Workstation

With Workstation (English: "Workstation " ) refers to a particularly powerful workstation for technical or scientific applications, in contrast to the standard personal computer for home or office use. Typically, workstations are used in companies and research institutions for compute- intensive applications such as 3D design, computer simulations, video editing and animated 3D computer graphics. Usually provide workstations in graphic representation, processing power, memory and multitasking above-average results, often the additional terminals are used.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the market was dominated by workstations running Unix and VMS operating systems, many manufacturers produced their own hardware based on vendor-specific high-performance RISC microprocessors such as the PA-RISC, MIPS or SPARC series. The acquisition cost was usually a multiple of which average PC. Meanwhile, the combination of the respective most powerful Intel or AMD processors (eg Xeon or Opteron ) has also been in the workstation segment largely prevailed with Microsoft Windows or Linux operating system, and most manufacturers offer their own processor lines for workstations no longer or have all set. The market is now dominated by large PC makers such as Hewlett- Packard and Dell, most previous manufacturer of RISC / Unix workstations have shifted to other products.

Due to the increasing use of computers in product development workstations have a central role in the development process of industrial products today. The range of applications includes, among other things, the design using CAD software, functional simulation, digital prototyping of complex products and the tools and forms design for manufacturing. An ever- growing area of ​​application is the creation of computer animation for feature films and television productions. Here many locations in several countries distributed single-user workstations are used in part to be connected together to increase the processing power to render a computing cluster.

Workstation and workstation

The term is not synonymous with workstation. A workstation is like a personal computer, a workstation - but not every workstation is a workstation. However, personal computers are now also very powerful and are increasingly used in scientific and technological area, the boundaries between personal computers and workstations are becoming increasingly blurred. Does this trend by frequent practice in computer marketing, a desktop computer is to enter through the term workstation with a particularly powerful painting.

Historically

Historically, the property for a user, or at least for a few users was an important distinction to the usual multi-user systems. Instead of the multi-user system via a terminal to be (usually in series and in text mode ) connected to a computer, the computing time you had to share with many others, was the engineer, the scientist, or a small workgroup with a workstation virtually exclusively a separate device for available. In contrast to the often slow serial terminal connections of the classic multi-user systems include workstations, direct attached, sometimes several, more powerful graphics systems and monitors, but in addition they can also have fast network connections operate connected powerful graphical X terminals. This opened up just for technical and scientific applications entirely new visualization options. Against this background, for workstations and X terminals typical, high-quality, large-format screens can be seen. Due to the rapid developments in standard PCs, especially in the area of ​​CPU, GPU, and operating systems, the difference between workstation and PC blurred more and led from about 2000 to thin out and consequently also to the disappearance of typically proprietary workstation architectures.

Development

Workstations developed in the 1980s to an independent computer form, not least because of the large workstation manufacturer this time as Apollo, DEC, HP, Sun, SGI, and NeXT, which was able to show the advantages of a workstation compared to multi-user systems. Added to this was at the time the idea of ​​client / server computing, also have a place at the workstation as a client. Many of these manufacturers have disappeared from the market or produce no more workstations. Among other reasons, because personal computer ever invaded the traditional applications of workstations. Today's standard PCs are much cheaper than traditional workstations, yet they are in terms of computing and graphics performance to the traditional workstation architectures and processors (MIPS, PA -RISC, PowerPC, SPARC) equal, if not superior part. Most offered as workstations today systems are ordinary high-end PC with an x86 processor. Frequently there are processors of the server and workstation series, such as Intel Xeon or AMD Opteron used.

Reliability

Workstations are typically equipped particularly robust in terms of both its hardware and its software. As a relatively expensive systems they were designed for professional applications where downtime represent a significant cost factor. The operating system therefore came to the mid- 1990s, mainly the commercial UNIX versions of the major vendors Sun, HP, IBM and SCO for use, but also VMS and other Unix -like systems such as NeXT. From 1994, the development of the functional scope of the Linux distributions was so far advanced that this open source reimplementation of Unix could replace the commercial systems. Around the same time, the graphical user interface with Windows also began to enforce on PCs, where it had previously found a distribution essentially only on Mac systems, which were mainly used by creative users and partly in the university sector. However, only the Unix and Unix-like systems provided the usual reliability of workstations. Especially with Windows 3.1, which was an essay on MS -DOS, but also in Windows NT were regularly crashes on the agenda. In the following period the differences between workstations and personal computers are increasingly dwindled. A distinction between a workstation and a PC equipped with high quality components is hard to make in the 21st century.

Ergonomics

For workstations ergonomics was from the beginning a more important topic than the PC. While PC users had to cope up in the 1990s, generally with very limited possibilities of MS- DOS, were workstations multitasking and multi- user capability and provided a graphical user interface, but also the much more powerful command line environment of a Unix system. There were, among others, an automatic tab-completion and history for the entered commands. When comparing these systems with newer computers should be noted however, that even an average smartphone from the beginning of the 21st century more computational power than a workstation from the 1980s. Accordingly, the demands on the ergonomics of the system have changed. The classic desktop environments of commercial Unix systems such as HP VUE and CDE like a modern Mac or Windows users seem very user-friendly. However, in their time, they were more ergonomic than the standard PC systems.