Barry and ALL, Article...Powerful PC's are muscling into the Workstation market...
zdnet.com
SPECIAL REPORT
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 1998
Powerful PCs are Muscling Into the Workstation Market
Michael J. Miller, Editor-In-Chief
PC Magazine
High-end Wintel-based computers are jumping past muscle-bound, low-end Unix workstations. It's no surprise to the hordes of Windows NT users who have seen features and processors double in power every year, but traditional workstation advocates may need time to adjust. Application vendors are already sensing the opportunity and have begun the migration of high-end graphics applications, such as animation and mechanical drawing, to Windows NT. Will this trend continue?
High-end workstations were once the exclusive domain of the big Unix workstation vendors such as SGI, Sun Microsystems, IBM and HP. These companies introduced many workstation standards -- such as OpenGL which started at SGI. Their workstations run high-resolution graphical niche applications, such as data visualization, CAD/ CAM and animation applications that gobble up graphics memory and CPU cycles. Many of these applications use 3D graphics and require high-performance resources as well.
With the advent of the Pentium II, multiprocessing and multithreading operating systems such as Windows NT and new high-end peripheral devices (3D accelerators and graphics coprocessors), we can now configure PCs that blow the doors off traditional workstations in the same price range.
It's still too soon to declare the world of non-Intel workstations dead, however. PCs still can't provide the same degree of scalability. Unix workstations run the same applications and operating environments on computers that have over a dozen processors, as well as gigabytes of memory and storage (with commensurately high prices). Windows NT-based PCs may be able to cluster their way to the same degree of scalability eventually -- but not yet.
In recent PC Magazine testing, we pitted systems with Pentium II/300 CPUs, 128MB of RAM, 8GB of storage and OpenGL-based graphics cards with 24MB of RAM against traditional workstations. As you might suspect, the PCs did well, and you can see the details of our testing in the full review.
One crucial question remains: How many high-end graphics applications will move to Windows NT now that the platform is popular? My guess is that the software will come, and the x86-based systems have entered this market for keeps.
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Regards, Michael
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