Razer has made a name for itself by making high-end gaming products, including powerful laptops and peripherals, but the company’s latest laptop, dubbed Tensorbook, is aimed at machine learning researchers needing serious computing power.
The laptop is a collaboration between Razer and deep learning company Lambda intended for laboratory use by those researching machine learning and artificial intelligence. It’s essentially a revised version of 2021’s Razer Blade 15 Advanced laptop running on Linux OS Ubuntu 20.04.
More than just a Linux machine, the Tensorbook has an eight-core 11th Gen Intel i7 chip, an Nvidia RTX 3080 16GB Max-Q graphics card, and a massive 64GB of RAM. It also features a 15.6-inch 165Hz 1440p display, two 1TB SSD drives, and all the ports under the sun. Alongside the Ubuntu OS, the Tensorbook also comes preinstalled with the Lambda Stack, including various compute software such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, CUDA, and cuDNN. Needless to say, it’s a powerful laptop.
For those intrigued by how much the Tensorbook costs, the base model with just Ubuntu installed and a base one-year warranty is available overseas for approximately $4,950. Meanwhile, the most expensive model which comes with three years of Lambda Premium Support and dual boot capacity with Windows 10 Pro costs roughly $7,100.
According to Lambda, the Tensorbook is an “all-in-one deep learning solution” offering researchers a dedicated GPU laptop so they’re not entirely reliant on cloud computing. Institutions using Lambda infrastructure work on various projects, such as training neural networks to detect cancer, and autonomous vehicles.
Due to being hardware aimed at a very specific market, the Tensorbook is currently only available through the Lambda website, so we don’t know if it will get a local release. On paper, it’s an impressive piece of kit that promises to make an impact on all manner of research.
