495X didn’t have things all its own way, lagging behind in the mass properties and boolean operations tests.

To get an idea of pure single threaded performance, albeit through a synthetic rendering test, we also used the Cinebench ST benchmark. Here the Xeon w9-3495X had a clear lead of 22% over the Threadripper Pro 5995WX. Interestingly, despite its significantly lower turbo frequency, the Intel Xeon Platinum 8490H wasn’t that far behind the AMD processor.

Reality modelling

Reality modelling is becoming much more prevalent in the AEC sector. Agisoft Metashape 1.73 is a photogrammetry tool that generates a mesh from multiple hires photos. It is multi-threaded, but uses multiple CPU cores in fits and starts. It also uses some GPU processing, but to a much lesser extent.

We tested using a benchmark from specialist US workstation manufacturer Puget Systems. The Threadripper Pro 5995WX just about edged out the Xeon w9-3495X in the smaller Rock model test but was 13% faster in the larger school map test. Interestingly, the Xeon Platinum 8490H was way off the pace. We wonder if the software spreads the load across both CPUs but is not optimised for this. It’s hard to explain this by the lower frequency alone.

Point cloud processing

software, Leica Cyclone Register 360, assigns threads according to the amount of system memory. On a machine with 64 GB it will run on five threads and on one with 128 GB or more it will run on six.

For the last few years AMD has had little in the way of competition in workflows that benefit from many cores or high memory bandwidth ’’

AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro processors feature up

Impact of memory channels on performance (testing with Intel Xeon w9-3495X)

The Threadripper Pro 5995WX was 10% faster than the Xeon w9-3495X when registering our 99 GB dataset. Both CPUs lagged behind AMD’s and Intel’s consumer processors. Even though those test machines only had 64 GB of memory, so only ran on 5 threads, their higher frequencies and IPC gave them the lead.

Rendering

Ray trace rendering is highly scalable. Roughly speaking, double the number of CPU cores to half the render time (if frequencies are maintained).

The Threadripper Pro 5995WX

significantly outperformed the Xeon w9-3495X in KeyShot and V-Ray, two of the most popular tools for design visualisation, and in Cinebench 23, the benchmark for Cinema4D. The Threadripper Pro 5995WX was 35% faster in Keyshot, 27% faster in V-Ray and 20% faster in Cinebench. This is a considerable lead.

But the advantage that AMD’s top-end workstation processor holds over the Xeon w9-3495X is not just down to it having 8 more cores. The relative energy efficiency of both processors and, therefore, the allcore frequencies they can maintain, has a major impact on performance.

In Cinebench, for example, the Threadripper Pro 5995WX maintained 3.05 GHz on all 64-cores while the Xeon w9-3495X went down to 2.54 GHz. The Xeon w9-3495X’s relationship between power, frequency and threads can be seen in more detail in the charts to the left.

Meanwhile, the dual Intel Xeon Platinum 8490H beat both single socket processors considerably. But with 120 cores and 240 threads to play with this came as little surprise.

Engineering simulation

Engineering simulation includes Finite Element Analysis (FEA) and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). FEA can help predict how a product reacts to real-world forces or temperatures. CFD can be used to optimise aerodynamics in cars or predict the impact of wind on buildings. Both types of software are extremely demanding computationally.

There are many different types of ‘solvers’ used in FEA and CFD and each behaves differently, as do different datasets.

In general, CFD scales very well and studies should solve much quicker with more CPU cores. Importantly, CFD can also benefit greatly from memory bandwidth, as each CPU core can be fed data quicker. This is one area in which ‘Sapphire Rapids’ can outperform Threadripper Pro. Both have 8-channel memory, but ‘Sapphire Rapids’ uses faster DDR5 4,800MHz whereas Threadripper Pro uses DDR4 3,200MHz. For our testing we used three select workloads from the SPECworkstation 3.1 benchmark. This includes two CFD benchmarks (Rodinia, which represents compressible flow, and WPCcfd, which models combustion and turbulence) and one FEA benchmark (CalculiX, which models a jet engine turbine’s internal temperature).

In Rodinia, the Xeon w9-3495X outperformed the Threadripper Pro 5995WX by a whopping 101%. In WPCcfd, the lead was smaller but, at 13%, still significant. Performance of both processors were dwarfed by the dual Intel Xeon Platinum 8490H.

Both Intel processors fared much worse in the Calculix (FEA) test, where the Threadripper Pro 5995WX took a substantial lead.

Memory bandwidth

In addition to cores, memory bandwidth is one of the main differentiators between workstation processors and their consumer counterparts.

This is governed largely by the number of memory channels each processor supports, but also by the type of memory.

Memory channels act as pathways

w9-3495X processor in Lenovo ThinkStation P7

Intel Xeon w9-3495X processor in Lenovo ThinkStation P7

between the system memory and the CPU. The more channels a CPU has, the faster data can be delivered.

13th Gen Intel Core and the AMD Ryzen 7000 Series have two memory channels, while the Intel Xeon W-2400 Series has four, and Intel Xeon W-3400 Series, 4th Generation Intel Xeon Scalable and Threadripper Pro 5000 Series all have eight. To get the full memory bandwidth, all memory channels must be populated with memory modules, as was the case with all our test machines.

As mentioned earlier, ‘Sapphire Rapids’ Xeons have an advantage over the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 5000 Series as they support faster memory – DDR5 4,800MHz compared to DDR4 3,200MHz.

A quick run through the SiSoft Sandra benchmark shows the comparative memory bandwidth one can expect. The Threadripper Pro 5995WX recorded 139.27 GB/sec, while the Intel Xeon w93495X pulled 184.64 GB/sec and the dual Intel Xeon Platinum 8490H went up to 325.6 GB/sec. These figures help explain why Sapphire Rapids does so well in our memory intensive CFD benchmarks.

To see how memory bandwidth impacts performance in different workflows, we tested the Xeon w9-3495X with a variety of different memory configurations, from 1-channel with a single 32 GB DIMM, all the way up to 8-channels with 8 x 32 GB DIMMs. Interestingly, even with 6-channels, the Xeon w9-3495X edged out the Threadripper Pro 5995WX in memory bandwidth, delivering 141.21 GB/sec in SiSoft Sandra.

As most of our benchmarks fit into 32 GB of memory, the fact that we reduced the capacity should have minimal impact on results, although it can’t be ignored altogether. The exception is our Leica Cyclone Register 360 test, which adjusts

Intel’s single socket ‘Sapphire Rapids’ workstation processors can be overclocked. This requires more power to be pumped into the CPU, which, of course, means more heat and therefore liquid cooling. While none of the major OEMs get involved with this, UK firm Armari is an expert.

For the Intel Xeon w9-3495X, Armari has developed a custom water-cooling solution for its 2UR56SR Node, a rack workstation available

the number of cores used in relation to system memory. This is why performance drops off massively with 32 GB.

As you can see from the charts on page WS9, memory bandwidth in the WPCcfd benchmark has a massive impact on performance. Interestingly, even with 6-channels filled, the Intel Xeon w9-3495X outperforms the AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5995WX.

Another workflow massively influenced by memory bandwidth is recompiling shaders in Unreal Engine 4.26 which uses all available cores. However, where Threadripper Pro 5995WX loses out in GB/sec it makes up for in cores and all-core frequency, as it still managed to beat the Xeon w9-3495X in our automotive benchmark.

Performance in CAD (Solidworks), ray trace rendering (V-Ray) and reality

From our tests, however, Sapphire Rapids is not going to be the Threadripper Pro 5000 WX-Series killer we thought it might be, at least in the broader product development sector.

In ray trace rendering, the 64-core Threadripper Pro 5995X still has a considerable lead over the 56-core Xeon w93495X. And while Intel may possibly win out at certain price points, simply because it has so many different models across its Xeon W-2400 and W-3400 families, we certainly don’t expect viz specialists to move to ‘Sapphire Rapids’ en masse. Plus, as you move down the range, it will face more competition from 13th Gen Intel Core.

But ‘Sapphire Rapids’ does have some big plusses. In single threaded workflows it appears to have a lead over Threadripper Pro, which could make a real difference in some CAD/BIM applications. Better single threaded performance should also boost 3D frame rates in CPU-limited applications.

modelling (Leica Cyclone Register 360 and Agisoft MetaShape Professional 1.73) appears to be virtually unaffected by memory bandwidth. There are a couple of caveats in Solidworks. In the simulation test, performance dropped a little when going from 4-channels to 1-channel. In boolean operations, 1-channel memory actually delivered marginally better results.

Conclusion

The importance to Intel of ‘Sapphire Rapids’ Xeon W-2400 and Xeon W-3400 being a success cannot be overstated. For the last few years AMD has had little in the way of competition in workflows that benefit from many cores or high memory bandwidth. Intel will have certainly felt the impact of Threadripper Pro.

through its ‘Ripper Rentals’ cloud workstation service. It allows the CPU to support up to 500W on all-core boost — a full 150W above its default TDP.

Armari also has a similar offering for the Threadripper Pro 5995WX, the 2UR64TP-RW Node.

We put both machines through their paces in Cinebench R23.

The Intel Xeon w93495X machine hit 2.88 GHz on all cores, 0.3 GHz faster than the air-cooled Lenovo ThinkStation P7.

We found the biggest potential benefit for ‘Sapphire Rapids’ to come from engineering simulation, specifically CFD. Our tests show that ‘Sapphire Rapids’ can deliver a massive performance boost, largely thanks to its superior memory bandwidth. While solvers and datasets vary, serious users of tools from Ansys, Altair and others should certainly explore what the Xeon W-3400 and 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors can do for them. Extremely complex simulations can take hours, even days to run. Cutting this time in half could deliver monumental benefits to a project.

All of this is exciting, but one can’t help but keep one eye on the future. AMD is expected to launch its next generation ‘Zen 4’ Threadripper Pro CPUs later this year. And, if rumours of 96-cores and 12-channel memory (DDR5) become a reality, then any lead Intel might have could be short lived.

This delivered a score of 69,811, equating to a significant 19% performance uplift.

The Threadripper Pro

76,117, corresponding to an 8% performance uplift.

Armari also offers an overclocked desktop Threadripper Pro

workstation, which we reviewed in the January/February 2023 workstation special report.

■ www.armari.com

Overclocking Pump up the power

The biggest potential benefit comes from engineering simulation, specifically CFD. Our tests show that ‘Sapphire Rapids’ can deliver a massive performance boost, largely thanks to its superior memory bandwidth

Workstations for every workflow

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The aesthetic design, functional design and build quality of the ThinkStation P7 and (in particular) the ThinkStation PX, is simply incredible

These are two of the most well designed and manufactured workstations we’ve ever seen, built for desktop or datacentre, but design firms will need to look closely at which workflows will benefit from the new ‘Sapphire Rapids’ Intel Xeon processors inside

Price £POA

www.lenovo.com/workstations

Lenovo has played its workstation hand extremely well over the last few years. In 2020, while HP and Dell continued to rely on ageing Intel ‘Cascade Lake’ processors to power their high-end workstations, Lenovo embraced AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro and the ThinkStation P620 was born.

The processor’s 64-cores gave Lenovo a significant performance advantage in a range of multi-threaded workflows, from simulation to ray trace rendering. Intel had nothing that came remotely close, but now with its new ‘Sapphire Rapids’ workstation processors, this is about to change.

And Lenovo is certainly going big with ‘Sapphire Rapids’. Its new workstations, the ThinkStation PX (pronounced P10), P7 and P5 arrived with considerable fanfare in March 2023. The striking black and red design is the result of a collaboration with legendary automaker Aston Martin. The workstation’s front grill and side panel’s flush handle are classic Aston Martin.

The flagship ThinkStation PX is the most expandable of the new machines, featuring dual 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors (up to 2 x 60-cores), up to 2 TB of DDR5 4,800MHz memory, and up to four dual-slot GPUs, including the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation. The machine is designed to handle the most demanding multi-threaded or multiGPU workflows such as Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), ray trace rendering and video editing.

The ThinkStation P7 comes with a choice of workstation-specific Intel Xeon W-3400 Series processors (up to 56-cores), and up to 1 TB of DDR5 4,800MHz memory. The single socket machine will likely hit the price/performance sweet spot for many visualisation and simulation workflows, especially those that want the combination of high clock speeds for single threaded operations and 56-cores. It can also support

up to three dual-slot GPUs.

The ThinkStation P5 features Intel Xeon W-2400 Series CPUs (up to 24 cores) and up to two dual-slot GPUs. Lenovo calls the P5 an ‘industry workhorse’ and it looks well suited to a wide range of workflows from CAD and visualisation to simulation and reality modelling, although we expect it will face stiff competition from Lenovo’s Intel Core-based workstations.

Rack optimised

The ThinkStation PX and P7 were built from the ground up to be ‘rack optimised’ and offer several features to transform these desktop machines into what Lenovo describes as ‘hybrid cloud workstations’, with remote management capabilities like those found in rack servers.

This includes an optional Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) card that gives IT managers ‘full remote management’. According to Lenovo, it will enable them to monitor the workstation, cycle on and off, perform BIOS or firmware updates and re-image the machine if necessary. In addition to data centre deployments, this could be of interest to IT managers supporting those working from home.

The machines also feature enhanced on-board diagnostics with a small LCD display on the front that shows a QR code in the event of a system error – even out of band failure states when a machine won’t turn on. The user simply snaps the code with their smart phone camera, and they will be taken directly to the relevant page on the Lenovo service website.

Lenovo ThinkStation PX design

As Lenovo’s flagship ‘Sapphire Rapids’ desktop workstation, it’s hardly surprising that the ThinkStation PX has the most impressive chassis. The build quality is superb, arguably the best we’ve seen in any workstation. The solid metal chassis has handles built into all four corners. It feels incredibly strong. And it certainly needs to be. Our test machine was heavy enough with a single GPU, single PSU and no Hard Disk Drives (HDDs). Carrying a ThinkStation PX around is a two-person job. Lifting it into a rack could be an Olympic sport.

The ThinkStation PX is primarily a desktop workstation, but it’s also been built from the ground up for the datacentre with a rack optimised ‘5U’ design. Bolt holes are hidden under a removable top cover, making it easy to deploy in a standard 19-inch rack with the optional sliding rack rail kit.

For resiliency and redundancy, the machine comes with an optional second

rear hot-swappable 1,850W power supply unit (PSU), so should one PSU fail, the machine will carry on working. There’s also a rear accessible power button and lockable front access hot swap storage, which includes options for both 3.5-inch Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) and Solid State Drives (SSDs). Up to two SSDs can also be mounted on the motherboard but will be hidden under a GPU in multi GPU configs.

Alongside the front drive bays, you’ll find the power button, headphone jack, LCD diagnostics display, two USB Type A and two USB Type C ports, which light up when powered on. This this is a big plus to stop you scrabbling around in the dark.

There are plenty more ports at the rear – 6 x USB Type A and 1 x USB Type C, along with two RJ45 Ethernet ports - 1GbE and 10GbE. There’s also an optional Intel AX210 WIFI PCIe Adapter with antennas built into the top of the chassis.

Inside, the system is essentially split into two distinct sections with the motherboard offset from the side. Above the motherboard you’ll find CPU, memory and GPUs. Beneath the motherboard is storage and power supply units (PSUs).

The beauty of this design is that the components that generate the most heat enjoy uninterrupted airflow from front to back. And considering that a fullyspecced ThinkStation PX can house up to two 350W Intel Xeon Platinum CPUs, up to four 300W Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation GPUs and up to 2TB of DDR5 memory spread across 16 DIMMs, it certainly needs all the help it can get.

To optimise thermals, Lenovo uses a tri-channel cooling system. Fresh air is drawn in through the ‘3D Hexperf’ front grill, the design of which was inspired by Aston Martin’s iconic DBS grand tourer. But it’s not just for looks. The spacing and shape of the rigid plastic grille, which has rounded spikes that protrude at the front, is optimised for maximum airflow.

The engineering star of the show is the redesigned ABS plastic air baffle, that acts as a wall of separation between the trichannel cooling system’s three distinct zones. Each zone is fed by its own fans — the idea being that you don’t get any pre-heated air from the CPUs going into the GPUs and vice versa. The baffle also separates the CPUs and brings a different channel of fresh air to each as well as the memory DIMMs.

Despite the close attention to thermal engineering, the ThinkStation PX is not a silent machine. Fan noise was quite noticeable when rendering or solving Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) problems using both Intel Xeon Platinum 8490H processors. But this is hardly

surprising, as it drew 1,000W at the socket. Still, compared to a rack mounted server it’s an oasis of calm.

The ThinkStation PX scores very highly on serviceability with tool-free access on everything bar the CPUs. It’s not only one of the most beautifully engineered workstations we’ve ever seen; it also feels like everything has been manufactured to very low tolerances. This starts with the side panel which can be removed easily with a simple press and pull of the stylish flush handle. The panel effortlessly clicks back into place, which can’t be said of many desktop workstations.

All serviceable components are signposted with red touch points, from the replaceable fans with blind mate connectors and the PSU(s) at the rear, to brackets that hold the GPUs in place and levers to ease out the hard drive caddies. Aston Martin’s Cathal Loughnane reckons you don’t need a user manual. We wouldn’t go that far, but it’s certainly intuitive.

Lenovo ThinkStation P7 design

From the outside the ThinkStation P7 looks like a slimmed down version of the PX. It’s the same height, but not as deep or wide (4U, for racks). This means there are no front accessible drive bays, and all interior components are located on one side of the motherboard – CPU and memory in the middle, GPUs either side and PSU and HDD caddies at the bottom.

An air baffle channels cool air directly over the CPU, while both 4 DIMM memory banks have their own cooling fan units which clip off.

As the front CPU fans only need to cool a single Intel Xeon W-3400 series processor, they are much smaller than those used on the ThinkStation PX. And, it seems, they don’t have to work as hard. When rendering in KeyShot, for example with the single Intel Xeon w9-3495X processor, the machine was remarkably quiet, even though it drew 530W at the

socket. And it can do this for hours on end. In Keyshot 2023, for example, when rendering a multi-frame animation on all 56-cores, fan noise remained constant, and the CPU maintained a steady 2.85 GHz.

The P7 follows the same design ethos as the PX with red touch points throughout. You don’t get quite the same level of serviceability, however. Once you clip out the cooling fans, for example, you must still disconnect the cables from the motherboard.

Elsewhere the chassis shares many of the same features as the PX – rear power button, built in WiFi, dual Ethernet, etc.

ThinkStation P7 / PX in action

Lenovo lent us a ThinkStation P7 and ThinkStation PX. These are pre-production units, so they may be slightly different to the final shipping workstations. Performance, for example, may increase with BIOS updates, so our benchmark results should not be treated as gospel.

The core specs can be seen below.

Lenovo ThinkStation P7

• Intel Xeon w9-3495X CPU

• 256 GB (8 x 32) DDR5 4,800MHz memory

• 4 x Nvidia RTX A4000 GPU (16 GB)

• 2 TB Samsung PM9A1 SSD

• Microsoft Windows 11 Pro for workstations

Lenovo ThinkStation PX

• 2 x Intel Xeon Platinum 8490H CPUs

• 256 GB (16 x 16) DDR5 4,800MHz memory

• Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Gen GPU (48 GB)

• 2 TB Samsung PM9A1 SSD

• Microsoft Windows 11 Pro for workstations

CPU workflows

The ThinkStation P7 is built around the new workstation-specific Intel Xeon W-3400 Series processors, supporting up to 56-cores in a single socket. While it can’t match the ThinkStation PX for

number of cores, the Intel Xeon W-3400 boasts higher Turbo clock speeds, so will outperform the ThinkStation PX in general system operations and in workflows that can’t take advantage of more than 56-cores.

CAD is a classic single threaded application and in Solidworks 2022 the ThinkStation P7 had a clear lead over the PX in everything but rendering. This lead also extended to reality modelling in MetaShape Pro (photogrammetry) and Leica Cyclone 360 (point cloud processing).

But in such single threaded or lightly threaded workflows, the ThinkStation P7 can’t hit the same heights as Lenovo’s mainstream workstations. The Lenovo ThinkStation P360 Ultra with 12th Gen Intel Core i9-12900K outperformed the ThinkStation P7 by a considerable margin. And this lead should grow even bigger with the P360 Ultra’s successor, the ThinkStation P3 Ultra, which features 13th Gen Intel Core processors.

But CAD users — at least those who only use CAD — are not really the intended audience for Lenovo’s ‘Sapphire Rapids’ workstations. The real beneficiaries will be those that have workflows that either benefit from a) lots of cores, such as ray trace rendering or simulation, b) from high memory bandwidth, such as Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), or c) just use colossal datasets that need lots of memory.

Of course, these are also workflows that are ideal for the AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5000WX Series, the processor at the heart of the Lenovo ThinkStation P620.

While we don’t have benchmark figures for that specific machine, we do have them for another 64-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5995WX-based workstation, the Scan 3XS GWP-ME A1128T workstation.

We found the Scan workstation (64-core Threadripper Pro 5995WX) outperformed the ThinkStation P7

The ThinkStation P7 and PX (pictured) can be rack mounted

For redundancy, The PX can be configured with a second hotswappable PSU

(56-core Xeon w9-3495X) in all of our rendering benchmarks – V-Ray, KeyShot, Blender and Cinebench. Here the additional eight cores and higher all-core frequencies appear to make a big difference. In Cinebench for example, Scan’s Threadripper Pro 5995WX maintained a 3.05 GHz Turbo, while Lenovo’s Xeon w9-3495X peaked at 2.54 GHz. Of course, frequencies cannot be compared directly, as both processors deliver different Instructions Per Clock (IPC).

There was a different story with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), testing the WPCcfd and rodiniaCFD workloads in the SPECworkstation 3.1 benchmark. The ThinkStation P7 had a small lead with WPCcfd and a substantial lead with rodiniaCFD. Here, we think Sapphire Rapids’ superior memory bandwidth gives it an advantage as it is able to feed its cores much quicker. While both AMD and Intel processors feature 8-channel memory, Intel has DDR5 4,800MHz which is much faster.

As one might expect, with 120 cores to play with, the ThinkStation PX had quite a considerable lead in both our rendering and CFD benchmarks.

We explore ‘Sapphire Rapids vs Threadripper Pro’ in more detail in the article on page WS4

GPU workflows

Of course, the ThinkStation P7 and PX offer much more than just ‘Sapphire Rapids’ processors. They can also host multiple highperformance Nvidia pro GPUs, up to the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation (read our review on page WS24)

The main difference between the two machines is that the PX can support four double height GPUs or eight single height GPUs, whereas the ThinkStation P7 can support three double height or six single height.

Our ThinkStation PX came loaded with a single Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation GPU. This is an incredibly powerful GPU for pro viz workflows with 48 GB of memory to handle colossal datasets. We got incredibly smooth graphics in our real-time viz tests with very high frame rates at 4K resolution in Enscape (118 FPS) and in Unreal Engine with the Audi Car Configurator model (64.5 FPS / 39.4 FPS with Ray tracing disabled / enabled).

Not surprisingly, it also delivered incredible scores in our GPU ray tracing benchmarks (KeyShot, V-Ray and, Blender). To provide some context of what this might mean for day-to-day workflows,

in Solidworks Visualize with the 3ds Stellar rendering engine it finished a 4K resolution 1,000 pass render in 81 seconds and a 100-pass render with denoising in a mere 8 seconds. In KeyShot, with denoising enabled, it rendered our bike scene at 8K resolution with 128 samples in 24 secs.

The ThinkStation P7 was configured rather differently, with four Nvidia RTX A4000 GPUs, each with 16 GB of memory. The obvious use case for this setup is virtualisation where the ThinkStation P7 could be carved up into four Virtual Machines (VMs) each with their own dedicated GPU.

The four GPUs could also be put to work in a single workstation, and we found enough collective power there to edge out a single Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation in V-Ray, even though the Nvidia RTX A4000 is built on Nvidia’s older ‘Ampere’ architecture. With the

seems to have added real value.

The big question for many design and engineering firms is whether ‘Sapphire Rapids’ is the right workstation platform for them? Or might they be better off with AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro, available in the Lenovo ThinkStation P620.

Much of this depends on workflows. Our tests show that the ThinkStation P7 with 56-core Intel Xeon w9-3495X wins out in single threaded software, such as CAD, and those that are typically heavily bottlenecked by memory bandwidth such as CFD. But the 64-core Threadripper Pro 5995WX offers significantly better performance for rendering, thanks in part to its additional eight cores.

Meanwhile, the ThinkStation PX with its dual Intel Xeon Platinum 8490H processors sits top of tree in all our highly multi-threaded tests, but at $17,000 per processor it feels the market for this level of performance will be quite limited. Plus, you must take a substantial hit in single threaded workflows.

Of course, ‘Sapphire Rapids’ for Lenovo’s workstations is not just about these top-end processors. For the ThinkStation P7, Lenovo offers a total of seven Intel Xeon W-3400 processors, ranging from 12 to 56 cores, compared to five for the Threadripper Pro 5000 WX-Series, so customers may find sweet spots where Intel wins out on price/performance.

Nvidia RTX 4000 Ada Generation GPU, which should launch later this year, we would expect a considerable performance uplift, probably more memory per GPU, and four GPUs to still cost less than a single Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada.

Of course, in a single workstation setup there are two big downsides to spreading all that GPU power across multiple boards – a) you’ll mostly only be able to harness the power of one of those GPUs for real-time visualisation, and b) the size of datasets will be limited by the memory capacity of a single board.

Conclusion

Lenovo has done an incredible job with its ‘Sapphire Rapids’ workstations. The aesthetic design, functional design and build quality of the ThinkStation P7 and (in particular) the ThinkStation PX, is simply incredible. Partnerships with leading brands often feel very surface level, but the one with Aston Martin

The options for the ThinkStation PX feel more limited, with lower core Intel Xeon Scalable processors competing with higher core count Intel Xeon W-3400 Series processors in the ThinkStation P7. Such configs may become more attractive when customers want to load up the workstation with four double height GPUs and don’t necessarily need tonnes of CPU performance.

Finally, it’s important to state that the ThinkStation P7 and PX are much more than just desktop workstations. By making them easily rack mountable, and offering server grade remote management and serviceability, they also give design and engineering firms the flexibility to support staff wherever they need to work.

Importantly, Lenovo’s ’hybrid cloud workstation’ approach means companies can manage the transition to hybrid working at their own pace, without having to jump in with both feet when investing in a centralised datacentre workstation resource.

Learn more about Intel ‘Sapphire Rapids’ in our in-depth article on page WS4.

ThinkStation P7 interior

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Intel Xeon ‘Sapphire Rapids’ workstation round up

Our top picks of single socket Intel Xeon W-2400 / W-3400 Series and 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable workstations — desktop and rack

HP Z4, Z6, Z8 & Z8 Fury G5

HP has four ‘Sapphire Rapids’ workstations, the most out of all the major vendors. Like Lenovo, it is also looking to blur the boundaries between desktop and datacentre, introducing several features more commonly found in servers, with a view to minimising downtime and enhancing system management. This includes hot swappable M.2 SSDs, redundant PSUs and the HP Anyware Remote System Controller to help IT managers better manage workstation fleets – desktop, rack and hybrid. The HP Z4 G5 features Intel Xeon W-2400 Series (up to 24-cores), and up to two dual slot GPUs. The HP Z6 G5 features the Intel Xeon W-3400 Series from 12 to 36 cores (not including the flagship 56-core model) and three dual slot GPUs. The HP Z8 G5 features ‘Sapphire Rapids’ fourth generation Xeon Scalable processors, but only up to 32 cores, and two dual slot GPUs. The HP Z8 Fury G5 supports the whole range of Intel Xeon W-3400 Series CPUs (up to 56-cores) and up to four dual slot GPUs.

■ www.hp.com/zworkstations

Boxx Apexx W3 / W4 & Raxx W3

Boxx’s ‘Sapphire Rapids’ workstation family is split neatly into three machines: the desktop Xeon W-2400 Apexx W3, the desktop Xeon W-3400 Apexx W4 (which can also be rack mounted), and the dedicated 3U rack, the Raxx W3, which features liquid cooled Xeon W-3400 processors.

The Apexx W3 can host two double slot GPUs, up to the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation, while the Apexx W4 and Raxx W3 can have four.

■ boxx.com

Scan 3XS Render Pro X6

Scan uses its expertise as a custom workstation manufacturer to offer something different to most others. Its Intel Xeon W-3400 Series-based 3XS Render Pro X6 makes the GPU the star of the show. It packs six Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090s into a Corsair 1000D chassis to create a massively powerful desktop workstation for GPU rendering.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 is a triple slot card out of the box, but Scan has stripped it down to single slot with a custom water cooler to keep thermals under control.

Scan also offers a more standard ‘Sapphire Rapids’ workstation. The 3XS Custom GWP 4677 features Intel Xeon W-2400 Series CPUs and dual GPUs up to the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation. ■ www.scan.co.uk/3xs

Dell Precision 5860 Tower , 7960 Tower & 7960 Rack

For its ‘Sapphire Rapids’ desktops, Dell has taken a different approach to HP and Lenovo. It has focused exclusively on Intel’s single socket workstation processors - the Xeon W-2400 (Precision 5860 Tower) and W-3400 (Precision 7960 Tower) - ignoring the server-focused 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable altogether. However, with these two machines, Dell should have most bases covered in design and engineering, especially with the Precision 7960 supporting 4 GPUs on top of its 56-cores. 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable still gets a look-in with the datacentre-focused dual socket Precision 7960 Rack. While on paper this 2U machine offers much greater user density compared to HP and Lenovo’s 4U / 5U offerings, it can only support up to two GPUs (whereas the Lenovo ThinkStation PX can support up to four), so those with more demanding GPU-centric workflows may lose out or have to use two machines instead of one, which will likely add to costs.

■ www.dell.com/precision

Workstation Specialists WS IXW-W7900 & WS IXW-W7901

UK firm Workstation Specialists offers two ‘Sapphire Rapids’ desktop workstations which differ largely by the number of GPUs they can support. The WS IXW-W7901 offers up to four double slot cards up to the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation, while the WS IXW-W7900 offers three.

Interestingly, on paper the WS IXW-W7901 should be able to do this with both Intel Xeon W-2400 and W-3400 Series processor options. This is in contrast to most workstation manufacturers who only offer four double slot GPUs with the more expensive Intel Xeon W-3400 Series processors.

So if your workflows are CPU light and GPU heavy, then configuring the WS IXW-W7901 with the entry-level Intel Xeon w3-2423, for example, could give you the power you need for GPU rendering without spending money on a high core count, high memory bandwidth CPU you don’t need. ■ www.workstationspecialist.com

With an Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation professional GPU and 64-core Threadripper Pro CPU, this monster desktop workstation packs a serious punch for the most demanding design viz workflows

For its latest high-performance workstation, Scan has combined two of the most powerful workstation-class processors out there — the 64-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5995WX CPU and the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation GPU.

Coupled with 256 GB of DDR4 memory and an ultra-fast 8TB SSD RAID 0 array, this machine will likely be the envy of most design viz artists.

Given that the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation is fresh off the production line (read our review on page WS24), it is arguably the silicon star of this workstation. With 48 GB of GDDR6 memory, the ultra-high-end GPU is well equipped to handle the most demanding viz datasets, both in real time 3D and ray tracing / path tracing.

It absolutely obliterated many of the benchmark records set by its predecessor, the Nvidia RTX A6000 (48 GB) (read our

review www.tinyurl.com/D3DRTXA6000). The biggest gains were seen in GPU ray tracing where the third generation RT cores really come into their own, outperforming the Ampere Generation GPU by a factor of 1.93, 2.05, and 2.19 respectively in the V-Ray, KeyShot, and blender benchmarks. This is a phenomenal generation on generation increase.

It’s no slouch in real time 3D either. In Unreal Engine 4.26 we saw frame rates with our Audi Car Configurator model increase by 1.50 and 1.41 times respectively with ray tracing enabled and disabled. The performance increase rose to 1.63 in arch viz tool Enscape 3.1, and also 1.63 in high-end automotive viz software Autodesk VRED Professional 2023.

Product spec

an automatic improvement in 3D frame rates either, as most real time viz tools are not multiGPU aware.

With so much processing power available through the GPU, it’s easy to forget there’s also a monster Threadripper Pro 5995WX CPU at your disposal. Rendering is an obvious beneficiary of the 64-core CPU but that’s also a job that the RTX 6000 Ada Generation does exceptional well.

To boost performance further, the Scan 3XS GWP-ME A1128T can take a second RTX 6000 Ada Generation GPU, but at £7,149 (Ex VAT) per card, you’ll need seriously deep pockets. This should cut ray trace render times significantly (by up to half), but you won’t get a 96 GB pool of memory to play with like you would with two Nvidia RTX A6000s. Nvidia has dropped support for NVlink. Don’t expect

Viz users often have well defined rendering pipelines that focus on either CPU or GPU and not necessarily both. That’s not always the case, of course. While V-Ray has entirely different render engines for GPU and CPU and users tend to stick to one, Solidworks Visualize can use both concurrently, and KeyShot allows you to easily swap between GPU and CPU as and when required. This could be to help free up compute resources in order to focus on other workflows, such as real time 3D, video editing or video encoding. Unreal Engine also has different compute-intensive processes that run on CPU and GPU.

CPU rendering also has the benefit of being able to work with incredibly

large datasets and with 256 GB of system memory (8 x 32 GB Samsung ECC Registered DDR4 3200MHz) the Scan workstation is certainly well equipped.

With a default TDP of 280W, the Threadripper Pro 5995WX is one of the more challenging CPUs to cool. Scan uses a 360mm Corsair H150i Elite Cappelix RGB hydrocooler mounted in the Fractal Design Meshify 2 case and has replaced the fans with more efficient Noctua models.

This gives enough thermal headroom to increase all core frequencies above the base 2.70 GHz, peaking at 3.05 GHz in both Cinebench and KeyShot 2023.

It’s not the best Threadripper Pro implementation we’ve seen. The Armari Magnetar M64TPRW1300G3 (read our review in DEVELOP3D’s December / January 2023 Workstation Special Report), with its custom All-in-One (AIO) cooler, manages to hit 3.38 GHz in Cinebench and 3.45 GHz in KeyShot, outperforming the Scan machine by a factor of 1.05 in Cinebench and KeyShot and even more in V-Ray (1.1).

Both processors pump out some serious heat and that’s hardly surprising considering how much power they draw. When rendering in Cinebench (CPU) we recorded 474W at the socket, 550W with V-Ray GPU, and a whopping 740W when using both processors in Solidworks Visualize. The machine was fairly noisy when CPU rendering, less so when GPU rendering.

The chassis is Scan’s trademark Fractal

Design Meshify 2 with 3XS custom front panel. It’s a little on the large side (542 x 240 x 474 mm), but is solid and well-built and has a ready supply of ports. Up front and top, there are two USB 3.2 Type A and one USB 3.2 Type C, with plenty more at the rear (eight USB Type-A and two USB 3.2 Type C). For networking there two superfast 10GbE NICs and WiFi 6 built in.

The Scan 3XS GWP-ME A1128T has some other tricks up its sleeve. While the 2TB Samsung 990 Pro SSD system drive is standard fare for workstations these days, the project drive certainly is not.

The ultra-fast 8TB RAID 0 array is built using four 2TB Samsung 990 Pro NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSDs mounted on an ASUS Hyper M.2 PCIe add-in card, and delivers phenomenal sequential read / write speeds. In CrystalDiskMark we recorded 24.6 GB/s read and 24.8 GB/s write, compared to 7.4 GB/s and 6.8 GB/s on a single 2TB Samsung 990 Pro.

This all sounds great on paper, but the reality is there are only certain workflows that will benefit from such fast storage and only in certain conditions. This includes engineering simulation (with gigantic datasets that don’t fit entirely into system memory), or video editing (with colossal, super high-resolution files). There may be more, and we’d love to learn what they are.

We did see a small benefit over a single SSD when copying files. A zipped file containing 90 GB of point cloud scan data delivered the biggest speed up, with

Scan Cloud workstations

Scan is best known for its desktop machines, but the Bolton-based firm also has a dedicated cloud workstation division that offers systems with Nvidia virtual GPUs (vGPUs) hosted in iomart datacentres in the UK.

Customers have a choice of pre-configured vGPU instances, available to rent on a monthly subscription. Alternatively, customers can go down to a granular level, selecting different vCPU, RAM, vGPU and storage options through an online configurator — in much the same way one would spec out a desktop workstation.

Customers get real time

feedback on the monthly rental price, then add to the basket when happy. While this shopping basket approach is a great way to understand the costs of components most new customers will likely call Scan’s Cloud workstation division for advice. Here they can help size vGPU instances based on the applications used and types of models created. Building a relationship in this way can also get you a free ‘Proof of Concept’ trial.

Each vGPU instance comes pre-loaded with Windows 10. However, the OS is unlicensed

the RAID 0 array finishing 35% faster. The same uncompressed dataset (7,414 scans) was 25% faster, a 3ds max dataset (60 large scene files and 4,400 smaller materials, totalling 4.6 GB) was 24% faster and a Revit dataset (68 files, totalling 4.6 GB) was 11% faster.

Of course, the downside of RAID 0 is it introduces multiple points of failure, so should one drive fail all data is lost. It makes regular backups more important than ever.

The verdict

The Scan 3XS GWP-ME A1128T is a serious workstation for design viz professionals, with buckets of processing power for all different workflows, from real-time to ray trace rendering, video editing and beyond. But it also comes with a serious price tag.

If £16,666 (Ex VAT) seems a lot more than you’re used to paying for a machine of this type, that’s because it probably is. The price of a Threadripper Pro CPU has increased significantly, and the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation costs considerably more than its predecessor did at launch.

But that’s the current reality of super high-end workstation hardware. Both AMD (CPU) and Nvidia (GPU) have had little in the way of competition in recent times. But with Intel’s long-awaited ‘Sapphire Rapids’ Xeon W-3400 Series CPUs (see page WS4) and AMD’s Radeon Pro W7800 and W7900 GPUs (see page WS28) out now this could change.

— the idea being that customers can save money by using their own Windows 10 corporate licences. Ubuntu is also available.

Scan also points out that

there is no charge for uploading or downloading data, which is not the case with hyperscale public cloud providers.

■ www.scan.co.uk/business/scan-cloud

Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation

One can’t deny the breathtaking performance of Nvidia’s new flagship workstation GPU and its potential to completely transform viz workflows, but some will find the price offputting

Price £7,150 + VAT

www.nvidia.com | www.pny.com

New GPU architectures are delivered from the top down. And the new Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation is very much at the top of the stack. With a price tag of £7,150 (Ex VAT), this 48 GB professional GPU is reserved for those that take design visualisation, simulation or AI extremely seriously.

The first thing to get out of the way is the name of this new workstation-class GPU. It is built on Nvidia’s Ada Lovelace architecture, named after the English Mathematician credited with being the first computer programmer.

Recently, Nvidia has used a single letter prefix for its pro GPUs — P for Pascal, T for Turing, A for Ampere, and so on.

As ‘A’ was already taken, Nvidia initially referred to the Ada Lovelace GPU as the Nvidia RTX 6000, but soon after tagged ‘Ada Generation’ on to the end, presumably to avoid confusion with 2018’s Turing-based Nvidia Quadro RTX 6000.

We don’t know why Nvidia didn’t use an ‘L’ prefix as it has done for its ‘Ada Lovelace’ datacentre GPUs (the Nvidia L4 and L40), but this is where we are

at now. The Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation might be a bit of a mouthful, but at least it has a clear identity.

The workstation card

The Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation is a dual slot, full height, PCIe 4.0 workstation GPU with four DisplayPort 1.4a connectors. It looks virtually identical to its predecessor, the Nvidia RTX A6000, and has a minimal angular black and gold design. The radial type fan blows hot air directly out of the rear of the workstation via the grille on the bracket.

The total board power is 300W, which is less than its triple slot ‘Ada Lovelace’ consumer counterparts — the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 and GeForce RTX 4080. Power is delivered via a single PCIe CEM5 16-pin connector.

The card has a phenomenal amount of processors: 142 third-gen RT Cores for ray tracing (delivering 211 TFLOPs), 568 fourth-gen Tensor Cores for AI compute (delivering 1,457 TFLOPs), and 18,176 next-gen CUDA cores for general purpose operations, boasting 91 TFLOPs of single precision performance. This is a significant jump up from the Nvidia RTX A6000 it replaces, which delivers RT Core performance of 76 TFLOPs, Tensor performance of 310 TFLOPs, and singleprecision performance of 39 TFLOPS.

The Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada comes with 48 GB of GDDR6 memory, which should be plenty for most viz-centric workflows. However, unlike its predecessor, the RTX 6000 Ada Generation does not support NVLink, so two GPUs cannot be bridged together with an adapter to create a 96 GB memory pool. While this shouldn’t matter to most users, it could be a barrier for those working with exceptionally high poly count models / high resolution textures.

It could also limit its use in engineering simulation, including Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD).

48 GB is still double that on offer in the top-end consumer Nvidia GeForce RTX 40-Series. The RTX 6000 Ada also differentiates itself from Nvidia’s consumer cards in several other ways, including pro drivers, pro software certifications, support for Error Correction code (ECC) memory, and some niche features for pro viz, including stereo and Frame Lock for viz clusters.

It also supports Nvidia virtual GPU (vGPU) software, which allows a workstation to be repurposed into multiple GPU-accelerated virtual workstation instances. With workstation vendors, especially Lenovo and HP, actively making their new ‘Sapphire Rapids’ desktop workstations rack friendly, this feature is likely to be more important than ever before.

Finally, it boasts 3x the video encoding performance of the Nvidia RTX A6000, for streaming multiple simultaneous XR sessions using Nvidia CloudXR.

Optimised for visualisation

The Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada offers all the generational improvements you’d expect from a new GPU architecture, but there are also significant changes in the way the GPU carries out calculations to increase performance in viz-centric workflows.

Deep Learning Super Sampling 3 (DLSS) and Shader Execution Reordering (SER) are the two technologies that stand out.

Nvidia DLSS has been around for several years and with the new Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada, it is now on its third generation. It uses the GPU’s AI Tensor cores to boost performance.

With Nvidia’s previous generation

‘‘

The Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation is a phenomenally powerful GPU. In several visualisation workflows, it delivered more than double the performance of the previous generation Nvidia RTX A6000 ’’

Autodesk VRED Professional 2022 (OpenGL)

model (No Anti Aliasing)

VRED Professional 2022 (OpenGL)

model (Anti Aliasing - Ultra-high)

‘Ampere’ GPUs, DLSS 2 took a lowresolution current frame and the highresolution previous frame to predict, on a pixel-by-pixel basis, what a highresolution current frame would look like.

With DLSS 3, the Tensor cores generate entirely new frames rather than just pixels. It processes the new frame, and the prior frame, to discover how the scene is changing, then generates entirely new frames without having to process the graphics pipeline.

So far, we’ve only seen DLSS 3 implemented in Nvidia Omniverse, but we expect others to follow. Enscape and Autodesk VRED, for example, both support DLSS 2.

As a background to Shader Execution Reordering (SER), Nvidia explains that GPUs are most efficient when processing similar work at the same time. However, with ray tracing, rays bounce in different directions and intersect surfaces of various types. This can lead to different threads processing different shaders or accessing

memory that is hard to coalesce or cache. With SER, the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation can dynamically reorganise its workload, so similar shaders are processed together. According to Nvidia, SER can give a two to three times speed up for ray tracing and a frame rate increase of up to 25%. But these are probably extremes. For offline path tracing in Unreal Engine 5.1, for example, Nvidia quotes speed improvements of 40% or more.

Engineering simulation

In product development, while visualisation is the primary use case for the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada, the GPU can also be used for engineering simulation.

At launch, Nvidia highlighted the use of Ansys software, including Ansys Discovery and Ansys Fluent for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD).

Compared to the RTX A6000, the RTX 6000 Ada not only has more cores and faster cores, but significantly larger L2 cache (96 MB vs 6 MB) and increased

memory bandwidth (960 GB/s vs 768 GB/s). According to Ansys, this results in ‘impressive performance gains’ for the broad Ansys application portfolio.

However, the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada is not suited to all simulation tools. Some simulation solvers require double precision and with relatively poor FP64 performance (which at 1,423 GFLOPSs is 1/64 of its FP32 performance), the RTX 6000 Ada is unlikely to perform that well in those that do. In fact, for double precision solvers, even 2016’s Nvidia Quadro GP100 boasts better FP64 performance of 5.17 TFLOPs.

Testing the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada DEVELOP3D put the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation through a series of real-world application benchmarks, both GPU rendering and real time visualisation.

The GPU is simply overkill for current generation CAD and BIM software, so we didn’t do any testing in that regard. However, it’s important to note that it will

Engine 4.26 (DirectX 12 - rasterisation)

Unreal Engine 4.26 (DirectX 12 - DXR) Audi car configurator model (ray tracing enabled)

Create 2022.3.3

Nvidia Omniverse Create 2022.3.3 Brownstone building - RTX - Real-Time mode with DLSS enabled

The Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation features an elegant dual slot design

still be certified for the likes of Solidworks and Solid Edge, which is useful if you plan to use those types of core applications alongside viz focused tools like KeyShot, V-Ray, and Unreal Engine.

The full spec of our AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro test machine, the Scan 3XS GWP-ME A1128T can be seen below. You can read a full review on page WS22

Scan 3XS GWP-ME A1128T

• AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5995WX processor (2.7 GHz, 4.5 GHz boost) (64-cores, 128 threads)

• 256 GB (8 x 32GB) Samsung ECC

Registered DDR4 3200MHz memory

• 2TB Samsung 990 Pro PCIe 4.0 SSD

• 8TB RAID array (4 x 2TB Samsung 990 Pro NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSDs)

• Asus Pro WS WRX80E Sage SE WiFi motherboard

• Corsair H150i Elite Cappelix RGB with Noctua fans

• 1,500W Corsair HXi, 80PLUS Platinum

• Microsoft Windows 11 Pro

For comparison, we also tested the Nvidia RTX A6000 GPU inside the same machine. Nvidia’s 528.24 pro driver was used for both GPUs.

Real time 3D

Real time 3D visualisation with applications that use OpenGL, DirectX or Vulkan graphics APIs continue to be a very important part of design visualisation. Key applications include Unreal Engine, Autodesk VRED, and the architerctural focused TwinMotion and Enscape. We recorded frame rates (Frame Per Second) within Enscape, Unreal Engine, Nvidia Omniverse, and Autodesk VRED Professional, a pro viz application

commonly used in automotive design.

We only tested at 4K (3,840 x 2,160) resolution. At FHD (1,920 x 1,080) , it’s a given that the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation can deliver more than enough performance.

In Enscape, we tested with five different models. Overall, our experience was incredibly smooth, even with the large RTX-enabled Enscape 3.0 building complex which uses 11 GB of GPU memory.

However, our preferred benchmark model, an urban scene from Enscape 3.1, was a little unresponsive, sometimes taking a few seconds to react to mouse or keyboard movements. We don’t know why this was, but it could be because it includes custom assets and textures and there is a conflict of some sort. Once it got going, however, we recorded a phenomenal 124.95 FPS, 63% faster than the Nvidia RTX A6000.

In Unreal Engine 4.26, the generationon-generation gains were smaller. The biggest increase came when ray tracing was enabled on our Audi test model, with the RTX 6000 Ada Generation delivering 1.5 times more FPS than the RTX A6000.

In Autodesk VRED Professional 2023, performance increases ranged from 1.63 to 1.89. The biggest came when antialiasing was disabled.

In Nvidia Omniverse Create 2022.3.3, we tested with the Brownstone building sample model. In RTX - Real-Time mode with DLSS enabled the RTX 6000 Ada was a whopping 3.62 times faster than the RTX A6000. However, there’s a case of comparing apples with pears here as the RTX 6000 Ada uses DLSS 3 while the RTX A6000 use DLSS 2 (see earlier on). In saying that, we saw no visual difference between the two. In RTX – interactive

(path tracing) mode the RTX 6000 Ada was 2.16 times faster.

Ray trace rendering

We tested with a range of GPUaccelerated ray-trace renderers, including V-Ray GPU, KeyShot, Solidworks Visualize, Nvidia Omniverse and blender.

With the V-Ray, KeyShot and blender benchmarks, the RTX 6000 Ada Generation shot ahead, outperforming the RTX A6000 by a factor of 1.93, 2.05 and 2.17 respectively. We saw similar gains in Nvidia Omniverse, with the RTX 6000 Ada taking less than half the time of the RTX A6000 to render the brownstone building scene.

However, in some of our real-world application tests, the gains were nowhere near as large. In Solidworks Visualize 2023, rendering the 1969 Camaro test scene with Nvidia Iray and the new 3DS Stellar Physically Correct global illumination engine, showed the RTX 6000 Ada to be between 32% and 40% faster than the RTX A6000.

In KeyShot 2023 the RTX 6000 Ada Generation rendered our motorbike model between 33% and 41% quicker in a range of stills and turntable animations. With KeyShot ‘s sample drone scene it went down to 23%-25%.

Conclusion

The Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation is a phenomenally powerful GPU. In several visualisation workflows, it delivered more than double the performance of the previous generation Nvidia RTX A6000. And when Nvidia has full control over both software and hardware, and the GPU’s fourthgen Tensor cores kick in with DLSS 3, the boost in real-time performance

Nvidia RTX 4000 SFF Ada Generation

Nvidia is having a staggered roll out of its Nvidia RTX Ada Lovelace GPUs for desktop workstations. Following on from the ultra-high-end Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation, which launched at the tail end of 2022, Nvidia has now released a second desktop GPU designed specifically for compact workstations with form factors like those of the HP Z2 SFF, HP Z2 Mini, Lenovo ThinkStation P3 Ultra, Dell Precision 3460 SFF and Dell Precision 3260 Compact. The GPU will likely be of interest to users of CAD or BIM software who want to extend their workflows into visualisation, VR and simulation with tools like KeyShot, Twinmotion, Lumion, V-Ray, Omniverse and more.

The Nvidia RTX 4000 SFF Ada Generation features 20 GB of graphics memory, nearly double that of its predecessor, the Nvidia RTX A2000

(12 GB), and is said to offer a 2x performance improvement. It also offers greater memory bandwidth, so it can transfer data to and from its memory more quickly. According to Nvidia, this results in improved graphics, compute and rendering performance.

The Nvidia RTX 4000 SFF is a low-profile, double height graphics card, which takes up two slots on the motherboard. It has four mini DisplayPort1.4a connectors.

The GPU is designed to operate with PCIe slot power alone and has a max power consumption of 70W. This is significantly lower than previous ‘4000’ class GPUs, which

(with seemingly no impact on end user experience) is simply breathtaking.

But these are the extremes of what you can expect from this super high-end workstation GPU. In some of our real world tests the performance increases were as low as 23%. But even this can save hours in the working day. When rendering out a 600 frame 4K animation in KeyShot for example, render times dropped from 6 hours 26 mins to 4 hours 50 mins.

There are some downsides to the new GPU. First, there is no NVLink, which may come as a disappointment to those really pushing the boundaries of complexity. Second it is quite power hungry, drawing 300W at peak. And finally, of course, there’s the price.

typically draw up to 140W. However, Nvidia confirmed that, in the future, it will also launch a standard Nvidia RTX 4000 GPU

include 6,144 CUDA parallel processing cores, 192 Nvidia Tensor Cores and 48 Nvidia RT Cores. Nvidia quotes 19.2 TFLOPs single precision performance, 44.3 TFLOPs RT Core performance, and 306.8 TFLOPS Tensor core performance. This is significantly more than the Nvidia RTX A2000 (8.0 TFLOPs, 15.6 TFLOPS and 63.9 TFLOPS respectively). And while single precision performance and RT core performance is very close to the 140W Nvidia RTX A4000, Tensor performance for AI operations has doubled.

both GPUs will be share the same silicon, but the Nvidia RTX 4000 SFF will be clocked lower.

Nvidia RTX 4000 SFF specs

£7,150 (Ex VAT) is an incredible amount to pay for a single graphics card and considerably more than Nvidia previously charged for its top end workstation GPUs. The Nvidia RTX A6000, for example, only cost £3,730 (Ex VAT) in February 2021.

While some will consider £7,150 to be a price worth paying for the transformative effect it could have on their workflows, others may seek better value elsewhere.

The new AMD Radeon Pro W7900 (48 GB) is one such option (see page 28), although it does not currently offer the same breadth of software support.

More than ever, perhaps Nvidia is facing its biggest competition from itself. The consumer-focused ‘Ada Generation’ GeForce RTX 4090 comes in around

The Nvidia RTX 4000 SFF GPU costs around $1,250, and will be available from workstation manufacturers later this year.

£1,500, but you miss out on some pro features, superior build quality and access to 48 GB of memory, double that of the 4090. And for some viz artists that’s a big deal. 48 GB allows you to work with more complex datasets and render them at higher resolutions. In simulation, engineers can increase the fidelity of the solver for more accurate results.

The additional memory will not just offer potential benefits for single app workflows. These days many viz artists to use multiple apps at the same time - render in V-Ray while working on real-time experiences in Unreal Engine, for example. And the RTX 6000 Ada Generation is much more likely to allow them to do this without having to compromise their workflow or output.

‘‘

When Nvidia has full control over both software and hardware, and the Tensor cores kick in with DLSS 3, the boost in real-time performance (with seemingly no impact on end user experience) is simply breathtaking ’’

Preview: AMD Radeon Pro W7800 / W7900

AMD’s new RDNA 3 pro graphics cards target price / performance to take the fight to Nvidia and its RTX 6000 Ada Generation, writes

Greg Corke

Price $2,499 (W7800) / $3,999 (W7900) www.amd.com/radeonpro

It’s been a while coming, but AMD has finally delivered its new professional graphics cards, built on the same RDNA 3 architecture of its consumer Radeon RX 7900 Series, which launched in December 2022. We say ‘delivered’ but AMD is not quite there yet. Our review cards missed the deadline for this Workstation Special Report by a matter of days.

The new boards — the Radeon Pro W7900 and Radeon Pro W7800 — target workflows including visualisation, real-time 3D, ray trace rendering, photogrammetry, VR, simulation, video editing, compositing and more. But with pro driver optimisations and certifications they can also be used for CAD and BIM.

The AMD Radeon Pro W7900 is a triple (2.5) slot GPU with 48 GB of GDDR6 memory, 61 TFLOPs of peak single precision performance and a total board power of 295W. It costs $3,999.

The AMD Radeon Pro W7800 is a dual slot GPU with 32 GB of GDDR6 memory, 45 TFLOPs of peak single precision performance and a total board power of 260W. It costs $2,499.

Both GPUs comprise multiple unified RDNA 3 compute units, each with 64 dual issue stream processors, two AI accelerators and a second gen ray tracing (RT) accelerator. According to AMD, RDNA 3 offers up to 50% more raytracing performance per compute unit than the previous generation.

Optimised ray tracing

For ray tracing, the new GPUs are compatible with Unreal Engine, Unity,

Lumion, Enscape, Solidworks Visualise, D5 Render, Maxon Redshift, plus other applications that support DirectX Raytracing (DXR), Vulkan ray tracing, or AMD Radeon ProRender, including Acca Edificius, Autodesk Inventor, Rhino, Autodesk Maya, and Blender (Cycles X).

This list should grow. AMD is also working with other software developers to help convert their existing Nvidia CUDA applications to run on the new GPUs and other AMD hardware. This is being done through AMD’s open-source toolset HIP (Heterogeneous-Compute Interface for Portability), which includes a ray tracing library, HIP RT, so developers can take advantage of the dedicated ray accelerators in AMD’s GPUs.

The new GPUs will go up against the 48 GB Nvidia RTX performance.

In SPECviewperf 2020 GeoMean, for example, AMD claims the Radeon Pro W7900 is within 7% of the performance of the Nvidia RTX A6000 Ada Generation but offers more than double the price/performance, as it costs less than half as much ($3,999 vs $8,615).

AMD also highlights support for DisplayPort 2.1,

the latest version of the digital display standard which offers three times the data rate of DisplayPort 1.4. According to AMD, this means its new GPUs are future proofed for next gen displays in terms of refresh rate, pixel resolution and colour bit-depth, while pointing out that the Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation supports DisplayPort 1.4.

Both the AMD Radeon Pro W7800 and W7900 feature three DisplayPort 2.1 and one Mini DisplayPort 2.1 connectors, a change from the previous generation Radeon Pro W6800 with six Mini DisplayPort 1.4.

Memory boost

With 48 GB, the Radeon Pro W7900 also marks a step up in terms of memory, with 50% more than its predecessor, the Radeon Pro W6800, putting it on par with the Nvidia RTX 6000

Memory is becoming increasingly important for viz workflows, not just to support extremely complex high-polygon datasets, but for multi-tasking as well, as product designer, Dr. Adi Pandzic, Ph.D, explains, “Large format renders require more horsepower, especially when doing 4K raytraced animations using [Solidworks] Visualize. The Radeon Pro W7900 allows me to easily keep working on the model [in Solidworks CAD] while rendering in

Rich Hurrey, president, founder, Kitestring, shares similar experiences, “The increased memory that the new AMD RDNA 3 GPUs offer, allows us to have multiple instances of Maya, Modo, and Unreal Engine open at the same time. All of this means that production work gets

Memory also differentiates the new GPUs from AMD’s consumer focused RDNA 3 GPU, the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX which has 24 GB. Both pro GPUs also come with AMD Software: Pro Edition. This offers pro software certifications for ‘performance and stability’, and pro features such as ViewPort Boost, which dynamically adjusts viewport resolution to boost performance, remote workstation support and more.

Look out for a review soon.

AMD Radeon Pro W7800

Cloud workstations for CAD, BIM and visualisation How the major public cloud providers stack up

Using Frame, the Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution, we test 23 GPU-accelerated ‘instances’ from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure, in terms of raw performance and end user experience

If you’ve ever looked at public cloud workstations and been confused, you’re not alone. Between Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure, there are hundreds of different instance types to choose from. They also have obscure names like g4dn.xlarge or NC16asT4v3, which look like you need a code to decipher.

Things get even more confusing when you dial down into the specs. Whereas desktop workstations for sale tend to feature the latest and greatest, cloud workstations offer a variety of modern and legacy CPU and GPU architectures that span several years. Some of the GCP instances, for example, offer Intel ‘Skylake’ CPUs that date back to 2016!

Gaining a better understanding of cloud workstations through their specs is only the first hurdle. The big question for design, engineering, and architecture firms is how each virtual machine (VM) performs with CAD, Building Information Modelling (BIM), or design visualisation

software. There is very little information in the public domain, and certainly none that compares performance and price of multiple VMs from multiple providers using real world applications and datasets, and also captures the end user experience.

So, with the help of Ruben Spruijt from Frame, the hybrid and multi-cloud Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution, and independent IT consultant, Dr. Bernhard

The ‘system performance’ is what one might expect if your monitor, keyboard, and mouse were plugged directly into the cloud workstation. It tests the workstation as a unit – and the contribution of CPU, GPU and memory to performance.

For this we use many of the same real world application benchmarks we use to test desktop and mobile workstations in the magazine. For BIM (Autodesk Revit), for CAD (Autodesk Inventor), for real-time visualisation (Autodesk VRED Professional, Unreal Engine and Enscape), and CPU and GPU rendering (KeyShot and V-Ray).

Tritsch, getting answers to these questions is exactly what we set out to achieve in this in-depth DEVELOP3D article.

There are two main aspects to testing cloud workstation VMs.

1. The workstation system performance.

2. The real end user experience.

But with cloud workstations ‘system performance’ is only one part of the story. The DaaS remote display protocol and its streaming capabilities at different resolutions, network conditions – or what happens between the cloud workstation in the datacentre and the client device – also play a critical role in the end user experience. This includes latency, which is largely governed by the distance between the public cloud

While benchmarking helps us understand the relative performance of different VMs, it doesn’t consider what happens between the datacentre and the end user

datacentre and the end user, bandwidth, utilisation, packet loss, and jitter.

For end user experience testing we used EUC Score (www.eucscore.com), a dedicated tool developed by Dr. Bernhard Tritsch that captures, measures, and quantifies perceived end-user experience in virtual applications and desktop environments, including Frame. More on this later.

The cloud workstations

We tested a total of 23 different public cloud workstation instances from AWS, GCP, and Microsoft Azure.

Workstation testing with real-world applications is very time intensive, so we hand-picked VMs that cover most bases in terms of CPU, memory, and GPU resources.

VMs from Microsoft Azure feature Microsoft Windows 10 22H2, while AWS and GCP use Microsoft Windows Server 2019. Both operating systems support most 3D applications, although Windows 10 has slightly better compatibility.

For consistency, all instances were orchestrated and accessed through the Frame DaaS platform using Frame Remoting Protocol 8 (FRP8) to connect the

end user’s browser to VMs in any of the three public clouds.

The testing was conducted at 30 Frames Per Second (FPS) in both FHD (1,920 x 1,080) and 4K (3,840 x 2,160) resolutions. Networking scenarios tested included high bandwidth (100 Mbps) with low latency (~10ms Round Trip Time (RTT)) and low bandwidth (ranging between 4, 8, and 16 Mbps) and higher latency (50-100ms RTT) using networkcontrolled emulation.

CPU (Central Processing Unit)

Most of the VMs feature AMD EPYC CPUs as these tend to offer better performance per core and more cores than Intel Xeon CPUs, so the public cloud providers can get more users on each of their servers to help bring down costs.

Different generations of EPYC processors are available. 3rd Gen AMD EPYC ‘Milan’ processors, for example, not only run at higher frequencies than 2nd Gen AMD EPYC ‘Rome’ processors but deliver more instructions per clock (IPC).

N.B. IPC is a measure of the number of instructions a CPU can execute in a single clock cycle while the clock speed of a

CPU (frequency, measured in GHz) is the number of clock cycles it can complete in one second. At time of testing, none of the cloud providers offered the new 4th Gen AMD EPYC ‘Genoa’ or ‘Sapphire Rapids’ Intel Xeon processors.

Here it is important to explain a little bit about how CPUs are virtualised in cloud workstations. A vCPU is a virtual CPU created and assigned to a VM and is different to a physical core or thread. A vCPU is an abstracted CPU core delivered by the virtualisation layer of the hypervisor on the cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) platform. It means physical CPU resources can be overcommitted, which allows the cloud workstation provider to assign more vCPUs than there are physical cores or threads. As a result, if everyone sharing resources from the same CPU decided to invoke a highly multi-threaded process such as ray trace rendering all at the same time, they might not get the maximum theoretical performance out of their VM.

It should also be noted that a processor can go into ‘turbo boost’ mode, which allows it to run above its base clock speed to increase performance, typically when

thermal conditions allow. However, with cloud workstations, this information isn’t exposed, so the end user does not know when or if this is happening.

One should not directly compare the number of vCPUs assigned to a VM to the number of physical cores in a desktop workstation. For example, an eight-core processor in a desktop workstation not only comprises eight physical cores and eight virtual (hyper-threaded) cores for a total of 16 threads, but the user of that desktop workstation has dedicated access to that entire CPU and all its resources.

GPU (Graphics Processing Unit)

In terms of graphics, most of the public cloud instance types offer Nvidia GPUs. There are three Nvidia GPU architectures represented in this article - the oldest of which is ‘Maxwell’ (Nvidia M60), which dates back to 2015, followed by ‘Turing’ (Nvidia T4), and ‘Ampere’ (Nvidia A10). Only the Nvidia T4 and Nvidia A10 have hardware ray tracing built in, which makes them fully compatible with visualisation tools that support this physics-based rendering technique, such as KeyShot, V-Ray, Enscape, and Unreal Engine.

At time of testing, none of the major public cloud providers offered Nvidia GPUs based on the new ‘Ada Lovelace’ architecture. However, GCP has since announced new ‘G2’ VMs with the ‘Ada Lovelace’ Nvidia L4 Tensor Core GPU.

Most VMs offer dedicated access to one or more GPUs, although Microsoft Azure has some VMs where the Nvidia A10 is virtualised, and users get a slice of the larger physical GPU, both in terms of processing and frame buffer memory.

AMD GPUs are also represented. Microsoft Azure has some instances where users get a slice of an AMD Radeon Instinct MI25 GPU. AWS offers dedicated access to the newer AMD Radeon Pro V520. Both AMD GPUs are relatively lowpowered and do not have hardware ray tracing built in, so should only really be considered for CAD and BIM workflows.

Storage

Storage performance can vary greatly between VMs and cloud providers. In general, CAD/BIM isn’t that sensitive to read/write performance, and neither are our benchmarks, although data and back-end services in general need to be close to the VM for best application performance.

In Azure the standard SSDs are significantly slower than the premium SSDs, so could have an impact in workflows that are I/O intensive, such as simulation (CFD), point cloud processing or video editing. GCP offers particularly fast storage with the Zonal SSD PD, which, according to Frame, is up-to three times faster than the Azure Premium SSD solution. Frame also explains that AWS with Elastic Block Storage (EBS) has ‘very solid performance’ and a good performance/price ratio using EBS GP3.

Cloud workstation regions

All three cloud providers have many regions (datacentres) around the world and most instance types are available in most regions. However, some of the newest instance types for example, such as those from Microsoft Azure with new AMD EPYC ‘Milan’ CPUs, currently have limited regional availability.

For testing, we chose regions in Europe. While the location of the region should have little bearing on our cloud workstation ‘system performance’ testing, which was largely carried out by DEVELOP3D on instances in the UK (AWS) and The Netherlands (Azure/ GCP), it could have a small impact on end user experience testing, which was all done by Ruben Spruijt from Frame from a single location in The Netherlands.

In general, one should always try to run virtual desktops and applications in a datacentre that is closest to the end user, resulting in low network latency and packet loss. However, firms also need to consider data management. For CAD and BIM-centric workflows in

particular, it is important that all data is stored in the same datacentre as the cloud workstations, or deltas are synced between a few select datacentres using global file system technologies from companies like Panzura or Nasuni.

Pricing

For our testing and analysis purposes, we used ‘on-demand’ hourly pricing for the selected VMs, averaging list prices across all regions.

A Windows Client/Server OS licence is included in the rate, but storage costs are not. It should be noted that prices in the table below are just a guideline. Some companies may get preferential pricing from a single vendor or large discounts through multi-year contracts.

Performance testing

Our testing revolved around three key workflows commonly used by architects and designers: CAD / BIM, real-time visualisation, and ray trace rendering.

CAD/BIM

While the users and workflows for CAD and Building Information Modelling (BIM) are different, both types of software behave in similar ways. Most CAD and BIM applications are largely single threaded, so processor frequency and IPC should be prioritised over the number of cores (although some select operations are multi-threaded, such as rendering and simulation). All tests were carried out at FHD and 4K resolution.

Autodesk Revit 2021: Revit is the number one ‘BIM authoring tool’ used by architects. For testing, we used the RFO v3 2021 benchmark, which measures three largely single-threaded CPU processes –update (updating a model from a previous version), model creation (simulating modelling workflows), export (exporting raster and vector files), plus render (CPU rendering), which is extremely multithreaded. There’s also a graphics test.

What is Frame? The Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution

WebRTC/H.264, which is well-suited to handling graphics-intensive workloads such as 3D CAD.

Frame is a browser-first, hybrid and multi-cloud, Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution.

Frame utilises its own proprietary remoting protocol, based on

With Frame, firms can deliver their Windows ‘office productivity’, videoconferencing, and high-performance 3D graphics applications to users on any device with just a web browser –no client or plug-in required.

The Frame protocol delivers audio and video streams from the VM, and

keyboard / mouse events from the end user’s device. It supports up to 4K resolution, up to 60 Frames Per Second (FPS), and up to four monitors, as well as peripherals including the 3Dconnexion SpaceMouse, which is popular with CAD users.

Frame provides firms with flexibility as the platform supports deployments natively in AWS, Microsoft Azure, and GCP as well as on-premise on Nutanix

hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). Over 100 public cloud regions and 70 instance types are supported today, including a wide range of GPUaccelerated instances (Nvidia and AMD). Everything is handled through a single management console and, in true cloud fashion, it’s elastic, so firms can automatically provision and de-provision capacity on-demand.

■ https://fra.me

All RFO benchmarks are measured in seconds, so smaller is better.

Autodesk Inventor 2023: Inventor is one of the leading mechanical CAD (MCAD) applications. For testing, we used the InvMark for Inventor benchmark by Cadac Group and TFI (https://invmark.cadac. com), which comprises several different sub tests which are either single threaded, only use a few threads concurrently, or use lots of threads, but only in short bursts. Rendering is the only test that can make use of all CPU cores. The benchmark also summarises performance by collating all single-threaded tests into a single result and all multi-threaded test into a single result. All benchmarks are given a score, where bigger is better.

Ray-trace rendering

The tools for physically-based rendering, a process that simulates how light behaves in the real world to deliver photorealistic output, have changed a lot in recent years. The compute intensive process was traditionally carried out by CPUs, but there are now more and more tools that use GPUs instead. GPUs tend to be faster, and more modern GPUs feature dedicated processors for ray tracing and AI (for ‘denoising’) to accelerate renders even more. CPUs still have the edge in terms of being able to handle larger datasets and some CPU renderers also offer better quality output. For ray trace rendering, it’s all about the time it takes to render. Higher resolution renders use more memory. For GPU rendering, 8 GB should be an absolute minimum with 16 GB or more needed for larger datasets.

Chaos Group V-Ray: V-Ray is one of the most popular physically-based rendering tools, especially in architectural visualisation. We put the VMs through their paces using the V-Ray 5 benchmark (www.chaosgroup.com/vray/benchmark) using V-Ray GPU (Nvidia RTX) and V-Ray CPU. The software is not compatible with AMD GPUs. Bigger scores are better.

Luxion KeyShot: this CPU rendering stalwart, popular with product designers, is a relative newcomer to the world of GPU rendering. But it’s one of the slickest implementations we’ve seen, allowing users to switch between CPU and GPU rendering at the click of a button. Like V-Ray, it is currently only compatible with Nvidia GPUs and benefits from hardware ray tracing. For testing, we used the KeyShot 11 CPU and GPU benchmark, part of the free KeyShot Viewer (www.keyshot. com/viewer). Bigger scores are better.

Real-time visualisation

The role of real-time visualisation in design-centric workflows continues to grow, especially among architects where tools like Enscape, Twinmotion and Lumion are used alongside Revit, Archicad, SketchUp and others. The GPU requirements for real time visualisation are much higher than they are for CAD/BIM

Performance is typically measured in frames per second (FPS), where anything above 20 FPS is considered OK. Anything less and it can be hard to position models quickly and accurately on screen.

There’s a big benefit to working at higher resolutions. 4K reveals much more detail, but places much bigger demands on the GPU – not just in terms of graphics processing, but GPU memory as well. 8 GB should be an absolute minimum with 16 GB or more needed for larger datasets, especially at 4K resolution.

Real time visualisation relies on graphics APIs for rasterisation, a rendering method for 3D software that takes vector data and turns it into pixels (a raster image).

Some of the more modern APIs like Vulkan and DirectX 12 include real-time ray tracing. This isn’t necessarily at the same quality level as dedicated ray trace renderers like V-Ray and KeyShot, but it’s much faster. For our testing we used three relatively heavy datasets, but don’t take our FPS scores as gospel. Other datasets will be less or more demanding.

Enscape 3.1: Enscape is a real-time visualisation and VR tool for architects that uses the Vulkan graphics API and delivers very high-quality graphics in the viewport. It supports ray tracing on modern Nvidia and AMD GPUs. For our tests we focused on rasterisation only, measuring real-time performance in terms of FPS using the Enscape 3.1 sample project.

Autodesk VRED Professional 2023: VRED is an automotive-focused 3D visualisation and virtual prototyping tool. It uses OpenGL and delivers very highquality visuals in the viewport. It offers several levels of real-time anti-aliasing (AA), which is important for automotive styling, as it smooths the edges of body panels. However, AA calculations use

a lot of GPU resources, both in terms of processing and memory. We tested our automotive model with AA set to ‘off’, ‘medium’, and ‘ultra-high’, recording FPS.

Unreal Engine 4.26: Over the past few years Unreal Engine has established itself as a very prominent tool for design viz, especially in architecture and automotive. It was one of the first applications to use GPU-accelerated real-time ray tracing, which it does through Microsoft DirectX Raytracing (DXR).

For benchmarking we used the Automotive Configurator from Epic Games, which features an Audi A5 convertible. The scene was tested with DXR enabled and disabled (DirectX 12 rasterisation).

Benchmark findings

For CAD and BIM Processor frequency (GHz) is very important for performance in CAD and BIM software. However, as mentioned earlier, you can’t directly compare different processor types by frequency alone.

For example, in Revit 2021 and Inventor 2023 the 2.45 GHz AMD EPYC 7V12 – Rome (Azure NV8as_ v4) performs better than the 2.6 GHz Intel Xeon E5-2690v3 – Haswell (Azure NV6_v3 & Azure NV6_v3) because it has a more modern CPU architecture and can execute more Instructions Per Clock (IPC).

The 3.2 GHz AMD EPYC 74F3 –Milan processor offers the best of both worlds – high frequency and high IPC thanks to AMD’s Zen 3 architecture. It makes the Azure NvadsA10 v5-series (NV6adsA10_v5 / Azure NV12adsA10_v5 / Azure NV36adsA10_v5) the fastest cloud workstations for CPU-centric CAD/BIM workflows, topping our table in all the single threaded or lightly threaded Revit and Inventor tests.

Taking a closer look at the results from the Azure NvadsA10 v5-series, the entrylevel NV6adsA10_v5 VM lagged a little behind the other two in some Revit and Inventor tests. This is not just down to having fewer vCPUs – 6 versus 12 (Azure NV12adsA10_v5) and 36 (NV36adsA10_ v5). It was also slower in some singlethreaded operations. We imagine there may be a little bit of competition between

‘‘ Frame automatically adapts to network conditions to maintain interactivity. EUC Score not only gives you a visual reference to this compression by recording the user experience, but it quantifies the amount of compression being applied

CAD / BIM

Microsoft Azure

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Google Cloud Desktop workstations

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Google Cloud Desktop workstations

u continued from page WS33

the CAD software, Windows, and the graphics card driver (remember 6 vCPUs is not the same as 6 physical CPU cores, so there may not be enough vCPUs to run everything at the same time). There could also possibly be some contention from other VMs on the same server.

Despite this, the 6 vCPU Azure NV6adsA10_v5 instance with 55 GB of memory still looks like a good choice for some CAD and BIM workflows, especially considering its $0.82 per hour price tag.

We use the word ‘some’ here, as unfortunately it can be held back by its GPU. The Nvidia A10 4Q virtual GPU only has 4 GB of VRAM, which is less than most of the other VMs on test. This appears to limit the size of models or resolutions one can work with.

For example, while the Revit RFO v3 2021 benchmark ran fine at FHD resolution, it crashed at 4K, reporting a ‘video driver error’. We presume this crash was caused by the GPU running out of memory, as it ran fine on Azure NV12adsA10_v5, with the 8 GB Nvidia A10-8Q virtual GPU. Here, it used up to 7 GB at peak. This might seem a lot of GPU memory for a CAD/BIM application, and it certainly is. Even Revit’s Basic sample project and advanced sample project both use 3.5 GB at 4K resolution in Revit 2021. But this high GPU memory usage looks to have been addressed in more recent versions of the software. In Revit 2023, for example, the Basic sample project only uses 1.3 GB and the Advanced sample project only uses 1.2 GB.

Interestingly, this same ‘video driver error’ does not occur when running the Revit RFO v3 2021 benchmark on a desktop workstation with a 4 GB Nvidia T1000 GPU, or with Azure NV8as v4, which also has a 4 GB vGPU (1/4 of an AMD Radeon Instinct MI25). As a result, we guess it might be a specific issue with the Nvidia virtual GPU driver and how that handles shared memory for “overflow” frame buffer data when dedicated graphics memory runs out.

AWS G4ad.2xlarge looks to be another good option for CAD/BIM workflows, standing out for its price/performance. The VM’s AMD Radeon Pro V520 GPU delivers good performance at FHD resolution but slows down a little at 4K, more so in Revit, than in Inventor. It includes 8 GB of GPU memory which should be plenty to load up the most demanding CAD/BIM datasets.

However, with only 32 GB of system memory, those working with the largest Revit models may need more.

As CAD/BIM is largely single threaded, there is an argument for using a 4 vCPU VM for entry-level workflows. AWS G4ad.xlarge, for example, is very cost effective at $0.58 per hour and comes with a dedicated AMD Radeon Pro V520 GPU. However, with only 16 GB of RAM it will only handle smaller models and with only 4 vCPUs expect even more competition between the CAD software, Windows and graphics card driver.

It’s important to note that throwing more graphics power at CAD or BIM software won’t necessarily increase 3D performance. This can be especially true at FHD resolution when 3D performance is often bottlenecked by the frequency of the CPU. For example, AWS G4ad.2xlarge and AWS G5.2xl both feature the same AMD EPYC 7R32 – Rome processor and have 8 vCPU. However, AWS G4ad.2xlarge features AMD Radeon Pro

many workflows that don’t need plenty of vCPU, those serious about design visualisation often need both.

It’s easy to rule out certain VMs for real-time visualisation. Some simply don’t have sufficient graphics power to deliver anywhere near the desired 20 FPS in our tests. Others may have enough performance for FHD resolution or for workflows where real-time ray tracing is not required.

For entry-level workflows at FHD resolution, consider the Azure NV12adsA10_v5. Its Nvidia A10 8Q GPU has 8 GB of frame buffer memory which should still be enough for small to medium sized datasets displayed at FHD resolution. The Azure NV6_v3 and Azure NV12_v3 (both Nvidia M60) should also perform OK in similar workflows, but these VMs will soon be end of life. None of these VMs are suitable for GPU ray tracing.

For resolutions approaching 4K, consider VMs with the 16 GB Nvidia T4 (Azure NC4asT4_v3, Azure NC8asT4_v3, Azure NC16asT4_v3, AWS G4dn.xlarge, AWS G4dn.2xlarge, AWS G4dn.4xlarge). All of these VMs can also be considered for entry-level GPU ray tracing.

V520 graphics while AWS G5.2xl has the much more powerful Nvidia A10G.

At FHD resolution, the Nvidia A10G is dramatically faster than the AMD Radeon Pro V520 in viz software (more than 3 times faster in Autodesk VRED Professional, for example) but there is very little difference between the two in Revit. However, at 4K resolution in Revit, the Nvidia A10G pulls away as more demands are being placed on the GPU, thus exposing some of the potential limitations of the AMD Radeon Pro V520.

Finally, Azure NC8asT4_v3 or AWS G4dn.2xlarge could be interesting options for workflows that involve using Revit alongside visualisation applications like Enscape, Lumion and Twinmotion. We found the Nvidia T4 GPU delivered good performance in those apps at FHD resolution, but not at 4K where things slow down. However, as they both have slower CPUs, general application performance will not be as good as it is with AWS G4ad.2xlarge or Azure NV6adsA10_v5.

Visualisation with GPUs

For real-time viz, a high-performance GPU is essential, and while there are

For top-end performance at 4K resolution consider VMs with the 24 GB Nvidia A10, including the AWS G5.xlarge, AWS G5.2xlarge, AWS G5.4xlarge, AWS G5.8xlarge and Azure NV36adsA10_v5. Interestingly, while all four VMs offer similar performance in V-Ray and KeyShot, the AWS instances are notably faster in real time workflows. We don’t know why this is.

The AWS.G4dn.12xlarge is also worth a mention as it is the only VM we tested that features multiple GPUs (4 x Nvidia T4). While this helps deliver more performance in GPU renderers (KeyShot and V-Ray GPU) it has no benefit for realtime viz, with VRED Professional, Unreal and Enscape only able to use one of the four GPUs.

Finally, it’s certainly worth checking out GCP’s new G2 VMs with ‘Ada Lovelace’ Nvidia L4 GPUs, which entered general availability on May 9 2023. While the Nvidia L4 is nowhere near as powerful as the Nvidia L40, it should still perform well in a range of GPU visualisation workflows, and with 24 GB of GPU memory it can handle large datasets. Frame will be testing this instance in the coming weeks.

As mentioned earlier, 3D performance for real time viz is heavily dependent on the

‘‘

Desktop workstations can significantly outperform cloud workstations in all different workflows, but to compare them on performance alone would be missing the point entirely

size of your datasets. Those that work with smaller, less complex product / mechanical design assemblies or smaller / less realistic building models may find they do just fine with lower spec VMs. Conversely if you intend to visualise a city scale development or highly detailed aerospace assembly then it’s unlikely that any of the cloud workstation VMs will have enough power to cope. And this is one reason why some design and engineering firms that have invested in cloud workstations for CADcentric viz workflows prefer to keep highend desktops for their most demanding design viz users.

Visualisation with CPUs

The stand-out performers for CPU rendering are quite clear with the Azure NV36adsA10_v5 with 36 vCPU and AWS. G4dn.12xlarge with 48 vCPU delivering by far the best results in V-Ray, KeyShot and those renderers built into Revit and Inventor.

Interestingly, even though the AMD EPYC 74F3 – Milan processor in Azure NV36adsA10_v5 has 12 fewer vCPUs than the Intel Xeon 8259 - Cascade Lake in the AWS.G4dn.12xlarge it delivers better performance in some CPU rendering benchmarks due to its superior IPC. However, it also comes with a colossal 440 GB of system memory so you may be paying for resources you simply won’t use.

Of course, these high-end VMs are very expensive. Those with fewer vCPUs can also do a job but you’ll need to wait longer for renders. Alternatively, work at lower resolutions to prep a scene and offload production renders and animations to a cloud render farm.

Desktop workstation comparisons

It’s impossible to talk about cloud workstations without drawing comparisons with desktop workstations, so we’ve included results from a selection of machines we’ve reviewed over the last six months. Some of the results are quite revealing, though not that surprising (to us at least).

In short, desktop workstations can significantly outperform cloud workstations in all different workflows. This is for a few reasons.

1. Desktop workstations tend to have the latest CPU and GPU technologies. 13th Gen Intel Core processors, for example, have much a higher IPC than anything available in the cloud,

and Nvidia’s new ‘Ada Lovelace’ GPUs are only now starting to make an appearance in the cloud. However, these are only single slot and not as powerful as the dual slot desktop Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation.

2. Users of desktop workstations have access to a dedicated CPU, whereas users of cloud workstations are allocated part of a CPU, and those CPUs tend to have more cores, so they run at lower frequencies.

3. Desktop workstation CPUs have much higher ‘Turbo’ potential than cloud workstation CPUs. This can make a

data resiliency, data centralisation, easier disaster recovery (DR) capability and the built in ability to work from anywhere, to name but a few. But this is the subject for a whole new article.

End user experience testing

While benchmarking helps us understand the relative performance of different VMs, it doesn’t consider what happens between the datacentre and the end user. Network conditions, such as bandwidth, latency and packet loss can have a massive impact on user experience, as can the remoting protocol, which adapts to network conditions to maintain a good user experience.

KeyShot rendering courtesy of Alex Dsouza

End user experience testing - the EUC Score Sync Player interface

● 1 Cloud and Instance type (e.g. Azure NC8asT4_V3)

● 2 Latency and network bandwidth

● 3 Click for detailed information about the VM specs, connection and endpoint

● 4 Click to maximimise the viewport

● 5 Viewport playback (examine for compression / responsiveness to mouse movements, etc.)

● 6 Task Manager showing resources used at the endpoint (not the cloud workstation)

● 7 Timeline (play back in real time or scrub up and down, as necessary)

end-user experience in remote desktops and applications. By capturing the real user experience in a high-quality video on the client device of a 3D application in use, it shows what the end user is really experiencing and puts it in the context of a whole variety of telemetry data. This could be memory, GPU or CPU utilisation, remoting protocol statistics or network insights such as bandwidth, network latency or the amount of compression being applied to the video stream. The big benefit of the EUC Score Sync Player is that it brings telemetry data and the captured real user experience video together in a single environment.

When armed with this information, IT architects and directors can get a much better understanding of the impact of different VMs / network conditions on

● a Actual CPU utilisation

● b Quantisation Priority (QP) (level of compression being applied to the video stream)

● c Performance in the viewport (Frames Per Second)

● d Round trip network latency

● e Actual network bandwidth used

● f Actual GPU utilisation of Nvidia GPUs with select applications

● g GPU memory utilisation

● h GPU utilisation for encoding the video stream (H.264)

end user experience, and size everything accordingly. In addition, if a user complains about their experience, it can help identify what’s wrong. After all, there’s no point in giving someone a more powerful VM, if it’s the network that’s causing the problem or the remoting protocol can’t deliver the best user experience.

For EUC testing, we selected a handful of

the Frame website (https://ux.fra.me)

EUC Score Sync Player is able to display eight different types of telemetry data at the same time, so that’s why there are different views of the telemetry data. The generic ‘Frame’ recordings are a good starting point, but you can also dig down into more detail in ‘CPU’ and ‘GPU’.

different VMs from our list of 23. We tested our 3D apps at FHD and 4K resolution using a special hardware device that simulates different network conditions.

The results are best absorbed by watching the captured videos and telemetry data, which can all be seen on

When watching the recordings, here are some things to look out for. Round trip latency is important and when this is high (anything over 100ms) it can take a while for the VM to respond to mouse and keyboard input and for the stream to come back. Any delay can make the system feel laggy, and hard to position 3D models quickly and accurately on screen. And, if you keep overshooting, it can have a massive impact on modelling productivity.

In low-bandwidth, higher latency

‘‘

New VMs come online, and prices change, as do your applications and workflows. But unlike desktops, you’re not stuck with your purchasing decision ’’

conditions (anything below 8 Mbps) the video stream might need to be heavily compressed. As this compression is ‘lossy’ and not ‘lossless’ it can cause visual compression artefacts, which is not ideal for precise CAD work. In saying that, the Frame Remoting Protocol 8 (FRP8) Quality of Service engine does do a great job and resolves to full high-quality once you stop moving the 3D model around. Compression might be more apparent at 4K resolution than at FHD resolution, as there are four times as many pixels, meaning much more data to send.

Frame, like most graphics-optimised remoting protocols, will automatically adapt to network conditions to maintain interactivity. EUC Score not only gives you a visual reference to this compression by recording the user experience, but it also quantifies the amount of compression being applied by FRP8 to the video stream through a metric called Quantisation Priority (QP). The lower the number, the less visual compression artefacts you will see. However, the lowest you can get is 12, as to the end user this appears to be visually lossless. This highest you can get is 50 which is super blurry.

Visual compression should not be confused with Revit’s ‘simplify display during view navigation’ feature that suspends certain details and graphics effects to maintain 3D performance. In the EUC Score player you can see this in action with textures and shadows temporarily disappearing when the model is moving. In other CAD tools this is known as Level of Detail (LoD).

The recordings can also give some valuable insight into how much each application uses the GPU. Enscape and Unreal Engine, for example, utilise 100% of GPU resources so you can be certain that a more powerful GPU would boost 3D performance (in Unreal Engine, EUC Score records this with a special Nvidia GPU usage counter).

Meanwhile, GPU utilisation in Revit and Inventor is lower, so if your graphics performance is poor or you want to turn off LoD you may be better off with a CPU with a higher frequency or better IPC than a more powerful GPU.

To help find your way around the EUC Score interface, see Figure 1. In Figures 2 and 3 we show the impact of network bandwidth on visual compression

EUC Score test results

artefacts. This could be a firm that does not have sufficient bandwidth to support tens, hundreds, or thousands of cloud workstation users or when the kids come home from school, and they all start streaming Netflix.

Conclusion

If you’re a design or manufacturing firm looking into public cloud workstations for CAD or design visualisation, we hope this article has given you a good starting point for your own internal testing, something we’d always strongly recommend.

There is no one size fits all for cloud workstations and some of the instances we’ve tested make no sense for certain workflows, especially at 4K resolution. This isn’t just about applications. While it’s important to understand the demands of different tools, dataset complexity and size can also have a massive impact on performance, especially with 3D graphics at 4K resolution. What’s good for one firm,

certainly might not be good for another.

Also be aware that some of the public cloud VMs are much older than others. If you consider that firms typically upgrade their desktop workstations every 3 to 5 years, a few are positively ancient. The great news about the cloud is that you can change VMs whenever you like. New machines come online, and prices change, as do your applications and workflows. But unlike desktops, you’re not stuck with a purchasing decision.

While design and engineering firms will always be under pressure to drive down costs, performance is essential. A slow workstation can have a massive negative impact on productivity and morale, even worse if it crashes. Make sure you test, test and test again, using data from your own real-world projects.

For more details, insights or advice, feel free to contact to Ruben Spruijt (ruben@fra.me) or Bernhard Tritsch (btritsch@bennytritsch.com).

Enscape scene showing heavy compression on network with 2 Mbps bandwidth and 200ms RTT latency (visual artefacts particularly noticeable on concrete slab and on edges)

Same scene with no compression

View the captured videos and telemetry data recordings on the Frame website (https://ux.fra.me)

fig 3

fig 2

Reimagining the desktop workstation

Greg Corke caught up with Adam Jull, CEO of IMSCAD, to explore the rise of the desktop workstation as a dedicated remote resource

IMSCAD is one of the pioneers of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and cloud workstation solutions for graphics intensive applications, including CAD. The company offers a range of solutions for on-premise, public and private cloud, using a variety of technologies for graphics virtualisation including Citrix, VMWare, Nvidia vGPU and more.

Recently, the company added HP Anyware into the mix. One aspect of this move was to provide IMSCAD customers with a secured, high-performance remote solution that works with desktop workstations, rather than dedicated rack mounted servers. The idea is that rather than getting involved in the complexities of virtualisation, users can get a dedicated one-toone connection to a highperformance desktop workstation. We caught up with IMSCAD CEO, Adam Jull to explore what this means for design, engineering, and architecture firms.

Greg Corke: The industry has been talking about VDI and cloud workstations for the past ten years but, it seems, they’ve never fulfilled their potential. What trends are you seeing at IMSCAD?

Adam Jull: Since Nvidia launched GRID GPUs many moons ago, the market has seen many variants of how you can virtualise your workstations with VDI or run them in the Public Cloud, but to date the number of firms running their desktops this way is still low. At IMSCAD, we have more enquiries for these types of solutions from the US, where we have over 50% of our customers.

In the UK and across Europe I would guess uptake of an implemented hosted or

VDI solution is no more than 10%, which is, of course, surprising especially after Covid and the move to more flexible working.

The reasons are down to complexity and cost, the desire of users to have the best possible performance. Running from Public Cloud can have the issue of latency and the CPU clock speeds. On-premise VDI can also be tricky, although this is still the most common approach taken by our customers. We have delivered hundreds of these on-prem VDI solutions. As long as you engage your users, this way will deliver the required performance.

Traditional workstations [configured for remote working] just work. OK, let me rephrase that - they work well 95% of the time.

The feeling was that five to six years ago VDI and Cloud would take over the traditional workstation market, but this has not been the case. Applications are getting bigger, more demanding workflows with VR, AI, visualisation, and digital twins. I also have to say the OEMs have done a great job improving and evolving their range of hardware options for specific workflows.

The other factors are around cost. Public Cloud is great for some things but for GPU-based desktops, it still is very expensive. If you want to run a Private Cloud with your own physical servers but hosted in a datacentre, then the costs can be reduced. The most cost-effective way is still on-premise, absolutely no question. Firms have their own reasons and ideas for doing either of these options for deployment, but the key skill IMSCAD brings is our experience with ISVs like Autodesk and how to fully optimise the environment to give users the best possible experience.

Greg Corke: Recently, we’ve seen a big shift in the workstation market with both HP and Lenovo launching ‘Sapphire Rapids’ desktop workstations that are also purpose built for racks. These are all 4U or 5U. But if you look at 12th or 13th Gen Intel Core, you can find some very powerful micro workstations that can also be rack mounted with custom kits. What is it about these machines that customers find attractive?

Adam Jull: I like the HP Z2 Mini and Lenovo ThinkStation P360 Ultra

[recently replaced by the Lenovo ThinkStation P3 Ultra] a lot. Small, but powerful, mountable in a datacentre cabinet or in an office server room. Effectively you get the power of a workstation in these small form factors and, just as importantly, you can then add a remoting software solution, of which there are a few good options.

You can run as a bare metal 1:1 machine, giving full resource to the user from any other device they want to connect from.

If you then collocate these machines in datacentre environment you effectively create your own Private Cloud with remoting capabilities, so removing the need for a VPN, improving the user’s remote access and with the control features you can run the workstations in a similar way to a VDI server farm.

I would call this ‘one step before VDI’ which is a simpler and ultimately you will not be going too far away from your traditional on-premise approach. Bare metal, 1:1 with the user, highly resourced and capable of handling all applications, no virtual layer and much less complexity and really neat, in my humble opinion.

Greg Corke: What kind of density can you get from the HP Z2 Mini G9? How many units in a standard rack and how does this compare to a traditional VDI using virtualised servers?

Adam Jull: In a typical 42U rack you can get up to 36 HP Z2 Mini G9 workstations. It’s difficult to compare that to a traditional VDI server deployment but if we are coming at it from a dedicated GPU standpoint that probably works best in that scenario.

So, with many high-end design applications and visualisation tools requiring more and more GPU resource for optimal performance to cope with users ever more demanding workflows, most users are typically looking for around 8 GB plus of GPU.

If we take an HP Z2 Mini G9 generously resourced with the Nvidia RTX A2000 12GB GPU we can provide 36 users. Compare that to a server, remembering the Z2 Mini is 1:1 so our comparison should be based on a published virtual desktop. Most datacentre GPUs tend to top out at 48 GB, so you can get where I’m going with this.

If we take a server that has 2 x Nvidia L40 48 GB cards on board, you are only getting 8 users per server. To get to the same density as our racked Z2 Mini you are going to need 6 x servers! So, as you can imagine there is going to be a substantial difference in cost.

‘‘

The feeling was that five to six years ago VDI and Cloud would take over the traditional workstation market, but this has not been the case ’’

Greg Corke: One of the big advantages of using traditional servers for VDI is that they are built from the ground up for the datacentre and have remote management built in. Desktop workstation manufacturers are now addressing this with optional system controller cards. HP’s new Anyware Remote System Controller is even available as an external USB box to give the HP Z2 Mini similar capabilities. Do these system controllers give desktop workstations the exact same capabilities as dedicated rack servers, or are there things still missing?

Adam Jull: Things that you might take as a ‘given’ or a standard function with server virtualisation have sometimes been a touch tricky to achieve with a [traditional] workstation fleet. Features that would have previously required administrators to use third party tools are now being introduced and catered for. The HP Anyware Integrated Remote System Controller does go a long way in closing that gap as systems administrators will now have the ability to remotely manage their workstation fleet from a single pane. It also provides features such as power management, hardware alerts and diagnostics along with the ability to image or reimage the operating systems. So, a big step in the right direction.

Greg Corke: The larger rack friendly desktop workstations come with ‘servergrade’ features like hot-swappable

redundant PSUs, rear power buttons, front access hot swap storage. But with the smaller machines you still need to get inside. Does this make management and servicing of these machines harder?

Adam Jull: The Z2 Mini can be racked in much the same way as a larger workstation and, in fact, HP has put a lot of thought into the design. It’s worth noting that although the Z2 Mini has a smaller form factor, the Rail Rack Kit slides out from the rack providing excellent clearance and access to cables and ports etc. The Rail Rack Kit also features captive fasteners, providing quick and easy tool-free access to the workstations. So, in terms of servicing and management, the Z2 Mini itself offers tool-less access and slide out components, allowing for simple and easy swap out capabilities which could be for maintenance or expansion. Ultimately, these machines are extremely reliable.

Greg Corke: With a centralised desktop workstation solution, do firms tend to give users their own dedicated machine, which they remote into wherever they work, or is there a shared pool? Are firms using the cloud to handle peaks?

Adam Jull: With HP Z workstations, users have access to bare metal resource and remote access to those resources by one of the best-in-class remoting protocols in HP Anyware’s PCoIP.

Much like other remoting solutions, HP Anyware provides desktop administrators the ability to grant users or groups access as they see fit, whether that’s dedicating a user to a specific machine or having a bunch of machines available on more of a round robin or random assignment. And just touching on that management piece it’s worth highlighting that HP provides an end-to-end product for the centralised desktop deployment model.

Typical components would be the HP Anyware Manager which provides administrators with a management plane to configure, manage, broker and monitor remote workstation connections. There’s also HP Anyware Connector which provides security gateway services and user authentication for remote connections to their assigned desktops and then, of course, there’s the HP Anyware Agents which is software installed on the remote workstation which securely encodes the desktop and streams pixels-only to the PCoIP Client.

The PCoIP Client is also required and helps to complete the circuit, if you will. It’s installed on the user’s end device and allows them to connect to the remote workstation. It decodes a stream of PCoIP pixels from the remote workstation PCoIP Agent. Most firms using this type of solution are pretty savvy - they know their workforce will flex whether that’s up or down, typically we see firms overprovision rather than burst into the cloud.

■ www.imscadservices.com

The HP Z2 Mini G9 is most commonly deployed on desktops, but the spacesaving design means it can also deliver impressive density in the datacentre

With AI stories hitting the headlines with remorseless regularity, Stephen Holmes has been considering how product designers and engineers might be preparing for the brave new world this technology promises

The chances of me being able to make it through this issue without at some point mentioning artificial intelligence, or AI, were about the same as me being able to walk through traffic blindfolded without being hit by a vehicle.

AI is everywhere right now — and we could devote hours of time discussing which of the stories making the headlines involve true AI, which are simply machine learning, and further down the food chain, which are just marketing bullshit promoted by opportunists trying to hitch a ride on the AI bandwagon.

Whatever the emerging technology might be, it now seems that the media will pick it up and run full speed with it until it reaches burnout. Or, like the smartphone, it will be assimilated so thoroughly into everyday life that it loses any novelty value.

I suspect AI will follow the latter trend. It will be something to which we all adapt, to a point where we no longer marvel at its abilities. Like autocorrect, but much better. At least it will be capable of understanding that the word ‘ducking’ hasn’t been used much since seventeenth century witch trials.

COMING SOON?

What’s different about AI is its apparent future ubiquity. It seems destined to impact all walks of life. With a quick scan of just this morning’s headlines, I see it show up in stories about global financial markets, essays written by school kids and a helpline for eating disorders. Barely a day goes without us receiving yet another warning that it will ultimately lead to humanity’s extinction.

Yet here we sit, all participants in the 3D design space, with little to show — yet — for what to all intents promises to be the biggest technological revolution since the dawn of the internet.

As Physna’s Paul Powers wrote in these pages back in March [www.tinyurl.com/ D3D-Physna], while there’s massive potential for AI in 3D design, it is taking much longer to reach us.

For product designers, design inspiration could be the first big winner, allowing users to generate 2D images for concepting and mood boards. Then there are tools like Vizcom, capable of importing your sketches and generating renders from them.

In terms of generating actual 3D models from text requests, there are no options that should have designers fearing for their livelihoods just yet — not Open AI Shap-E, nor Nvidia Magic3D, nor Google DreamFusion.

But the fact that such big names even have an interest in the 3D modelling space will likely have CAD tool vendors scrambling to quickly include some of this in their own offerings.

In our neighbouring field of AEC, architects are having a much more worried conversation about what AI means for them. If an AI programme like Swapp can map out entire hotels and apartment blocks into a BIM model and produce the drawings, then what does this signal long-term for the thick-rimmed glasses crew?

PREPARE FOR AN INFLUX

This — and the way that AI is impacting other industries like graphic design, photography, visual effects and more — drags us back to how product designers

should be approaching what’s out there now and preparing for an influx of workflow-upending AI tools.

One thought is that by using some of the AI tools we’ve already mentioned, the concepting stages for a design could be faster, but also produce many more options and avenues for products.

Even with all the sales and focus group data that could be fed into such a process, an experienced design head is still going to be critical in deciding which AI-generated ideas merit further investigation and might be taken into development.

The education of future designers needs to be reconsidered, but that’s just the start. As I see it, if this is one of the few sectors with a little time to consider the impending tidal wave of uses for AI, then we best use that time well. We should be proactive in deciding how we want to make use of the advantages it can offer.

Seeing as designers and engineers are the ones most often tasked with tackling the worst problems facing mankind, then we’ve got to hope that AI will be of some ‘ducking’ use to us.

GET IN TOUCH: As fear and hostility towards AI ramps up, Stephen is most looking forward to the return of the Luddite riots, but wondering what exactly they’ll smash up instead of cotton looms this time round. On Twitter, he’s @swearstoomuch

Bad news for architects? Swapp promises AI-powered building design docs in minutes

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An experienced design head is still going to be critical in deciding which AIgenerated ideas merit further investigation 

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