Current Workstation Market
As of January 2009, all RISC-based workstation product lines have been discontinued, after the following steps of major RISC vendors:
- SGI ended general availability of its MIPS based SGI Fuel and SGI Tezro workstations in December, 2006.
- Hewlett-Packard withdrew its last HP 9000 PA-RISC based desktop products from the market in January, 2008.
- Sun Microsystems announced end-of-life for its last Sun Ultra SPARC workstations in October, 2008.
- IBM retired its IntelliStation POWER product line on January 2, 2009.
The current workstation market uses x86-64 microprocessors. Operating systems available for these platforms include Windows, the different Linux distributions, Mac OS X, and Solaris 10. Some vendors also market commodity mono socket systems as workstations.
Three types of products are marketed under the workstation umbrella:
- Workstation blade systems (IBM HC10 or Hewlett-Packard xw460c. Sun Visualization System is akin to these solutions)
- Ultra high-end workstation (SGI Virtu VS3xx)
- High-end deskside system two ways capable x64 systems
A significant segment of the desktop market are computers expected to perform as workstations, but using PC operating systems and components. PC component manufacturers will often segment their product line, and market premium components which are functionally similar to the cheaper "consumer" models but feature a higher level of robustness and/or performance. Notable examples of this are the AMD Opteron, Intel Xeon processors, and the ATI FireGL and Nvidia Quadro graphics processors.
A workstation class PC may have some of the following features:
- support for ECC memory
- a larger number of memory sockets which use registered (buffered) modules
- multiple processor sockets, powerful CPUs (for Intel CPU it will be server derived Xeon instead of typical for PCs Core)
- multiple displays
- run reliable operating system with advanced features
- high performance, reliable graphics card (for Nvidia it will use a Quaddro series gpu which is an enterprise variant of the more cost efficient consumer cards)
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