Accelerating design and increasing efficiency with Lenovo Workstations and NVIDIA Quadro GPUs
Aston Martin’s commitment to making the most beautiful cars in the world is legendary. Their commitment to perfection is unwavering. With a proven track record of giving customers the ultimate in beauty and power, the company only works with a select few world class vendors to ensure they are able to live up to these uncompromising standards. As a result, when Aston Martin was looking to standardize their workstation portfolio across the various work streams throughout the company – from styling and design, to engineering and validation – they ultimately chose Lenovo as their Official Workstation Partner because of the strong performance and the reliability of our technology.
Becoming the official workstation partner of Aston Martin is the next step in an already existing relationship that goes beyond automotive and reaches across the engineering, design, visualization, and architecture disciplines.
“You can’t design or build cars without workstations,” said Steve O’Connor, Director of IT at Aston Martin. “Lenovo’s workstation catalog allows us to configure our machines across the main workloads of our organization including styling and design, CAD and engineering to match each team’s unique needs.”
Part of the design language at Aston Martin is to challenge both the physical and digital tools available, pushing beyond to achieve design perfection. The constant transition from virtual to reality and back is part of the Aston Martin DNA that never settles for good enough.
The design team at Aston Martin uses Lenovo workstations powered by NVIDIA Quadro GPUs to blend the digital and the physical side of design, modeling, rendering and more to inspect, critique, adjust and challenge what they are capable of throughout the process. Whether the team is comparing a clay sculpting to digital sketches, or transferring milled models to rendered models, the power and performance of our workstations are up to the challenge of what they’re designing. This means designs can combine a high degree of detail and be thoroughly validated so every part of fit, finish and complex surfacing can be rendered into near perfect, real-world products.
And now, with the reality of working remotely, Aston Martin continues to move forward utilizing the ThinkPad P Series mobile workstations – offering the ability to open large design files and continue creating without delay. This enables them to bring their designs to life in real-time. Harnessing the power of NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics in a mobile form factor, Lenovo’s mobile workstations offer Aston Martin the ability to improve their design, engineering and visualization workflows without restrictions.
While raw performance is definitely a top priority for Aston Martin, there were other elements that went into the consideration process. Prior to standardizing on Lenovo, Aston Martin struggled with consistency, reliability and visibility into future hardware developments needed to optimize performance. They needed a partner that could deliver an unmatched experience – both from a technical hardware and relationship standpoint. Offering insight into our product roadmap helped ensure confidence their workstations would stay current with their technical needs generation-to-generation – all with easy manageability, up-to-date drivers and strong application performance.
“We use a lot of different software from companies such as Adobe and Autodesk, and basically cover every application category that you can think of,” said O’Connor. “The Lenovo Performance Tuner allows us to easily keep the profiles changing and adapting to the applications that the designers and engineers are running. Not only are we confident that our workstations are the most up-to-date that they’ve ever been, but I can’t remember the last time I’ve had a complaint from engineering or design in the last three or four years since we standardized on Lenovo.”
Partnering with this iconic brand and the people behind it is a privilege and we are proud to be a part of helping them design the future. Aston Martin’s graphic designers, engineers, modelers and more depend on the power and reliability of Lenovo’s workstations and NVIDIA’s professional graphics to do the heavy lifting and pave the way.
Whether they’re using the ThinkPad P Series mobile workstations or the ThinkStation desktop PCs, they can have peace of mind knowing the digital tools behind them are designed, tested and proven to help get the job done. This allows Aston Martin to focus on what they do best: achieving perfection in the design and building of everything they create. If you’re ready to supercharge your organization’s workflows, learn more about how Lenovo and NVIDIA are partnering to fuel Aston Martin’s innovation here.