Is a new Serval Pro in the works?

[isantop]

Is there any chance this will be resolved in the near future? One of my friends is planning on getting a new laptop and there's no way he'll get one without a good graphics card.

What does he plan on using it for? For video, desktop, and some 3D, the Intel Graphics are plenty powerful, and offer lower heat and better power consumption. For a large majority of users, the Intel HD 3000 and HD 4000 far superior to discreet cards.

If he's looking at doing high-end gaming, we're waiting on the next generation of AMD GPUs to be manufactured. Once they are, we can begin testing. Still no ETA, though.

[Penguissimo]

What does he plan on using it for? For video, desktop, and some 3D, the Intel Graphics are plenty powerful, and offer lower heat and better power consumption. For a large majority of users, the Intel HD 3000 and HD 4000 far superior to discreet cards.

If he's looking at doing high-end gaming, we're waiting on the next generation of AMD GPUs to be manufactured. Once they are, we can begin testing. Still no ETA, though.

Not to dig too deeply for details (and I understand if you can't say right now), but are you referring to the 7970M? Or do you have to wait for the card after that to come out?

[isantop]

Not to dig too deeply for details (and I understand if you can't say right now), but are you referring to the 7970M? Or do you have to wait for the card after that to come out?

I'm not sure exactly which card they're looking at.

[Ayanzo]

Indeed. The Gazelle is not designed to be a Serval replacement but rather a lighter, high quality audio/visual experience laptop with very fast processing. The Serval was designed for extremely heavy work loads that differ from the Gazelle.

I too am eagerly waiting for the new Serval Pro in the works. As a mobile developer. I must say that the specs for the gazelle professional when compared to my Serval_7 that I purchased last September were quite the let down. Nvidia as far as I'm concerned is of little consequence as long as there's no performance dip when moving to AMD.

The full copper cooling that the Serval has is a huge plus when compiling monstrous amounts of code, at least locally. Commonly I find myself using all of my 16 GB (maximum at the time of purchase) of ram and near 95% of the CPU during long compiles, an option for 32 GB would be a welcome addition since I'll be able to force-cache most of my build tree and speed that up a bit.

I like my Serval, and my co-workers have been eyeing the platform compared to the company supplied HP-Elite notebooks and thus far; I've been kicking butt on compile time. Although inferior to a desktop development machine; when you're moving between departments and hardware test stations high performance laptops 'still' are in demand. HP's catalog tops out at around 8GB @1333 with the I7's (at the same price I got far more power), well the ones I've seen at least, so I'm glad I found you guys offering high performance Linux friendly Hardware. Currently in my division there are desires for faster machines even though we have the top of the line from our typical go-to; HP.

If the Serval series is discontinued I'll be quite the sad panda.

[isantop]

If the Serval series is discontinued I'll be quite the sad panda.

Not to fear; a new Serval is definitely being worked on. We're actually looking into AMD as despite poorer driver support, they do perform pretty well, and Nvidia is completely incompatible for 2012.

[compholio]

Not to fear; a new Serval is definitely being worked on. We're actually looking into AMD as despite poorer driver support, they do perform pretty well, and Nvidia is completely incompatible for 2012.

I assume you guys looked into providing Bumblebee with nVidia boxes and decided that wouldn't work. I'm really glad I got my laptop when I did, thinking about what it used to be like using an ATI card makes me shudder.

[isantop]

I assume you guys looked into providing Bumblebee with nVidia boxes and decided that wouldn't work. I'm really glad I got my laptop when I did, thinking about what it used to be like using an ATI card makes me shudder.

Bumblebee still isn't a consumer-ready product. It's not automatic, and thus not technically Optimus, and it's confusing to set up and use.

That all said, for most people the integrated Intel graphics work really well. That was one of the big improvements of both Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge. They're about on par with entry-level discreet cards.

[compholio]

Bumblebee still isn't a consumer-ready product. It's not automatic, and thus not technically Optimus, and it's confusing to set up and use.

That all said, for most people the integrated Intel graphics work really well. That was one of the big improvements of both Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge. They're about on par with entry-level discreet cards.

Do you know if these new laptops can play Diablo III decently under Wine? If they're able to do that then my friend would probably be ok with it. I'm not sure if he wants this one for himself or for his wife, but they just had a baby so I won't get a chance to ask for a while.

[isantop]

Do you know if these new laptops can play Diablo III decently under Wine? If they're able to do that then my friend would probably be ok with it. I'm not sure if he wants this one for himself or for his wife, but they just had a baby so I won't get a chance to ask for a while.

Apparently, the Ivy Bridge Intel HD 4000 is capable of playing Diablo III at low settings and 1080p smoothly. That's under Windows; your mileage will vary with Wine. But overall, I think there's a good chance. That hardware is technically capable to spitting out data that quickly.

[bakelitedoorbell]

What does he plan on using it for? For video, desktop, and some 3D, the Intel Graphics are plenty powerful, and offer lower heat and better power consumption. For a large majority of users, the Intel HD 3000 and HD 4000 far superior to discreet cards.

This is interesting.. I have a Serval5 with Nvidia 260M and was thinking about an upgrade. I work with video, encoding it into different formats, editing with Openshot. I wanted to get into creating animated graphics with Blender also, but this is slow on my current computer. Would the Intel HD be better than what I have now for these uses?

I play games on a Win7 partition too but that's not a priority.