BLAME ENGINEERS: Workstation sales soar by 8.9 per cent a year One of the more prized wins in reseller-land is a sale of workstations, because the heavy lifting such machines perform generate lots of data. That means a chance to talk storage, networks and many other topics, making workstations a fabulous foot in the door. Plenty of folks will therefore be rather happy that market-watcher …
One reason I can cite from my own workplace: it's hard to run a couple of VMs or an OpenStack rig on your typical Dell Latitude corporate lappy. And since world+dog has gone cloud crazy, being able to show your stuff running in cloud when on site at a customer with the world's worst wifi/internet is a Good Thing.
Well "workstation" is a very fuzzy word. Back in the 1980s and 1990s it mostly meant "yet another UNIX workstation". Back then that implied more RAM and and CPU power than your typical "MS-DOS"-PC.
Today, thanks to gamers, virus scanners, Windows and the Freedesktop people, your typical PC is really fast. In fact it's already hard to get a $10k PC. In any case you now can run either the current spiritual successor of MS-DOS or UNIX on your computer.
So while the industry which already started to brand 486s running Windows 3.1 as "workstations" has it's own definition, I personally see it differently. For me a "workstation" is mostly defined as a computer running an unixoid operating system, since that's the key to a powerful system. CPU power is mostly irrelevant in many tasks. It doesn't matter if your calculation takes 0.1 or 10 seconds, if you need a minute to enter the command for your calculation. That's where unixoid systems shine, they have powerful command processors which enable you to express your intention in very little code. To me this is what makes a workstation.
In the nineties a workstation was a desktop minicomputer, which meant RISC processors, SCSI discs and UNIX software.
What would a workstation be today? If you count your average gamer's PC or MacPro, then the term makes no more sense, nor does a crappy PC become a workstation just because it runs Ubuntu. Since crappy PCs have lots of storage (SSD), 10 Gb Ethernet and 8K video. 1 TB of RAM is a commodity server's fare, which leaves us with CPU power as the distinguishing factor. Workstation class might start at 100 cores or a couple of massive GPU cards. Above that you would approach HPC territory. Mobile? That means anything that fits in a big American truck (lorry).
I would agree with the question. However, in the mobile workstation niche, I would include the portable All-in-one's, albeit the Dell XPS-18 with an i7 and 8GB RAM and SSD is only an "entry level" workstation, but it can run Hyper-V and a few VM's; shame about connectivity and limited disk but lots of screen real estate...
We've recently configured up a mobile workstation (based on a Dell Alienware machine) for a developer colleague and were a little surprised to find just how few vendors now make mobile workstations . ie. anything with a screen larger than ~15" and decent resolution etc..
Workstation == The machine that you want you run a program on which:
1) the cheap PCs in the lab room are simply unable to run (plus, those are "Windows", unserious at best)
2) the Gods of the Sun Mainframe In the Basement decided you won't run: "Have your department head submit a request, LOL! X terminal access? No bandwidth for that, sorry."
The state of play has very much changed since then, so that term makes only sense to oldsters who want to keep young people off their lawn.
Today, get a cheap terminal and allocate CPUs in the cloud,
....until your personal AI needs a big machine right in your physical neighborhood.
That's where unixoid systems shine, they have powerful command processors which enable you to express your intention in very little code.
What, you mean like bash? And the array of SUS text-processing utilities? And scripting languages like Awk, Perl, and Ruby? And fast character-mode editors like vim?
I run all of that on Windows. It's my standard Windows development environment.1 A little Cygwin installation and presto.
So I guess that means any Windows system can be quickly transformed into a "workstation".
1When Visual Studio or Eclipse offers significantly more productivity than the entire shell and command set, I'll consider using an IDE. And, of course, using the same tools on Windows, Linux, and UNIX makes cross-platform development simpler; my user experience doesn't differ much these days among those platforms.
(ok luggable)
that can :-
1) take 64Gb RAM?
2) Have a screen better than 1920x1080
3) has a CPU better than an Quad Core i7
4) Comes with 2TB of M-Sata SSD
My HP Laptop runs at least 6 VM's most days. 28-30Gb ram.
sure this is an exception but like another poster says, this is my personal go anywhere cloud server.
there's no such laptop. It's easy to spec things that are not available.
When laptops start to take 64GB you'll be needing 128GB? And in Apple Air-esque form factor too.
Consider the Eurocom Panther 5SE. It packs up to 12 core Xeons and 4 SSDs, though Complement the basic FullHD display with a USB powered Displaylink monitor for "easy" portability.
You'll still be limited to the paltry 32 gigs on memory but the GPU memory (16GB) can be utilized as a RAM disk.
Then again you could just scotch tape an UPS into a Proliant and carry that too.
We have a lot of Dell Precision "M series" mobile workstations around. While I wouldn't want to carry one of these (with 180-watt power brick) across a desert, they are actually pretty nice machines. Nice screen, good keyboard (with number pad), and with a SSD and 2GB or better video card, they are quick. Would make a good gaming laptop too. Some of our other departments are realizing that their pretty little "Ultrabook" laptops are really just shiny toys with tepid performance when it comes to actually getting work done and are coveting these as well. Then we have the *snort* Surface Pro tablets that only a delusional marketing type could love...
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