Workstation
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A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or
Workstations formerly offered higher performance than mainstream
The increasing capabilities of mainstream PCs since the late 1990s have reduced distinction between the PCs and workstations.
History
Origins and development
Perhaps the first computer that might qualify as a workstation is the
In 1965, the IBM 1130 scientific computer became the successor to 1620. Both of these systems run Fortran and other languages.[12] They are built into roughly desk-sized cabinets, with console typewriters. They have optional add-on disk drives, printers, and both paper-tape and punched-card I/O.
Early workstations are generally dedicated minicomputers, a multiuser system reserved for one user. For example, the PDP-8 from Digital Equipment Corporation, is regarded as the first commercial minicomputer.[13]
The
1980s rise in popularity
In the early 1980s, with the advent of
Workstations often feature
, and well-designed cooling. Additionally, the companies that make the products tend to have comprehensive repair/replacement plans. As the distinction between workstation and PC fades, however, workstation manufacturers have increasingly employed "off-the-shelf" PC components and graphics solutions rather than proprietary hardware or software. Some "low-cost" workstations are still expensive by PC standards but offer binary compatibility with higher-end workstations and servers made by the same vendor. This allows software development to take place on low-cost (relative to the server) desktop machines.Thin clients
Workstations diversified to the lowest possible price point as opposed to performance, called the
This approach was first attempted as a replacement for PCs in office productivity applications, with the 3Station by 3Com. In the 1990s, X terminals filled a similar role for technical computing. Sun's thin clients include the Sun Ray product line.[23] However, traditional workstations and PCs continued to drop in price and complexity as remote management tools for IT staff became available, undercutting this market.
3M computer
A high-end workstation of the early 1980s with the three Ms, or a "3M computer" (coined by Raj Reddy and his colleagues at CMU), has one megabyte of RAM, a megapixel display (roughly 1000×1000 pixels), and one "
Another goal was to bring the price below one "megapenny", that is, less than $10,000 (equivalent to $27,000 in 2022), which was achieved in the late 1980s. Throughout the early to mid-1990s, many workstations cost from $15,000 to $100,000 (equivalent to $192,000 in 2022) or more.
Decline
The more widespread adoption of these technologies into mainstream PCs was a direct factor in the decline of the workstation as a separate market segment:[25]
- Extremely reliable components: together with multiple CPUs with greater cache and error-correcting memory, this may remain the distinguishing feature of a workstation today. Although most technologies implemented in modern workstations are also available at a lower cost for the consumer market, finding good components and making sure they work compatibly with each other is a great challenge in workstation building. Because workstations are designed for high-end tasks such as weather forecasting, video rendering, and game design, it is taken for granted that these systems must be running under full load, non-stop for several hours or even days without issue. Any off-the-shelf components can be used to build a workstation, but the reliability of such components under such rigorous conditions is uncertain. For this reason, almost no workstations are built by the customer themselves but rather purchased from a vendor such as Hewlett-Packard / HP Inc., Fujitsu, IBM, Lenovo, Sun Microsystems, SGI, Apple, or Dell.
- High-performance 3D graphics hardware for computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-generated imagery (CGI) animation is increasingly popular in the PC market around the mid-to-late 1990s mostly driven by computer gaming, yielding the first official GPU in Nvidia's NV10 and the breakthrough GeForce 256.
- High-performance floating-point calculations, relegating RISC to even more high-end markets.[26]
- Hardware support for 80486DXprocessor. Even then, x86 floating-point performance lags other processors due to limitations in its architecture. Today even low-price PCs now have performance in the gigaFLOPS range.
- High-performance/high-capacity data storage: early workstations tend to use proprietary disk interfaces until the SCSI standard of the mid-1980s. Although SCSI interfaces soon became available for IBM PCs, they were comparatively expensive and tend to be limited by the speed of the PC's Serial ATAis more modern, with throughput comparable to SCSI but at a lower cost.
- High-speed networking (10 Mbit/s or better): 10 Mbit/s network interfaces were commonly available for PCs by the early 1990s, although by that time workstations were pursuing even higher networking speeds, moving to 100 Mbit/s, 1 Gbit/s, and 10 Gbit/s. However, economies of scale and the demand for high-speed networking in even non-technical areas have dramatically decreased the time it takes for newer networking technologies to reach commodity price points.
- Large displays (17- to 21-inch) with high resolutions and high refresh rate, which were rare among PCs in the late 1980s and early 1990s but became common among PCs by the late 1990s.
- Large memory configurations: PCs (such as IBM clones) are originally limited to 640 KB of RAM until the 1982 introduction of the 80286 processor; early workstations have megabytes of memory. IBM clones require special programming techniques to address more than 640 KB until the 80386, as opposed to other 32-bit processors such as SPARCwhich provide straightforward access to nearly their entire 4 GB memory address range. 64-bit workstations and servers supporting an address range far beyond 4 GB have been available since the early 1990s, a technology just beginning to appear in the PC desktop and server market in the mid-2000s.
- BSD and Linuxon commodity PC hardware.
- Tight integration between the OS and the hardware: Workstation vendors both design the hardware and maintain the Unix operating system variant that runs on it. This allows for much more rigorous testing than is possible with an operating system such as Windows. Windows requires that third-party hardware vendors write compliant hardware drivers that are stable and reliable. Also, minor variations in hardware quality such as timing or build quality can affect the reliability of the overall machine. Workstation vendors are able to ensure both the quality of the hardware, and the stability of the operating system drivers by validating these things in-house, and this leads to a generally much more reliable and stable machine.
Market position
Since the late 1990s, the workstation and consumer markets have further merged. Many low-end workstation components are now the same as the consumer market, and the price differential narrowed. For example, most
Workstations have typically driven advancements in CPU technology. All computers benefit from multi-processor and multicore designs (essentially, multiple processors on a die). The multicore design was pioneered by IBM's POWER4; it and Intel Xeon have multiple CPUs, more on-die cache, and ECC memory.
Some workstations are designed or certified for use with only one specific application such as
Current market
GPU workstations
Modern workstations are typically
Decline of RISC workstations
By January 2009, all
- Hewlett-Packard withdrew its last HP 9000 PA-RISC-based desktop products from the market in January 2008.[30]
- IBM retired the IntelliStation POWER on January 2, 2009.[31]
- SGI ended general availability of its MIPS-based SGI Fuel and SGI Tezro workstations in December 2006.[32]
- Sun Microsystems announced end-of-life for its last Sun Ultra SPARC workstations in October 2008.[33]
In early 2018, RISC workstations were reintroduced in a series of IBM POWER9-based systems by Raptor Computing Systems.[34][35] The Mac transition to Apple silicon greatly increased power efficiency and size efficiency over x86-64 with its ARM-based RISC architecture.[36]
x86-64
Most of the current workstation market uses x86-64 microprocessors. Operating systems include
These are three types of workstations:
- Workstation blade systems (IBM HC10 or Hewlett-Packard xw460c. Sun Visualization System is akin to these solutions)[38]
- Ultra high-end workstation (SGI Virtu VS3xx)
- Deskside systems containing server-class CPUs and chipsets on large server-class motherboards with high-end RAM (HP Z-series workstations and Fujitsu CELSIUS workstations)
Definition
A high-end desktop market segment includes workstations, with PC operating systems and components. Component product lines may be segmented, with premium components that are functionally similar to the consumer models but with higher robustness or performance[39].[40]
A workstation-class PC may have some of the following features:
- Larger number of memory sockets which use registered (buffered) modules[41]
- Multiple displays[41]
- Reliable high-performance graphics card[41]
- Multiple processor sockets, powerful CPUs[41]
- Run reliable operating system with advanced features[41]
- Support for ECC memory[41]
See also
- Mobile workstation
- Gaming computer
- List of computer system manufacturers
- Music workstation
- Personal supercomputer
- Remote Graphics Software
References
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- ^ "End of General Availability for MIPS® IRIX® Products". Silicon Graphics. December 2006.
- ^ "A remarketed EOL Sun Ultra 45 workstation". Solar systems. Archived from the original on 2012-01-02. Retrieved 2012-04-11.
- ^ "Raptor Launching Talos II Lite POWER9 Computer System At A Lower Cost". Phoronix.
- ^ Raptor Announces "Blackbird" Micro-ATX, Low-Cost POWER9 Motherboard, Phoronix
- ^ "Introducing M1 Pro and M1 Max: the most powerful chips Apple has ever built". Apple Newsroom (Australia). Retrieved 2023-11-16.
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External links
- Media related to Workstations at Wikimedia Commons