The workstation is reborn

Remember the workstation? It was a snob’s dream, a just reason to chortle at the plebes running PCs. Personal computer? Ha! What a toy. I have a workstation. Don’t bother me, kid, I’m working. On my workstation. Go log on to AOL or something.

Workstations used to be plentiful, mainstream machines for power users, developers, and everyone who wanted more from a system than they could get from a home computer. They needed systems that were powerful and easy to customize, instead of user-friendly. Now workstations are a rarity, relegated to a few specialized markets such as sci/tech, academia, 3-D graphics, and animation. And most so-called workstations aren’t workstations at all. They’re PCs in tuxedos, dressed up for a swanky party they ought not attend.

A workstation is a muscle-bound, desk-side Unix beast that you swaddle in barbed wire when you’re away. If you miss them as I do, be cheered: They’re coming back. Technology from AMD, Intel, and Apple, among others, will kick off the renaissance. The components they are now building into dual-processor servers will be repackaged — but not scaled down — for single-user workstations.

The market’s obsession with low-profile rack servers forced OEMs of the AMD Opteron 64-bit CPU to target that market first. But even if AMD wanted Opteron reserved solely for server use, dual- and single-processor Opteron chip sets and motherboards have been announced. Less expensive Opteron CPUs have debuted in recent weeks, and the desktop-targeted Athlon64 is right around the corner. I’d say that AMD-powered 64-bit workstations will be on the market in 2004.

Pedestal machines with dual Xeon processors have already arrived from Intel and its OEMs. Whether any 32-bit x86 system can be termed a workstation is a fair question. The category should leave room for affordable alternatives to systems priced at about $3,000 (the baseline workstation target). With 64-bit machines in the mainstream, Xeon could become the bargain player.

The 64-bit machine getting the most attention now is the Power Mac G5. Jon Rubinstein, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, is just plain adamant about calling the Power Mac G5 a PC instead of a workstation. I understand why — he doesn’t want his baby squeezed into the tiny niche that now confines so-called workstations. And if the Power Mac G5 is judged by PC standards instead of workstation standards, it will fare better in characterizations of its performance and usability. I do understand. Yet I can’t help that when I drive Apple’s latest creation, my brain hollers, “This is a workstation!” To his credit, Mr. Rubinstein is not swayed by the voices in my head.

The workstation wild card is Itanium 2. It’s a no-brainer to me, given that the CPU is a top performer. Intel needs something that fills the margin and performance gaps that competition and Xeon’s price slide will create. There are questions about cooling, but system makers are handling that with increasing ingenuity. HP’s got the Itanium franchise and the engineering smarts to make it work. We’ll have to wait until HP decides there is a worthwhile market for non-server Itanium.

When these machines come out, I’m going to stuff one with a flamethrowing 3-D accelerator, 8GB of memory, and a terabyte of disk. No joystick, no TV tuner, and no cables running to my stereo. If you call it a PC, I’ll tell you to go calculate a spreadsheet. You’ll find me working at my workstation.