Lee -
Thin clients are not "dumb terminals". They can do anything a fat client can do. They use resources on the server to execute applications rather than their own horsepower, and are optimized for graphics handling. Compute intensive tasks like CAD run more slowly on thin clients, so you're right, engineering sites will probably stick with large workstations. But for most routine "office productivity" or dedicated applications, there is no difference in user experience between a thin client and a regular PC, assuming that the network bandwidth and server power is adequate.
Both can run virtually any application or group of applications, both can support multiple windows, both support multi-media...
An advantage of thin client systems like Citrix include the ability to run Windows applications on non-windows hardware like Sun workstations. This is handy for Wall Street trading desks, where the trader has a SUN box but wants to run occasional windows apps like word, excel, or other applications written for the Intel environment. The old solution was put a small PC somewhere on the trader's desk but the Citrix solution is much more elegant. And the apps are running on an Intel server, so there is no compatibility issue.
I saw a demonstration which showed performance of standard Windows applications on a 450 MHz PC and a thin client based on StrongArm. The thin client had almost identical performance at 1/10 the cost. This was a complex benchmark which ran several operations on a number of standard Windows applications and measured performance as the load increased.
Of course, the work had to be done somewhere, typically on a large server, so the economic benefits are dependent on the number and normal loading of clients in a system, but real-world examples show general-purpose systems can satisfy most users at about 1/3 the initial capital cost of traditional PC clients, with lower maintenance costs as well. And given the longer life of the thin client, 5 year cost of ownership is more like 20% of the traditional solution.
So please don't confuse thin clients with either old style terminals or the NC. They are really client-server system components with more of the workload distributed to the server. |
