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Workstation

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This article is about the type of computer. For other uses, seeWork station.
ANeXTcubeworkstation, the same type on which theWorld Wide Webwas created byTim Berners-LeeatCERNinSwitzerland.[1]

Aworkstationis a special computer designed for technical orscientificapplications.[2]Intended primarily to be used by a single user,[2]they are commonly connected to alocal area networkand runmulti-useroperating systems.The termworkstationhas been used loosely to refer to everything from amainframe computerterminal to aPCconnected to anetwork,but the most common form refers to the class of hardware offered by several current and defunct companies such asSun Microsystems,[3]Silicon Graphics,Apollo Computer,[4]DEC,HP,NeXT,andIBMwhich powered the3D computer graphicsrevolution of the late 1990s.[5]

Workstations formerly offered higher performance than mainstreampersonal computers,especially inCPU,graphics,memory, and multitasking. Workstations are optimized for thevisualizationand manipulation of different types of complex data such as 3D mechanical design, engineering simulations likecomputational fluid dynamics,animation,video editing,image editing,medical imaging,image rendering,computational science,and mathematical plots. Typically, theform factoris that of adesktop computer,which consists of a high-resolution display, akeyboard,and amouseat a minimum, but also offers multiple displays,graphics tablets,and3D micefor manipulating objects and navigating scenes. Workstations were the first segment of the computer market[6]to present advanced accessories, and collaboration tools likevideoconferencing.[5]

The increasing capabilities of mainstream PCs since the late 1990s have reduced distinction between the PCs and workstations.[7]Typical 1980s workstations have expensive proprietary hardware and operating systems to categorically distinguish from standardized PCs. From the 1990s and 2000s,IBM'sRS/6000andIntelliStationhaveRISC-basedPOWERCPUs runningAIX,and itsIBM PC SeriesandAptivacorporate and consumer PCs have Intel x86 CPUs. However, by the early 2000s, this difference largely disappeared, since workstations use highlycommoditizedhardware dominated by large PC vendors, such asDell,Hewlett-Packard,andFujitsu,sellingx86-64systems runningWindowsorLinux.

History

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EarlyXeroxworkstation
HP 9000model 425 workstation runningHP-UX9 andVisual User Environment(VUE)
HP 9000model 735 runningHP-UXand theCommon Desktop Environment(CDE)

Origins and development

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The first computer that might qualify as a workstation is theIBM 1620,a small scientific computer designed to be used interactively by a single person sitting at the console.[8]It was introduced in 1959.[9]One peculiar feature of the machine is that it lacks any arithmetic circuitry.[10]To perform addition, it requires a memory-resident table of decimal addition rules.[11]This reduced the cost of logic circuitry, enabling IBM to make it inexpensive. The machine iscodenamedCADET and was initially rented for $1000 per month.

In 1965, theIBM 1130scientific computer became the successor to 1620. Both of these systems runFortranand 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 were generally dedicatedminicomputers,a multiuser system reserved for one user. For example, thePDP-8fromDigital Equipment Corporation,is regarded as the first commercial minicomputer.[13]

TheLisp machinesdeveloped atMITin the early 1970s pioneered some workstation principles, as high-performance, networked, single-user systems intended for heavily interactive use. Lisp Machines were commercialized beginning 1980 by companies likeSymbolics,Lisp Machines,Texas Instruments(theTI Explorer), andXerox(theInterlisp-Dworkstations). The first computer designed for a single user, with high-resolution graphics (and so a workstation in the modern sense), is theAltodeveloped atXerox PARCin 1973.[14]Other early workstations include theTerak 8510/a(1977),[15]Three Rivers PERQ(1979), and the laterXerox Star(1981).

1980s rise in popularity

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See also:Silicon Graphics Inc,NeXT,Apollo Computer,Digital Equipment Corporation,andIBM RT PC

In the early 1980s, with the advent of32-bitmicroprocessorssuch as theMotorola 68000,several new competitors appeared, includingApollo ComputerandSun Microsystems,[16]with workstations based on 68000 andUnix.[17][18]Meanwhile,DARPA'sVLSI Projectcreated several spinoff graphics products, such as theSilicon Graphics3130.Target markets were differentiated, with Sun and Apollo considered to be network workstations and SGI as graphics workstations.RISCCPUs increased in the mid-1980s, typical of workstation vendors.[19]

Workstations often featureSCSIorFibre Channeldisk storage systems, high-end3D accelerators,single or multiple64-bitprocessors,[20]large amounts ofRAM,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

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Workstations diversified to the lowest possible price point as opposed to performance, called thethin clientornetwork computer.Dependent upon a network and server, this reduces the machine to having no hard drive, and only the CPU, keyboard, mouse, and screen. Somediskless nodesstill run a traditional operating system and perform computations locally, with storage on a remoteserver.[21]These are intended to reduce the initial system purchase cost, and thetotal cost of ownership,by reducing the amount of administration required per user.[22]

This approach was first attempted as a replacement for PCs in office productivity applications, with the3Stationby3Com.In the 1990s,X terminalsfilled a similar role for technical computing. Sun'sthin clientsinclude theSun Rayproduct 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

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Main article:3M computer
ANeXTstationgraphics workstation from 1990
Sony NEWSworkstation: 2×68030at 25 MHz, 1280×1024 pixel and 256-color display
SGI Indygraphics workstation
SGI O2graphics workstation
HPC8000 workstation runningHP-UX11i withCDE
Six workstations: four HP Z620, one HP Z820, one HP Z420

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 "MegaFLOPS"compute performance (at least one million floating-point operations per second).[24]RFC 782 defines the workstation environment more generally as "hardware and software dedicated to serve a single user", and that it provisions additional shared resources. This is at least one order of magnitude beyond the capacity of the personal computer of the time. The original 1981IBM Personal Computerhas 16 KB memory, a text-only display, and floating-point performance around1kFLOPS(30 kFLOPSwith the optional 8087 math coprocessor. Other features beyond the typical personal computer include networking, graphics acceleration, and high-speed internal and peripheral data buses.

Another goal was to bring the price below one "megapenny",that is, less than$10,000(equivalent to $28,000 in 2023), which was achieved in the late 1980s. Throughout the early to mid-1990s, many workstations cost from$15,000to$100,000(equivalent to $200,000 in 2023) or more.

Decline

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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]

  • Reliable components
  • High-performance3D graphicshardware forcomputer-aided design(CAD) andcomputer-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 inNvidia's NV10 and the breakthroughGeForce 256.
  • High-performanceCPUs:the firstRISCof the early 1980s offer roughly one order of magnitude in performance improvement overCISCprocessors of comparable cost.Intel'sx86CISC family always had the edge in market share and theeconomies of scalethat this implied. By the mid-1990s, some CISC processors like theMotorola 68040and Intel's80486andPentiumhave performance parity with RISC in some areas, such as integer performance (at the cost of greater chip complexity) and hardwarefloating-pointcalculations, relegating RISC to even more high-end markets.[26]
  • Hardware support forfloating-pointoperations: optional on the original IBM PC; remained on a separate chip for Intel systems until the80486DXprocessor. 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'sISAperipheral bus. SCSI is an advanced controller interface good for multitasking and daisy chaining. This makes it suited for use in servers, and its benefits to desktop PCs which mostly run single-user operating systems are less clear, but it is standard on the 1980s-1990s Macintosh.Serial ATAis more modern, with throughput comparable to SCSI but at a lower cost.
  • High-speednetworking(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 rates for graphics and CAD work, 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 the80286processor; 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 asSPARCwhich 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.
  • Operating system:early workstations ran theUnixoperating system (OS), aUnix-likevariant, or an unrelated equivalent OS such asVMS.The PC CPUs of the time have limitations in memory capacity andmemory access protection,making them unsuitable to run OSes of this sophistication, but this, too, began to change in the late 1980s as PCs with the32-bit80386with integrated pagedMMUsbecame widely affordable and enablingOS/2,Windows NT 3.1,and Unix-like systems based onBSDandLinuxon 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

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Sun Ultra 20withAMDOpteronprocessor andSolaris 10

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, mostMacintosh Quadracomputers were originally intended for scientific or design work, all with theMotorola 68040CPU, backward compatible with68000Macintoshes. The consumerMacintosh IIcxandMacintosh IIcimodels can be upgraded to theQuadra 700."In an era when many professionals preferred Silicon Graphics workstations, the Quadra 700 was an intriguing option at a fraction of the cost" as resource-intensive software such asInfini-Dbrought "studio-quality 3D rendering and animations to the home desktop". The Quadra 700 can runA/UX3.0, making it aUnixworkstation.[27]Another example is theNvidiaGeForce 256consumer graphics card, which spawned theQuadroworkstation card, which has the same GPU but different driver support and certifications for CAD applications and a much higher price.

Workstations have typically driven advancements in CPU technology. All computers benefit from multi-processor and multicore designs (essentially, multiple processors on adie). The multicore design was pioneered by IBM'sPOWER4;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 asAutoCAD,AvidXpress Studio HD, or3D Studio Max.The certification process increases workstation prices.

Modern market

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ThisHewlett-PackardZ6, anx86-64-based workstation has two RTX 5000 GPUs.

GPU workstations

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Modern workstations are typicallydesktop computerswithAMDorNVIDIA GPUsto dohigh-performance computingon software programs such asvideo editing,3D modeling,computer-aided design,andrendering.[28]

Decline of RISC workstations

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By January 2009, allRISC-based workstation product lines had been discontinued:

  • Hewlett-Packard withdrew its lastHP 9000PA-RISC-based desktop products from the market in January 2008.[29]
  • IBM retired theIntelliStation POWERon January 2, 2009.[30]
  • SGI ended general availability of its MIPS-basedSGI FuelandSGI Tezroworkstations in December 2006.[31]
  • Sun Microsystems announced end-of-life for its lastSun UltraSPARC workstations in October 2008.[32]

In early 2018, RISC workstations were reintroduced in a series ofIBMPOWER9-based systems by Raptor Computing Systems.[33][34]TheMac transition to Apple silicongreatly increased power efficiency and size efficiency over x86-64 with its ARM-based RISC architecture.[35]

x86-64

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Most of the current workstation market uses x86-64 microprocessors. Operating systems includeWindows,FreeBSD,Linux distributions,macOS,andSolaris.[36]Some vendors also market commodity mono-socket systems as workstations.

These are three types of workstations:

  1. Workstation blade systems (IBM HC10 or Hewlett-Packard xw460c.Sun Visualization Systemis akin to these solutions)[37]
  2. Ultra high-end workstation (SGI VirtuVS3xx)
  3. Deskside systems containing server-class CPUs and chipsets on large server-class motherboards with high-end RAM (HP Z-series workstationsandFujitsu CELSIUSworkstations)

Definition

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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.[38]

A workstation-class PC may have some of the following features:

See also

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References

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  2. ^ab"workstation | Definition & Facts",Britannica,retrieved2021-12-05
  3. ^Bechtolsheim, Andreas; Baskett, Forest (1980)."High-performance raster graphics for microcomputer systems".Proceedings of the 7th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques - SIGGRAPH '80.New York, New York, USA: ACM Press. pp. 43–47.doi:10.1145/800250.807466.ISBN0897910214.S2CID12045240.
  4. ^"US and India sign neutrino pact".Physics World.31(5): 13. May 2018.doi:10.1088/2058-7058/31/5/23.ISSN0953-8585.
  5. ^abJohnson, Karen; Fairless, Tami; Giangrande, Scott (2020-08-01).Ka-Band ARM Zenith Radar Corrections (KAZRCOR, KAZRCFRCOR) Value-Added Products(Report).doi:10.2172/1647336.OSTI1647336.S2CID242933956.
  6. ^"Global Personal Computers Market Report (2021 to 2030) - COVID-19 Impact and Recovery - ResearchAndMarkets".Business Wire. 2021-06-23.Retrieved2022-09-07.
  7. ^"Workstation Computer".OIDair WEB.Archived fromthe originalon 2021-12-05.Retrieved2021-12-05.
  8. ^"IBM workstations"(PDF).IBM.
  9. ^"IBM Archives: 1620 Data Processing System".ibm.2003-01-23.Retrieved2022-03-06.
  10. ^Sweeney, D. W. (1965)."An analysis of floating-point addition".IBM Systems Journal.4(1): 31–42.doi:10.1147/sj.41.0031.ISSN0018-8670.
  11. ^"IBM 1620".2017-12-22. Archived fromthe originalon 2017-12-22.Retrieved2022-03-08.
  12. ^"IBM 1130 Press Release".2019-07-05. Archived fromthe originalon 2019-07-05.Retrieved2022-03-06.
  13. ^Hey, Anthony J. G. (2015).The computing universe: a journey through a revolution.Gyuri Pápay. Cambridge University Press.ISBN978-1-316-12976-0.OCLC899007268.
  14. ^Newquist, HP (1994).The Brain Makers.Internet Archive. Indianapolis, Ind.: Sams Pub.ISBN978-0-672-30412-5.
  15. ^"» Pascal and the P-Machine The Digital Antiquarian".Retrieved2022-03-08.
  16. ^"The Death Of The Workstation? - INFOtainment News".2013-02-11.Retrieved2022-03-19.
  17. ^"The SUN workstation architecture"(PDF).Stanford University.Retrieved15 March2022.
  18. ^"Apollo Domain DN100 workstation - CHM Revolution".computer history.org.Retrieved2022-03-10.
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  22. ^"Diskless Nodes HOW-TO document for Linux: What is this all about?".ossh.Retrieved2022-03-18.
  23. ^"CNN - Here comes the Sun Ray - November 2, 1999".CNN.Retrieved2022-03-18.
  24. ^Andries van Dam; David H. Laidlaw; Rosemary Michelle Simpson (2002-08-04). "Experiments in Immersive Virtual Reality for Scientific Visualization". Computers & Graphics. 26 (4): 535–555. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.4.9249. doi:10.1016/S0097-8493(02)00113-9
  25. ^The Daily Gazette.The Daily Gazette.
  26. ^Webster, Bruce(December 1991)."Macintosh Quadras - Power But No Pizzazz".MacWorld.Vol. 8, no. 12. pp. 140–147.
  27. ^Wilkinson, Chris (11 December 2020)."Working from home at 25MHz: You could do worse than a Quadra 700 (even in 2020)".Ars Technica.
  28. ^Unsworth, Andrew (February 9, 2023)."Best workstation GPUs in 2024 - The top picks".PC Guide.
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  35. ^"Introducing M1 Pro and M1 Max: the most powerful chips Apple has ever built".Apple Newsroom (Australia).Retrieved2023-11-16.
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  38. ^Peddie, Jon (June 13, 2013).The History of Visual Magic in Computers: How Beautiful Images are Made in CAD, 3D, VR and AR.Springer London.ISBN9781447149323.RetrievedApril 28,2024.
  39. ^abcdefBushong, Stewart C.; Clarke, Geoffrey (2013-08-07).Magnetic Resonance Imaging: Physical and Biological Principles.Elsevier Health Sciences.ISBN978-0-323-27765-5.
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  41. ^"The Best PCI Express NVMe Solid State Drives (SSDs) for 2024".PCMAG.
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