Autodesk on Intel-Based Laptops, did you know it was this good?

NEIL CROSS: Well, hello all. Welcome to this Autodesk University 2021 industry talk. It's hosted by myself, Neil Cross, the host of the Tech 3D YouTube channel, formerly called TFI. And it's done in partnership with Intel. All right. The whole point of this industry talk this class is to speak directly to Autodesk's customers. And I want to speak directly to some of their product users who are on aging computer systems. And there's rather a lot of them out there. And how do I know this? Well if you don't know, not too long ago, I designed from scratch, developed, and then released workstation performance benchmarking tool called InvMark for Autodesk and vendor. And it grades your workstation [INAUDIBLE] vendor across various different modules, gives you a number of grades based on how your system performs, and then it uploads those scores to my online leaderboard.

So after analyzing my online leaderboard across a rather large sample set of uploads, it was quite apparent that a rather large amount of people are still on aging systems. In fact, around 30% of the people who uploaded to the InvMark leaderboard around workstations and laptops from around five or six years ago or older. And that's just when the guys who had the foresight to think to themselves, hey, fancy testing how fast my workstation is against other people who are doing the same kind of work as me.

And that kind of got me thinking. Is it because they don't know that their systems are so old and so dated? Or are there other reasons behind that? So that's kind of how this class formed. But of course, I do want to address this head on. And that is, of course, the world's been a very difficult place over the last couple of years. Work's been tough. It really has been for a lot of people. And migrating to a new laptop or a new desktop and spending an investment on that is not a high priority for a lot of people in tough circumstances.

So but of course, there's the guys out there who maybe did buy a laptop five or six years ago, and they still to this day think it's the best laptop that money could possibly buy. It was the best back then. And it still trumps everything that could be bought today. The class is hopefully talking directly to those guys. But then, of course, there's also a rather large amount of people out there who just aren't technically minded in terms of computers. They don't follow the scene. Maybe they're just not familiar with how far things are progressed and what gains and productivity boosts they could get by migrating up from an older platform.

The software works on their older laptop. Why do they need to migrate? Well I'm going to show you why. And I want to start with a little bit of a teaser, mate. Because did you know all this time whilst I've been chatting away at you, in my top pocket here, I have a computer. Oh yeah, I do. I do. In this rather flashy electric blue, Autodesk expertly branded fashionable jacket is a computer. And in this computer, there is more processing power for Autodesk and vendor, Fusion 360, Revit, AutoCAD, and many other Autodesk applications. That computer runs those applications faster than a Dell precision tower with dual Xeon processors from seven years ago.

You want to see? Of course, you want to see the computer, mate. You think I'm telling porkies or something. No, no, no. Genuinely. That there is a computer. It's the size of a candy bar. And it will run Autodesk products faster than a desktop Dell precision tower from seven years ago. That's how far things have come. That is an Intel 11th Gen platformed computer from today. You want to see how?

Whoa, Niel. Hang on. Before when you had that PC?

Yeah, I'm here.

Did you call that PC before a candy bar?

Yeah, well because I'm speaking to most people in the US. So [INAUDIBLE].

I don't care. You're not from the US. You've never called it a candy bar in your life. Nobody in the UK calls it-- it's a chocolate bar, mate. Stop trying to be all fitting in. Chocolate. Chocolate bar. Candy bar is for you.

Who are you?

I'm the voice in your head. Who are you?

Why am I stood here talking to myself?

I don't know why you talk to yourself. What are you asking me for? You said I'm the voice in your head. Ask your doctor or something. [INAUDIBLE]

Thanks. Enough of the jokes. Now I talk a bit more about this. This is the chocolate bar sized PC. And because I truly believe that this is where our story begins with current day modern platform computing. Now, nobody is suggesting that you run a CAD workstation on this. It's not what it's for. It's a representation of how far things have come since five or six years ago. So this is a Dell Optiplex 7090 ultra form factor computer. And it's on Intel 11th Gen. And this is a PC that fits in a monitor stand. And it's relatively inexpensive. It's only about 700 pounds or $700.

And when I said that this has more power in it for Autodesk applications than Dell workstation from around six or seven years ago, that could have split the audience somewhat. Now there will be a subsection of people watching this who may have said, well that's obvious, mate. I've been following what's going on. I understand how things work. You're just stating the obvious. There'll be a lot of people though who are watching this who will look at this and don't follow the scene. They will just imagine that that can't be possible. How can that be more powerful than a huge tower workstation? But they're probably thinking to themselves, as much as I don't believe you and I can't see how that's possible, Niel, you wouldn't be saying something like that in a class like this unless there was something to it.

So yeah. Let's just, let's see where you're going with this. OK, all right. Let's see where I am going with this. I'm going to give you a quick demonstration. Behind me here is the very same Dell precision workstations, the T5610 with the dual Xeon CPUs in. And I'm going to set it away running my InvMark benchmarking solution. That's going to start running away now. And whilst it's doing that, I'm going to give you a quick demonstration of how far things have come by just casually building this Optiplex PC in the monitor stand.

I'm going to then power it on. Then I'm going to run the benchmark tool while this is running. And I'm going to show you how long it takes with this to catch up to that after I built it and then powered it on. And then that should give you a pretty good idea, bearing in mind that that's already started. And I'm not exactly hurrying here. So we're going to put the USB-C cable in here. This is the monitor cable. All right. That's going in there. And then what we do is we turn this monitor stand around. And then we line the plastic clips up on the monitor stand. It clips in. Power it on. And that should fire up like so. So that's going to put it into Windows. Now--