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Technology Stocks : Dell Technologies Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: freeus who wrote (47674)	6/15/1998 5:18:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 176387

freeus - There seems to be a lot of confusion about what is and is not a workstation. As Meathead and others have pointed out this is an important market so let me take a minute to give some definitions. When tech types talk about the workstation market or workstation products they are not talking about PCs or even souped-up PCs, but about machines which use mostly PC components but have a slightly different architecture designed to speed transfers between memory and disk, or between CPU and memory, or between CPU and graphics. They also have more sophisticated graphics systems which do more work on the card, cutting down on bus traffic and increasing graphics performance. I am quite familiar with CPQ's Professional Workstation line and HP's Kayak line, I know the specifications of Dell's workstation products but do not have first hand knowledge. I also have used products from Sun and SGI which are RISC Unix workstations. The Intel-based workstation market has been developing for several years, but has really taken off in the last 18 months because of both hardware advances and because many of the traditional Unix software packages are now available for NT. These packages (CAD and EAD systems used for development of complex products like jet planes, new computer chips, etc., as well as the more famous use to generate animated dinosaurs and other real-time 3D animation) depend on the advanced features of the workstation such as special memory control and graphics capability, and don't really run very well on a standard PC, even a very fast one like a 400MHz PII. The workstation market, because of its emphasis on performance and the traditionally very expensive products, has been a high margin business for all who have gone into it, although the investment to get to an acceptable product is not small, and involves working with software partners as much as hardware. Dell has developed very successful workstation products and has seen some of its best growth in this space, in both percent units and gross margin. CPQ and HP were early leaders, and are currently battling for #1 in NT based systems. HP also makes Unix-based workstations. Dell's growth exceeds the leaders and they may well hit and maintain #1 in the near future.