In-Brief: Autodesk talks to Architosh about iPad Pro and AutoCAD 360

Yesterday Architosh had the pleasure of talking to Amy Bunszel, vice president of AutoCAD at Autodesk, about what people saw of AutoCAD 360 during the Special September Event. This week Apple unveiled the new iPad Pro with its very special Apple Pencil, a new highly advanced stylus, purpose-built for the new, larger, and much more powerful tablet device.

In this article, we quickly preview a broader discussion between Amy Bunszel, Vice President of AutoCAD at Autodesk, and Architosh editor-in-chief, Anthony Frausto-Robledo.

AutoCAD 360 Pro on the iPad Pro

After the event, Autodesk was demoing its AutoCAD 360 app on the new iPad Pro, with the new Pencil and the new keyboard for new types of functions.

When AutoCAD 360 was shown during the special event, it displayed a CAD drawing of the entire San Francisco Bay area. (see image 01 below) Needless to say, that’s a very big CAD drawing. The new iPad Pro with the new Apple A9X processor is vastly more powerful than the other iPad lineup with earlier generation processors.

“This device is really fast,” Bunszel said. “The drawing shown of the San Francisco bay area has more than 320 thousand entities…we can load drawings that are twice as large” than on previous iPads. The new A9X processor is a 3rd generation chip from Apple, meaning during the manufacturing process, the chip got smaller, less power-consuming, and able to pack in more transistors. It has 2x the memory bandwidth of the A8X and 2x faster storage performance, with game-console class graphics acceleration.

01 – Phil Schiller of Apple boasts of the iPad Pro’s powerful A9X processor, shown here running AutoCAD 360. Autodesk told Architosh that the new device is remarkably fast. Image: screenshot from Apple Event screencast.

Amy Bunszel outlined several of the new features that the company is working on for AutoCAD 360 when it runs on the iPad Pro with the use of Apple Pencil. She noted that in many cases, their users are working with very complex drawings on mobile devices, and the new Apple Pencil will be put to good use to handle the complexity that Touch cannot. The same goes for the keyboard cover that Apple also introduced.

One example is what the company calls Force Measurement. The list of features—which are not set or determined insofar as a new release is concerned—goes on. AutoCAD 360 is described as “buttery” on the new iPad Pro, a testament to just how much faster this latest pro iPad really is.

This is just a preview of more details to come as we round out a larger feature article. Stay tuned!