The Untimely Demise Of Workstations (deprogrammaticaipsum.com) 122
Graham Lee, writing at De Programmatica Ipsum: Last month's news that IBM would do a Hewlett-Packard and divide into two -- an IT consultancy and a buzzword compliance unit -- marks the end of "business as usual" for yet another of the great workstation companies. [...] In high-tech domains, an engineer could readily have a toolchest of suitable computers in the same way that a mechanic has different tools for their tasks. This one has an FPGA connected by both PCI-E and JTAG to allow for quick hardware prototyping. This one is connected to a high-throughput GPU for visualisations; that one to a high-capacity GPU for scientific simulations. The general purpose hardware vendors want us to believe that an okay-at-anything computer is the best for everything: you don't need a truck, so here's a car. But when you're hauling a ton of goods, you'll find it cheaper and more satisfying to shell out more for a truck. Okay-at-anything is good for nothing.
What? (Score:5, Insightful)
What?
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I really don't understand either. The only true workstation sold by IBM today are the POWER servers which have deskside conversion options.
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Yeah. Especially this:
Current hardware vendors offer an incredible amount of diversity. Want your PCI-E/JTAG FPGA? There are a bunch of different ones you can buy and stick in any PC, with any combination of CPU, GPU, memory, etc. you want, for a fraction of what Big Blue might have charged for it.
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A better analogy than a car mechanic might be a woodworker. A wealthy hobbyist can buy the same high end power tools that a pro does, but a pro woodworker has all kinds of custom-built fixtures and jigs that speed repetitive but fiddly tasks.
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Since you mentioned woodworkers with custom jigs.
This luthier [youtube.com] uses a bunch of them and documents it in his videos. The level of skill and resourcefulness displayed here is fascinating. (And people spend time watching football?) If everyone took their job and the quality of their work to this level, the world would be saved.
Re:What? (Score:4, Funny)
Luthiers literally do fiddly tasks.
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If that Truck costs 60k while you can get two cars that can do the work for 50k then you are still better off.
To extend the analogy. For most people who have trucks, they use the Truck only features very uncommonly, where it financially would make sense to rent a truck when you actually need it.
Is it common to rent a PC on premises? (Score:2)
Similarly, Steve Jobs used to liken the iPhone and iPad to a car [cdixon.org] and desktop and laptop computers to a truck. Of course, every analogy has holes.
- A lot of car rental companies refuse, or at least make it cost-prohibitive, to rent a truck to a customer between license age and age 25. This encourages recent graduates of 2- and 4-year colleges to buy a truck instead of a car.
- Is there a common way to rent a PC on premises? Remote desktop to a virtual machine in a datacenter doesn't provide a good impression
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Also, last time I looked into it, you can't tow with a rental truck.
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You didn't look into it in the last decade or two then.
Both U-Haul and Home Depot rent trucks for towing stuff, and have for as long as I've known.
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A lot of rental companies refuse to rent a CAR to anyone below the age of 25. Unless you pay the extra insurance premiums, of course. That's because the insurance is much higher for those under 25. But if you need it, you can get it, you just have to pay through the nose.
OTOH, rec
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I usually ignore the car analogies on Slashdot, but thinking about it, trucks aren't all that bad in this case. You don't go to GM and buy a truck with a toolbox and generator in the bed. You buy a pretty generic truck and find a third party shop that specializes in that kind of thing. Possibly different shops for the toolbox and generator, plus another one to paint the company logo on the door.
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What?
Average morons who don't understand what a workstation is are trying to understand the IBM split by pretending that IBM is HP, and since they don't understand business, it is all keywords to them. Or tools. But they're not sure what the tools are, and which keywords are features the tool has, and which are about what the tool is used for. So even mechanics tools are just keywords to them.
Meanwhile, AMD is buying Xilinx and we can expect future workstations with hardware AI units.
People who don't understand (Score:2)
Average morons who don't understand what a workstation is {...} Or tools. But they're not sure what the tools are, and which keywords are features the tool has, and which are about what the tool is used for.
Yup completely looks like that.
The guy probably has never touched a workstation. He probably consumes most of the internet through his smartphone, and uses a chromebook or a tablet with a keyboard (which actually aren't technologically different, just marketing) to type and submit this article.
Also has completely failed to understand that usually new tech expands the user base, rather than replacing the old one.
Big iron didn't disappear when micro-computer appeared (if anything, multiple members of the TOP5
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I am quietly confident that there is nothing on this planet for which that would be my preferred solution.
OTOH, an an actively trying to purchase a workstation as I write this: One of my requirements is 3 * 5 1/4" drive bays. Unfortunately, none of the "market leaders" has this in his current "portfolio".
There is a good reason why no one develops hardware in the "developed world" - management believes that "we have arriv
Profits (Score:2)
OTOH, an an actively trying to purchase a workstation as I write this: One of my requirements is 3 * 5 1/4" drive bays. Unfortunately, none of the "market leaders" has this in his current "portfolio".
I bet that the markeers at Dell, Lenovo and HP don't even know what a 5 1/4" bay is.
Whereas, a few minutes spent will give you exactly what you need for rather cheaply.
(Or, you could check the offering of Lian-Li, Corsaire, BeQuiet, etc. most of their gamer/mid-tower/big-tower range feature front holes that can either accept a 12x12 or 14x14 RGB Fan, or 3 drive bays).
(Out of curiosity, what are you putting into those? Some backup media drive? Or a good old 5 1/4" floppy drive that you desperately need to be
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
It is basically people who are trying to justify modernizing outdated technology.
I have heard similar arguments a few decades ago about Mainframes. How modern Workstations and PC's are really no match to a good Mainframe, and there is some Total Cost of ownership because Mainframes did some particular tasks better. However the likes of SUN Ultra Sparc Workstations and IBM PowerPC workstations offered a more affordable option, while it might not be as powerful as a mainframe, you can get more of them for cheaper to match the power. Now PC's are doing the same as Workstations. PC's Today are really taking the place of a workstation. You can get a PC that out specs a Workstation on most factors, for a fraction of the cost. and you can use multiple of them to make up any difference.
With Laptops and Mobile devices taking the place of many Desktop Apps, The Desktop PC is really doing the roll of a workstation today already. This means the legacy Workstations don't have much of a real need anymore.
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Computer-not-magic. Clear?
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It's a funeral dirge for the days when your status as an engineer kind of revolved around whether you had a real workstation (HP/Apollo, Sun, DEC, SGI, and I guess IBM, too, if people had RS/6000) and how good the one you had was.
Low-end pizza box Suns were better than x86 PCs in terms of *status* but often PCs were better in computing ability, especially if that Sun was getting on in years. Kind of like how being broke Englishman with an aristocratic title was better than being a thriving commoner, except
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Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Depending on circumstances, pre-built PCs from a name brand can be less expensive than a straight up in-house build from commodity parts. (due to economies of scale).
Now, that modularity still applies to such systems (for the most part), and so you don't need to have any brand loyalty whatsoever. (and if those offerings are not perfect matches for your org's use case, you can still get them, and drop in a modular component or two as needed, to make them into perfect matches.)
Something like a Sun Workstation
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The price difference between a pre-build vs build you own, Really falls down to the level of customization you need. Also what components you can really cheap out on vs what you want much higher.
I am giving a really old example. But back in the days when I went from a 486 to a Pentium. when I upgraded it, I was able to move the Sound Card, as the Sound Blaster 16 was good enough I also had moved many of my Drives over as well. This saved me hundreds of dollars off my price.
Sourcing. (Score:2)
Depending on circumstances, pre-built PCs from a name brand can be less expensive than a straight up in-house build from commodity parts. (due to economies of scale).
Nope.
Depends on where you source your parts.
- If you point of comparison is buying components boxed, from the shelf of an actually shop with a street address in the middle of New York. (Including buying boxed small parts. Like USB cable and power cords, etc. sold 10 bucks a piece on the shelf, because it's an easy way for the shop to earn margins on small items). And then optionnally paying an employee of the shop to assemble it for you: yes, it's going to look not much cheaper tha buying some "big brand" r
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It's usually only cheaper because a lot of people make a few extra compromises when buying a pre-built computer. When assembling a desktop computer from parts, I'll always go for 4 RAM slots (or more if available). The power supply will always be quite a bit more than I plan to use to make it possible to upgrade stuff in the future. I might opt to install better quality fans or cooling components, or might opt for just a little bit more storage.
When buying a pre-built machine, there tends not be be a lot
I have even saw one with TWO PCI-E slots! (Score:2)
> This one has an FPGA connected by both PCI-E and JTAG to allow for quick hardware prototyping. This one is connected to a high-throughput GPU for visualisations
One time I saw a computer that could have BOTH a PCI-E card AND a GPU. Amazing.
I do have one computer for work and one for personal.
Then I have an old one laying around that's basically for rebooting, so I don't have to re-open all my work when I test something with the boot process.
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In 2020? No. Apple's Mac pro is arguably the modern equivalent of a Workstation, and it's pretty much 100% standard parts producing a device a hobbyist can build themselves by ordering the right equipment from the Internet.
This has been true since the mid 90s, it is just that the "standard parts" were more expensive and so it was done less often.
Ever since the VESA local bus (VLB) showed up, you could put a $10k video card on a server motherboard and you're almost there.
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Oh the horrid car analogy, but I will back up this claim for you, because this in a way makes sense.
There for some time we were seeing several cars/trucks with expanded passenger capacity as well as truck beds. They weren't exactly great at doing either thing as they were still pretty cramped and they couldn't all a lot either but I do know a few people that cried as Chevrolet killed the Avalanche.
In the same way we are still seeing these conversion cars that remind us of SUVs that porked a car and came u
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Much of the time, we don't need a massive truck. Get a car with a trailer hitch. And attach a trailer for when you need to do some additional work where you need a bed.
I know Truck Marketing shows the guy taking a New 70k truck on a rough muddy farm road, Pulling a semi-truck trailer.... While this is the case. Most people just use the Truck as a daily driver.
Re: What? (Score:2)
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A basic modern PC is more powerful than most workstations in history. For a lot of tasks that previously required workstation grade hardware a consumer grade PC is now more than adequate.
Workstations are still around but getting more specialized, and often you can get 95% of the way there just by throwing a decent GPU into an off the shelf PC.
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
The general purpose hardware vendors want us to believe that an okay-at-anything computer is the best for everything.
Yeah, I think he's misremembering the 90s. I worked at HP at the time. Not only did the killer micros do a "good enough" job, they knocked the socks off anything we could produce ourselves. The creamed us.
Here's a little history. HP had 68k workstations (the HP 9000/300 line) and we had PA-RISC timeshares (HP 9000/800 line). Sun, SGI, and IBM came out with RISC based Unix workstations and we bought Apollo. The Apollo guys helped us bang out the Snakes systems, HP 900/700 systems with crazy fast PA-RISC CPUs, running an a mind blowing 50 and 66 MHz. Wow, don't use it all in one spot. For comparison, a fast x86 at the time was around 10-12 MHz. Clearly RISC was the faster architecture.
Intel didn't sit still. They kept cranking the clock rates of x86, adopting a RISC core below a hardware (!) x86 instruction translator. Wow. Just wow. The RISC vendors did the same and managed to keep a shrinking performance lead.
HP launched a moon shot, the Tahoe program which turned into Itanium. This was a superscalar processor and initial projections were it was going to ship around 1997 at a blazing 500 MHz! Other processors at the time of the announcement were in the 100-150 MHz range so that was a pretty huge performance jump.
Then Intel and AMD got into a clock rate war. They poured enormous amounts of cash into building new fabs and improving their designs. Turns out a few billion dollars beats a better architecture. We all know how this ended. The killer micros with enormous investment got better much faster than RISC systems did. By the early 2000's it was clear x86 beat every RISC processor both in raw performance and price performance.
And that's when all the RISC architectures petered out. It's not that people had anything against them, it's not that the market was too small, the market entirely went away. There was nothing you could do with a Sun workstation you couldn't do better and cheaper with a stock PC running Linux or Windows. Literally nothing. To use examples from TFA, want a JTAG interface? Plug it into a PCI slot or USB port. Want a FPGA? PCI slot. Visualization? Latest graphics card from Nvidia or ATI.
TFA is right, we don't buy a system and go to the App store to see what it can do. We still start with an app and pick a system to run it. It's just that today, the market has consolidated to basically Windows, Linux, OSX, and The Cloud. There's a lot of stuff available on all three desktops (e.g. all the cloud apps). Some stuff is still specific to one OS or the other. People are savvy enough to pick the one they want and that will blow the socks off what the author nostalgically remembers from 2000.
Worst analogy ever (Score:4, Insightful)
Unlike cars, a computer's "load carrying" capability isn't related to its physical size.
I can get a machine with terabytes of storage and vast processing power in the palm of my hand for a few hundred $$$.
Why do I need a "workstation"?
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Why do I need a "workstation"?
How fast can you type on a touchscreen? And what do you do when reading code on that little screen wrecks your eyesight?
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That might work for a desktop setup, but true workstation....not so sure. As an example, I have multiple monitors connected, 3 different VMs running and hardwired through a 1Gig network connection so I can backup my VMs to a NAS without taking days. I don't believe there is a phone on the market that has the horsepower & storage to handle that environment.
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But then the workstation makers invested heavily in their own CPU architectures based on RISC design principles and again the two diverged. The workstation market became highly differentiated: RS/6000 from IBM (later PowerPC), Alpha from Digital Equipment Corp, MIPS from, well, MIPS, SPARC from Sun, PA-RISC from HP. The software on these workstations, while superficially very similar, was also differentiated and surprisingly incompatible. Take a program from HP-UX and you’ll have difficulty running it on NeXTSTEP, unless the authors shared the source code and used the nascent GNU autotools to support portable building. As Yoda said: begun, the UNIX wars have.
...
What’s got lost alongside the death of the workstation is the business model where you sell expensive computers as part of an integrated solution into a particular vertical market, where that expensive solution will cost a lot less than cobbling something together out of cheap PCs. Why? I think people have a lower expectation and higher pain threshold when using computers now; they expect an amount of friction based on their own experience and translate that expectation into realms where it doesn’t belong. As I described way back in issue 2, computing is a lemon market.
Organisations would go to the workstation vendors because they solved particular problems very well. If you’re in AI, you need Symbolics. Computer graphics, SGI. Telecoms, that’d be Sun. If you want to write software in Ada for the military-industrial complex, you’ll be buying a Rational workstation. Yes, the first IDE was a completely integrated package of hardware and software. And, of course, Apple for Desktop Publishing, the Mac being a workstation of sorts itself. People would buy computers because applications like AutoCAD, Quark or Mathematica ran well on them. They wouldn’t buy the computer then browse the App Store to see whether it could do anything useful.
Re: Worst analogy ever (Score:2)
No need for an Internet connection, wifi, Bluetooth, or a cellular connection - it's all done right on the phone, no server snooping on your reading material.
Turn a web site into a "podcast" and listen while you walk, work, ride the bus, or whatever.
Linux? There are no distros with functional screen readers.
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swipe down from the top of your iPhone screen
My iPhone screen? You mean the companies iPhone screen.
And when they figured out that too many company devices were walking off the property, they discovered one of the major advantages of big beige boxes sitting under desks.
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You plug in a nice monitor using the HDMI or DVI connector and plug a nice keyboard into the USB port. DONE!
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Why do I need a "workstation"?
Custom hardware would be my guess. if you want multiple GPUs or something more exotic you need something with power, cooling, and connectivity to support the hardware.
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Re: Worst analogy ever (Score:2)
Re: Worst analogy ever (Score:2)
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Workstations typically have things like ECC memory and better cooling for extended high cpu usage. The parts tend to be of higher quality as well. Do you really want a fan to die during a week long simulation?
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I don't care how fast the cpu is and the vast storage capacity of a phone or tablet is. That does not make it good for doing things which are productive.
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I can get a machine with terabytes of storage and vast processing power in the palm of my hand for a few hundred $$$.
Really? That's amazing! Can you send me a link? I'd buy one of those!
Reality, at least at the current state of the art, is that such a machine does not exist. Yeah, I can go buy a machine with terabytes of storage and vast processing power but it won't fit in the palm of my hand. Yeah, the machine that fits in the palm of my hand is significantly faster than an equivalent machine of 5 or 10 years ago. But I'm not sure I'd call that "vast." For example, Apple's new chips in MacBook Pros may beat their
Workstations Are Not Going Away (Score:5, Insightful)
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For now. There's powerful momentum behind design technologies (CAD, BIM, 3D, Video Editing, etc.) moving into the cloud. No customer wants it, but software companies (Adobe, AutoDesk, etc.) have financial gains to be made by shoving the engineering and design industry back to renting computer time on their cloud.
caps will kill that + areas with poor networking! (Score:2)
caps will kill that + areas with poor networking!
Re:Workstations Are Not Going Away (Score:5, Insightful)
I love it when people discover "new" technology. Like hey let's have these thin clients or terminals and do the real processing on big servers. Nobody has ever done that before!
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It's all cyclical. Fashion, entertainment, technology, etc. Look at cell phones. Back in the day they were large behemoths. Then once we hit the mid to late 1990's they shrunk down. And now they are large again. Mainly due to the displays that folks use for everything under the sun. But yeah, "the cloud" of 2020 is analogous to the mainframes of yesteryear...
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The endless IT circle of centralize-decentralize.
I dream of a day where the vast majority of IT management are not incompetent and leech consultancies who feed off the incompetents all go bankrupt.
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But this one goes up to SHINY!
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Part of that momentum is coming from users because it often makes economic sense. All of the applications in your list are now doable in the cloud. I wouldn't have said that a few years ago, but it is the case now. If you can play 3D games in the cloud, and you can, there really isn't much you can't do. Unless hardware is going to be hammered until it dies a cloud service is probably a win.
I was a huge proponent of running stuff on local hardware until a couple of years ago. Since then, I've moved just ab
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Also cloud based applications have gotten easier to use and more convenient especially as they have added enough features for most people to use. For example, very few people need all the functionality of Excel as a spreadsheet. Most people need simple tabulation that Google Sheets or any online spreadsheet can do. That and where I have worked Excel was/is being used more as a design/layout tool for forms than a spreadsheet. I still see HR spreadsheets like vacation request forms.
Personally I do have backup
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If you design anything with your computer, you are going to need one.No, eventually, your high-compute power tasks will move to an on-premises cloud server/cluster farm and from there to some web-based cloud server/cluster farm because the bean counters/investors/take your pick will require this.
Even the high-compute power of your Adobe tasks will move into Adobe's cloud as they find it more profitable to do so. You'll still access it from your local computer and you might even be able to store the results
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Nobody said that they were going away. That said, most people aren't going to pay Dell/HP/IBM $50,000 for one when you can build one yourself for $10,000 in high end PC parts. We now live in a era where you can get 32 Core processors and 512 GB RAM kits from NewEgg like you were ordering socks from Amazon.
And Chromebooks for Administrative Staff (Score:2)
and Non Technical Managers.
Or maybe Surface tablets...
There will still be higher level managers/VPs/CIO/CEO... who will demand the most cutting edge, powerful systems to run their pivot tables, but seriously, there are probably very few people who will actually use these devices for much of anything than the usual desktop applications.
Re:And Chromebooks for Administrative Staff (Score:5, Interesting)
Computers have 2 users Producers and Consumers. Consumers read/respond to email, surf, read reports, etc. Producers create CAD drawings, write/debug code, edit/create video or music what would be deemed “power users”. Some people have said, “but it’s moving to the cloud”, well, storage may be cloud based, but the heavy processing is local.
Power users need computers, PC’s, workstations, etc. Consumers can usually get by just fine with tablets or chromebooks.
As far as the Surface - I run an IT shop and can order for myself pretty much whatever I want. I've had 2 iterations of Surface and hated them both. It feels like a toy, the screen isn’t that great, the battery life sucks (90 minutes, 2 hours tops), lack of ports It’s really just glorified, overhyped, overpriced tablet.
Re: And Chromebooks for Administrative Staff (Score:2)
Writing and testing code on iPad (Score:2)
Producers create CAD drawings, write/debug code
Everything you've named can be done on an iPad.
Writing and testing code on an iPad, particularly one without a mobile data connection ($/mo) to a rented server ($/mo), is a recent development. I remember June 2009 when Apple was rejecting iPhone ports of classic games just because the emulated computer could be rebooted into a BASIC prompt [slashdot.org] into which the user could type unapproved code. It took seven more years to get from there to Swift Playgrounds.
Even in fourth quarter 2020, can an iPad user make iPad apps and publish them to the App Store on an iPad
What? (Score:3)
IBM hasn't sold a workstation in over a decade. They make POWER chips available to third parties to build workstation boards, which as far as I can tell they will continue to do.
As for PC workstations, there are dozens of companies still building those. The author decries these as "can do anything good at nothing" machines, but the reason they took over is the rate of technological advancement for commodity hardware overtook workstations in the 2000's. You could buy a commodity PC with a Quadro video card that would outperform an SGI workstation costing twice as much. Heck, before Quadros were crushing SGIs and RS/6000s, they were blowing away the $3000 Wildcat and Oxygen workstation 3D cards at less than half the price as well.
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IBM does indeed. Phoronix semi regularly benchmark one of the third party POWER workstations. They're more expensive and for most talks slower than a decent PC. 100% fully open source though, so not too outrageous if you need a very high level of trust, or even if you want something a little different.
What is a workstation? (Score:2)
Vendors tend to throw that term around but these days it sees to mean, "more expensive, but in theory more reliable than a consumer desktop". Whether they actually are more reliable is not at all clear.
Also means "powerful computer that doesn't have alien eyes or something on it that makes it look like a toy".
Often also means: "50% less crap-ware", and ships with proprietary "security" software that you need to disable in order to get anything done.
No need for workstations (Score:2)
Back in the day I used Sun workstations. Compared to my desktop workstation, my home PC was an under-powered toy.
Today I you can use a laptop that is many orders of magnitudes more powerful than my old Sun workstation. For enterprise computing tasks you can access servers including configurable on-demand cloud-based servers. There is no need for desktop workstations.
It’s all generic these days (Score:2)
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What do you mean "might try"? Apple IS ditching x86 for ARM.
There will be (more) news on Nov 10.
The right tool for the job (Score:3)
But when you're hauling a ton of goods
For the average person, maybe on one occasion every 5-10 years.
That is a pretty dumb reason for buying an expensive vehicle that will hardly ever get used for what it is designed for, Unless the real issue is self-image
As everyone grounded in the real world knows, the optimum solution is to buy the vehicle you will use the most and for the few exceptions in a lifetime, hire something with more capacity. Or just hire a team to perform that job for you. Few individuals are capable or fit enough to shift a one-ton load. Even though many one-ton loads are really just several back-and-forth 200lb loads.
The argument fails.Both for the example given and the extension to PCs - hasn't this guy heard of the cloud?
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for the few exceptions in a lifetime, hire something with more capacity.
Have you ever rented an on-premises PC or workstation?
hasn't this guy heard of the cloud?
I've tried the cloud. I concluded that remote desktop to the cloud is a lagfest.
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You could perfectly well have a decent machine next to your desk with several top end graphics cards and not just dual CPUs but dual PSUs (one on the UPS) and use it to design all sorts of things - or even debug next gen hardware.
Or, you could sit in your mum's basement writing PHP by throwing cow pats at the screen with y
You miss paying $10K to $100K or more? (Score:2)
Dafuq is this guy talking about? Workstations used to cost minimum $10K to over $100K for a heavy duty graphics station.
Everything today is cheaper, more flexible and with a wider range of configurations.
- Two competing Wintel chip vendors regularly increasing performance
- Full operating system compatibility, which choice of Linux or Windows
- Competing providers of graphics cards that work as massively parallel processors
- Massive I/O capacity and variety of peripherals on PCI-whatever and USB
- Form factors
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Go to the Dell website pick a Precision workstation and start pimping it out. I am at 80k GBP which is around 100k USD. If you want to spend that on a workstation today you still can.
Though frankly you would be better off working out how to offload your compute to a cluster somewhere and get something for a lot less.
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I'm curious how many people are willing to spend that kind of money on a pre-built workstation when you can just build yourself something with a 32 core AMD Threadripper processor and 512 GB of RAM for under $10,000.
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"Graham is a senior at Oxford" (Score:2)
I knew Cambridge was where they do Computing and Oxford where they do Social Science, but could none of his colleagues be bothered to warn him about his lame, cliched and almost always incorrect computer-car analogy ?
Server-class hardware in PC form factor (Score:2)
I don't think that a "workstation" is necessarily the same thing as just a "Wintel" PC with higher specs.
While that may be true for a low-end workstation, high-end workstations tend to be designed a little bit like servers: with components designed to be easy to service.
Drives, cards and PSU can often be replaced without any tools.
They are also often sold with service/support packages.
All this because any downtime when the workstation user is not able to do work is considered wasted, and must be minimised.
T
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Odd reasoning (Score:3)
In high-tech domains, an engineer could readily have a toolchest of suitable computers in the same way that a mechanic has different tools for their tasks. This one has an FPGA connected by both PCI-E and JTAG to allow for quick hardware prototyping. This one is connected to a high-throughput GPU for visualisations; that one to a high-capacity GPU for scientific simulations.
and now we have a standard PC with expansion cards for all 3 tasks, instead of having to have 3 single-purpose computers on my desk.
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Untimely? (Score:2)
Workstation Unix User Group Story (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm bored and really don't want to read news, so Slashdot gets a free essay.
I didn't understand what the Calgary Unix Users Group really was in Calgary until years after it was over. (Not CUUG, we're still going; but we aren't the group we were when founded.)
Calgary, 1991 was an oil town that did mondo amounts of geological modelling and staggering amounts of (geological) database storage and manipulation. It was a time in Moore's Law when year-old machines were arguably obsolete, in that your 20-hour runs could become 15-hour runs if you upgraded your 1990 machine to 1991. Engineers could get their boss to spend $20,000 (1991$ = $33K 2020) pretty easily. Competition between HP, DEC, IBM and SUN was pretty hot.
To become a "CUUG Sponsor" with the right to address the meeting one month per year, you pretty much had to donate some thousands to keep the meetings going (pay for the snacks at your own meeting, for sure), and also donate a workstation to our "CRC", the "CUUG Resource Centre", also our downtown office that consumed most of the donation funds. People would come down there and do stuff like port programs from SUN to DEC or whatever, try out the machine.
(This later on, whole separate story, became Calgary's first ISP, with 50 modems hooked into Calgayr's first non-University Internet node, and a CUUG Board Member split off that function to become a commercial firm, "CADVision", which he sold for about $50M. No, he didn't donate a cent.)
After Windows NT came in, it was possible to run programs in more than 640K on non-workstations, and it all began to decay. It was gone in about 3 years. Unix Workstations were still selling, but in sharp decline. The sponsors all dried up. As I said, CUUG is still going over 20 years after that, but we just meet and talk Unix now, the 100-member meetings are a memory, it's all done on a shoestring. The CRC became one server in a guy's basement for a decade, then a VPS that costs just dollars per month.
What was explained to me later was that the sponsorship "talks" (genteel sales pitches, bad form to just tout your own product) were never the point; the CRC was. It was a salesroom, like a car showroom, but for engineers that loathe being pitched to. Just leave them alone in the room to try out all the workstations, they'll buy one. Or get their boss to. This is not an era of brand loyalty: if you're running C programs, you could give a crap about the OS or the hardware, just the run time on your reservoir simulation.
It was a weird situation, where large companies vied to donate $20K pieces of equipment. And trusted to their product to sell itself.
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> . It was a time in Moore's Law when year-old machines were arguably obsolete, in that your 20-hour runs could become 15-hour runs if you upgraded your 1990 machine to 1991.
1991? I was part of a Fujitsu team that sold a supercomputer to a Calgary university/oil industry consortium for geological modelling. Vendors at the time claimed that the fastest workstations had 25% of the power of a supercomputer. So why spend the money for the super? The customer said it would take 4 months of computing to get th
Nonsense (Score:2)
It's true that the highly specialized (and often curiously limited) expensive workstation is gone. That's because the modern general purpose PC, possibly with a couple specialized add-ons will blow one of those workstations away at a fraction of the cost.
I just built a new workstation from parts and it is working out nicely. The trick is that you have to select the parts individually and assemble it yourself or pay someone like MicroCenter to do it for you. The appropriate hardware may appear to be absent f
On my desk (Score:2)
The bus stops at the bus station.
The train stops at the train station.
On my desk there is a work station...
So very outdated... (Score:2)
So for one, IBM spun down any workstation related activity years ago. They are currently phoning in POWER servers and only really taking seriously their mainframe hardware business. POWER workstations got spun down about the same time as x86 workstations (which were killed off before the second Lenovo acquisition)
It also holds onto an antiquated notion that workstation must not have x86 in it. This has been pretty antiquated since around 20 years ago. I can see being nostalgic for those days with a clear
Kickass workstation (Score:2)
You want a kickass workstation? Built your own Threadripper box. Put in 128 GB ram and 32 or more processors. Put in water cooling and an ultimately cool gamer case. $4k if you pull out all the stops, you can do it for $2.5. This will kick the tail of brand name workstations costing of $10k. Way over.
If you want to go even cheaper, go with Ryzen and gamer boards. Still kick the tail for most workstations.
Re: Maybe he misses driving the forklift (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The author of TFA doesn't consider that a "workstation" because it's not fantastically expensive and it can run the same apps as the PC under the receptionist's desk.
Re: (Score:2)
I think that's the point the author doesn't understand. You can now build a machine in the same class as the old "workstation" based on commodity parts, possibly with a couple of specialized or high end modules added. IMHO, calling the end result a workstation is fair enough. The author seems to disagree for undetermined reasons.
Part of it may be marketing related. Many of the parts in my workstation built from commodity parts are marketed to gamers (though I skipped the neon lights and such) but the specs