Yes, you are correct about CAD being floating point intensive, in fact, that's a gross understatement ;-)
But that brings a very good point, particularly when considering the purchase of a laptop to install NX on. Of course, for my job, going to user meetings and visiting customers, I don't have much of a choice, but today there is a class of laptops know as 'Portable Workstations'. These are the ones you should consider if you're looking to install NX on them. Prior to the introduction of theses sort of machines, BTW. I'm running on a Dell Precision M4500 with an Intel quad-Core 'i7' processor, laptops were just not all that usable for something like NX. In fact, in those days when I went on the road I had what was called a 'luggable workstation'. Basically a full-fledged workstation in a large briefcase. It wasn't technically considered portable since you had to plug it into a conventional power source, but you could carry it onto a plane as hand baggage (although it was always exciting explaining to the security people that it was a just a computer). For most trips I sent it has luggage inside it's own fully padded 'Pelican' hardcase. It came complete with a full size keyboard, mouse and 19 inch monitor but it took time to unpack and setup. I went through 3 of these machines before the laptop vendors finally started to provide true 'workstation' class units.
Here's a photo of me taken in 2006 where I'm using this system during a demo. Shortly after that I switched to using a laptop:
Note that the 'flags' on the back of the case indicated the various countries that THAT particular machine had been 'lugged' to ;-)
These 'workstaions in a briefcase' I used were from a company named 'MaxVision' out of Huntsville, AL (it was started by some people who left Intergraph when they were contemplating exiting the workstation business back in the late 90's) which is still in business today providing 'portable' workstations for people who REALLY need to be able to move fast and yet have to have computing power that can only be found in a TRUE workstation type configuration.
John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:
To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.