And who can forget the Cardiff Giant? 
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That was probably a TI Silent 700 printing terminal, not a computer. They were pretty sleek devices.
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Those terminals were fkn great for their time!
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You don’t know the budget of my planned movie!
(Yeah, I’d just show the prop people this post and tell them “make me something that looks like this!”)
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putting an expansion card in that’d support multiple SFP+ or QSFPs for 10Gb (or 40/100Gb) network ports to allow you to do line-rate network monitoring. That’s a tough thing to come by.
Needs scads of RAM, CPU, and tons and tons of disk to hold all the stuff you’re slurping off the wire.
The network analyzer is about the last realistic use for the lunchbox that I’ve been able to come up with.
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This thing is basically a standard work station tower case with a screen and keyboard mounted on the side. It’s got a AMD Threadripper CPU and what looks like the I/O panel from a standard mother board. There’s no reason to think that it isn’t up-gradable, and non-upgradable work stations are… not well liked. Limited upgrade path is a lot of what eroded the popularity of Apple’s work stations.
And a 6c/12t Intel at 2.6ghz is not going to give “very close” performance to a 24c/48t AMD at 3.8ghz. Which is the base processor here.
You probably can’t. It’s a full sized HEDT system. The base model processor in that thing retails for $1400 and doesn’t have a mobile low/tdp version. The platform has more PCIE lanes, more memory capacity and a whole shit balls of other features that mainsteam platforms lack and don’t tend to turn up in laptops. No one makes a Threadripper laptop.
That thing is probably meant for media work and similar high test things in the field, I’ve seen things like that before dragged out to broadcast and film shoots. And know a fair few video producers who would prefer it to packing their cars with Mac Pros and piles of monitors, or checking a work station in a pelican case as their luggage on a flight. And renting a screen when they get there.
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Maybe a wee bit expensive for a Quadrilateral Cowboy cosplay…
laser5.off(3); laser6.off(3); door6.open(3)
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Does this come with the launch codes?
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For that kind of money it should really come in a nice Coach bag.
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Seems a very clever way to inflate the price of a desktop computer by sticking the monitor and detachable keyboard onto one side. A well equipped hacker could make this at home at a fraction of the price, except rugged parts, but if I want a rugged PC, a Toughbook would cost a fraction as well.
Not that it hasn’t its uses, but at that price I would expect an exceptional level of ruggedness, which of course it can’t have judging by the fans holes on the back.
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I remember they had a demo of one of those in our local Kmart. (Which I also remember.)
5-6 years after that, my dad brought home a portable Compaq PC-clone home from work; it looked similar IIRC. We’d play “Wheel of Fortune” on it, even with its monochrome display.
Not portable, but before that we had DECMates and a C64, plus this which is now in my cellar:
As of 3-5 years ago it was still operable.
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I used to use a similar style for debugging avionics. It had connections to allow for easy installation of various National Instruments data acquisition modules, and more processing power than a toughbook (I also use toughbooks).
Later I updated to a Dewetron system and ditched the National Instruments stuff.
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a) I was noting even my firmly-midrange (but decent) gaming laptop is quite upgradeable. The highest-end models are MUCH more powerful. It also self-OCs to around 4.6 GHz, when needed =). My apologies for being unclear.
b) So carry an external box w/ Lightning or other fast connection and plug it into your laptop, including any GPU setup you can think of. STILL cheaper! Notably, dual-GPU solutions are also notoriously unstable for many purposes. And when you don’t need the damn suitcase, you don’t have to lug it around ^^’ .
I see no point for this giant, expensive box. At all. I’m sure it’s powerful, but you can do the same for much less, and more conveniently, to boot.
Fair, although as I mentioned above to @Ryuthrowsstuff, all you need is a good external box with a fast (probably Lightning) connection and pouf you have every feature this thing offers, including multiple GPUs, but you can simply leave the Box of Bricks™ at home, when you don’t need the extra “oomf” =).
Honestly, I’m pretty damn sure I can duplicate every feature here for less than $4K, I think, and certainly less than $5K. And that’s starting with a “Cadillac” gaming laptop (2 or 3 tiers above mine) and the external box!
It’s sorta like how I feel about Macs. Yeah, nice kit, but did they build it from powdered money and glue made from the tears of Bill Gates?!
Looks like one of the legendary Network General Sniffers from the 1990s. Those things had serious nerd cred in their day.
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That’s not OCing itself. That’s standard CPU boost frequency. And the Threadripper in the workstation boosts to 4.5ghz. And has features to push itself beyond that with sufficient cooling.
An external thunderbolt box can give you 64 PCI lanes and up to 2 TB of ram? Another GHZ of base clock and 18 more cores?
For gaming. Their pretty damn common in work stations. If you click through to the product page you’ll see that most of the GPUs on offer aren’t gaming GPUS, but professional/compute cards.
I provided one, there are a lot of professional situations that involve lugging a powerful desktop workstation to field locations. It’s particularly common in media. The crews doing this also bring big powerful laptops, often gaming laptops. But those can’t always physically do the highest load work necessary. So I actually had as a job duty at one point. Packing desktop work stations into pelican boxes to over night them to hotels. So our field producers could pick them up, and lug said Pelican cases out to the location (thankfully often in the hotel). Those guys would pack peripherals and other field equipment as their carry-on, or as their main luggage and live out of the carry-on. And either buy a monitor on site or rent one, whichever was cheaper/available. Then mail the damn thing back on the other end.
This isn’t a gaming PC. It’s about $1k too much just on the CPU for anything gaming related. And there isn’t a laptop with that grade of performance, this class of CPUs doesn’t go in laptops. Hell Intel doesn’t have a HEDT processor with that many cores. And they have like 1 server processor that has more cores than the base model here.
You can get this sort of performance cheaper. The internets and professional spaces are very excited about low cost Threadripper builds. But you’re not getting it in a laptop. And certainly not for $1200 bucks when the processor alone retails for $1400.
It certainly seems to come in at a premium over similar grade, pre-built, desktop workstations. But unlike the Mac Pro where that premium is for rich Corinthian leather saddle bags, the extra cost here has a point and includes the monitor and keyboard.
And just to underline the astronomical difference between that gaming laptop and the sort of work station in question. Here’s the details on the two cpus (again rolling with a base model for the rolly box).
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/AMD-Ryzen-Threadripper-3960X-vs-Intel-i7-9750H/3617vs3425
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“Lightning” is Apple’s proprietary connector for iphones/ipads. You probably mean “Thunderbolt”.
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Yes, ty, I get the 2 interchanged constantly. Nonetheless, my point stands.
Once again, you are completely missing the point. As a matter of fact, as long as it has a Thunderbolt connector (ty @jerwin) the laptop, itself, really doesn’t matter all that much, assuming you load the external box with the proper hardware, of course, and the laptop meets some pretty basic criteria.
Yes, you CAN do far better for less money, with better ergonomics to boot; that’s not gonna change.
Apart from preformance issues @Ryuthrowsstuff mentioned, even Thunderbolt 3 has only 4 PCIe 3.0 lanes, so for compute application that require transferring a lot of data between main memory and GPGPU/compute device memory, connecting such device through Thunderbolt may be pointless. Using a laptop with many data acquisition cards connected through Thunderbolt port would be also extremely unpractical.
These suitcase computers are not really designed to compete with laptops, they are more of an alternative to mobile 19 inch rack systems, for example like those used in commercial photogrammetry / digital image correlation setups (and I know which one of these I’d prefer to carry up the stairs). Such systems have to be frequently moved, have to be somewhat rugged and setting them up has to be as simple and fast as possible. The cost of the hardware doesn’t matter in such applications, because software will cost 10x as much anyway.
While Thunderbolt or any other connector available in a laptop won’t do that, I’ve seen connector that could do all of these things excluding base clock improvements 
A friend has an IBM server that has expansion ports with Intel QuickPath Interconnect available from outside. It is possible to connect 2 such servers, and the result is a ridiculous machine with 8 processors sockets and up to 6 TB RAM. The pin count on the connecting cables is insane.
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