Bold new grill design by Aston Martin unveiled at DreamWorks

Lenovo has announced a trio of new ThinkStations, the PX, P7 and P5. The P Series workstations are the company’s top-of-the-line machines, with graphics, speed, memory and storage of the highest caliber—all of which distinguish them from ordinary PCs—and design and workmanship that distinguishes them from workstations by other computer manufacturers.
But, like the Aston Martin DBX, which Lenovo is co-marketing these workstations with, they might be more machine than engineers need. But engineers can certainly appreciate how they are made, how they perform and how they look.
A representative from Aston Martin was on hand at Lenovo’s unveiling of the new workstations at DreamWorks Studios in Burbank, near Los Angeles, Calif. It turns out the creation of a modern full-length animation movie is among the most demanding of computing tasks. Each frame of a movie is 3D characters and a scene rendered. Making its latest “Puss in Boots” movie took 300 million compute hours, according to a DreamWorks representative.
Aston Martin, the tiny British automotive company (“We all work in one building,” said the Aston Martin lead designer) that acquired its fame from one fictional driver (James Bond) seems to now also offer a design service for products other than its own, although in the case of Lenovo, it service is part of mutual admiration rather than payment.

The workstations have an all-new chassis design and lots of red—Lenovo’s signature color—and a prominent honeycomb grill.
“Redesigned air baffles and larger 3D hex ventilation openings, along with Lenovo’s patented tri-channel cooling system, allow for unobstructed airflow—ensuring maximum cold air intake and hot air exhaust,” says Lenovo in the press material accompanying the event.
The co-marketing with Aston Martin was first made public at Autodesk University 2022, where a bright yellow Aston Martin SUV (brought to virtual reality with Lenovo equipment) stole the show.
At the top of the line is the PX. The “X” is a Roman numeral, so it’s pronounced “P-ten.” With up to 120 cores, this high-performance, multitasking, multiuser server is dressed up like a workstation, although it is utter overkill for even the most sophisticated engineering and design tasks. Using it for CAD would be like driving the Aston Martin to get milk from the corner store. All of its cores would go unused, as CAD and most simulation applications are not multithreaded.
But suppose your CAD work involves a lot of reality capture, which generates tremendously large photogrammetry models or billion point clouds. Then you might be able to use one of the new P Series workstations—if not the PX.
Having performance increases, such as shown by the PX, are to be welcomed for their potential, if not their immediate practicality. With that much headroom, compute limited processes and workflows, such as using huge point clouds, building models down to the detail of doorknobs and aircraft models down to their rivets, factory digital twins with room to breathe and grow are within sight for the engineer, architect or civil engineer. With entire factories being scanned and whole fields scanned to the blade-of-grass resolution by drones, factory and facility models have grown in size and sophistication by orders of magnitude. And you still have compute-bound processes such finite element analysis (FEA) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD). With near supercomputing power available at arm’s reach, why spend money on cloud tokens to queue up simulations on remote servers? This is perhaps more of an immediate need for local supercomputing for data scientists and machine learning developers, who have to handle datasets measured in terabytes and, of course, those “creatives” like our hosts that do 3D animation and digital special effects.
What’s New?
These new workstations feature the latest Intel processors and support for the NVIDIA RTX GPUs.
“These new desktop workstations have been meticulously designed with a customer-centric lens in order to meet desired business outcomes and deliver innovative new solutions that our customers can enjoy well into the future as workloads increase in complexity,” said Rob Herman, vice president of Lenovo’s Workstation and Client AI Business Unit. “We partnered closely with Intel, NVIDIA and Aston Martin to ensure these new systems offer the best of form and functionality by combining a premium chassis with ultra high-end graphics, memory and processing power.”
The new toolless chassis design is a joy for anyone who wants to maintain and service their own machine.
“Look for red” is all the advice an engineer would need to be able to maintain and service the new Lenovo machines with every access point and lever in red.
“Without so much as an instruction manual, your eye finds where your hands need to go to release drives, memory, graphic cards, power supplies….”
ThinkStation PX
The Lenovo ThinkStation PX is the most powerful workstation the company has ever offered with a 53 percent average performance gain over the prior generation according to Lenovo. The company does not intend for it to be used as a personal workstation, though—although it could do so without getting warm. For maximum use, the PX is equipped with a 1850W power supply.
Should you be able to justify the PX, be prepared to run a separate electrical outlet for it. Each PX requires a 20A circuit. Most 120V outlets have a 15A circuit breaker.
Heat generated by the Intel Xeon Scalable processors is efficiently whisked away by Lenovo’s patented cooling channels. There’s space for up to four dual-slot NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation GPUs. Memory maxes out at 2TB of DDR5 memory with fast PCIe Gen 5 lanes for high bandwidth in multiuser environments.
ThinkStation P7
The new ThinkStation P7 has a single CPU socket with the latest Intel Xeon W processor with up to 56 cores. It may let you take on tasks that you once sent to the cloud or local server racks. Like the others, it can be rack mounted. The P7 has slots for three NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation GPUs—perfect for content creators like the animators at DreamWorks, where the workstations were unveiled, and data scientists, machine language trainers and perhaps the most high-tech architects who may be working with huge point clouds from scans and photogrammetry models or generating VR content.
ThinkStation P5
Lenovo suggests that the ThinkStation P5 would fit the bill for all other architects and also engineers and creative professionals of a less demanding sort. The P5 also has the latest Intel Xeon W processors with up to 24 cores but the support of two NVIDIA RTX A6000 professional graphics cards. It is perfect for BIM, solid modeling, reality capture and more, according to Lenovo.
The new P Series workstations will be available starting in May 2023.