Sun SPARCstation 1+, 25 MHz RISC processor from early 1990s

A workstation, such as a Unix workstation, RISC workstation or engineering workstation, is a high-end microcomputer designed for technical or scientific applications. The SPARCstation, SPARCserver and SPARCcenter product lines were a series of SPARC -based Computer workstations and servers in desktop Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX, sometimes also written as Unix with Small caps) is a computer Engineering is the Discipline and Profession of applying technical and scientific Knowledge and microcomputer is a Computer with a Microprocessor as its Central processing unit. Workstations are intended primarily to be used by one person at a time, although they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. Multi-user is a term that defines an Operating system or Application software that allows concurrent access by multiple users of a Computer. An operating system (commonly abbreviated OS and O/S) is the software component of a Computer system that is responsible for the management and coordination

Historically, workstations offered higher performance than normally seen on a contemporary personal computers, especially with respect to graphics and CPU power, memory capacity and multitasking ability. A personal computer ( PC) is any Computer whose original sales price size and capabilities make it useful for individuals and which is intended to be operated

Workstations are often optimized for displaying and manipulating complex data such as 3D mechanical design, engineering simulation results such as for computational fluid dynamics, animation and rendering of images, and mathematical plots. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD is one of the branches of Fluid mechanics that uses Numerical methods and algorithms to solve and analyze problems that involve Consoles usually consist of a high resolution display, a keyboard and a mouse at a minimum, but often support multiple displays and may often use the fastest available versions of microprocessors. In Computing, a keyboard is an Input device partially modelled after the typewriter keyboard which uses an arrangement of buttons or keys In Computing, a mouse (plural mice, mouse devices, or mouses) For design and advanced visualization tasks, specialized input hardware such as graphics tablets or a SpaceBall can be used. A graphics tablet (or digitizing tablet, graphics pad, drawing tablet) is a computer Input device that allows one to hand-draw images and graphics Workstations have classically been the first part of the computer market to offer advanced accessories and collaboration tools such as videoconferencing capability. A videoconference (also known as a videoteleconference) is a set of interactive Telecommunication technologies which allow two or more locations to interact

Following the performance trends of computers in general, today's average personal computer is more powerful than the top-of-the-line workstations of one or two generations before. Moore's law describes an important trend in the History of computer hardware. As a result, the workstation market is becoming increasingly specialized, since many complex operations that formerly required high-end systems can now be handled by general-purpose PCs. However, workstations are designed and optimized for situations requiring considerable computing power, where they tend to remain usable while traditional personal computers quickly become unresponsive. Workstations perform work of such value to their owners that they are free of the requirement to run mass-market commodity operating systems. While the technology between workstations and PCs has since become similar, workstations still have many specialized features not found on their PC counterparts.

The term "workstation" has also been used to refer to a terminal or PC hooked up to network. A computer network is a group of interconnected Computers. Networks may be classified according to a wide variety of characteristics

What makes a workstation?

Consumer products such as PCs (and even game consoles) today use components that provide a level of power, at a reasonable cost, suitable to tasks which do not require heavy and sustained processing power. However, for engineering, medical, and graphics production tasks, where time is essential, the workstation is hard to beat.

It is instructive to take a detailed look at the history of specific technologies which once differentiated workstations from personal computers. The modern reader might be amused at what was considered the target for a high-end workstation in the early 1980s, the so-called "3M computer": a Megabyte of memory, a Megapixel display (roughly 1000x1000), and a "MegaFLOPS" compute performance (at least one million floating point instructions per second). 3M was a goal first proposed in the early 1980s Raj Reddy and his colleagues at CMU as a minimum specification for academic/technical Workstations at least a Megabyte Measuring performance In order for FLOPS to be useful as a measure of floating-point performance a standard benchmark must be available on all computers of interest ^[1] As limited as this seems today, it was at least an order of magnitude beyond the capacity of the personal computer of the time; the original 1981 IBM PC had 16 KB memory, a text-only display, and floating-point performance around 1 kiloFLOPS (30 kiloFLOPS with the optional 8087 math coprocessor). The 8087 was the first math Coprocessor for 16 bit processors designed by Intel (the I8231 was older but designed for the 8 bit Intel 8080) Other desirable features not found in desktop computers at that time included networking, graphics acceleration, and high-speed internal and peripheral data buses.

(Another goal was to bring the price for such a system down under a "Megapenny", that is, less than $10,000; this was not achieved until the late 1980s. )

The more widespread adoption of these technologies into mainstream PCs was a direct factor in the decline of the workstation as a separate market segment:

• High performance CPUs: while RISC in its early days (early 1980s) offered something like an order-of-magnitude performance improvement over CISC processors of comparable cost, one particular family of CISC processors, Intel's x86, always had the edge in market share and the economies of scale that this implied. See also X86 assembly language The generic term x86 refers to the most commercially successful Instruction set architecture in the history of Personal By the mid-1990s, x86 CPUs had achieved performance on a parity with RISC (albeit at a cost of greater chip complexity), relegating the latter to niche markets for the most part.
• Hardware support for floating-point operations: optional on the original IBM PC; remained on a separate chip for Intel systems until the 80486DX processor. In Computing, floating point describes a system for numerical representation in which a string of digits (or Bits represents a Real number. The Intel 486, otherwise known as the 80486 i486 or just 486 was the first tightly pipelined X86 design Even then, x86 floating-point performance continued to lag behind other processors due to limitations in its architecture. Today even low-price PCs now have performance in the gigaFLOPS range, but higher-end systems are preferred for floating-point intensive tasks.
• Large memory configurations: PCs were originally limited to a 640K memory capacity until the 1982 introduction of the 80286 processor; early workstations provided access to several megabytes of memory. The Intel 286, introduced on February 1, 1982, (originally named 80286, and also called iAPX 286 in the programmer's manual Even after PCs broke the 640K limit with the 80286, special programming techniques were required to address significant amounts of memory until the 80386, as opposed to other 32-bit processors such as SPARC which provided straightforward access to nearly their entire 4 GB memory address range. SPARC (from Scalable Processor Architecture is a RISC Microprocessor Instruction set architecture originally 64-bit workstations and servers supporting an address range far beyond 4 GB have been available since the mid-1990s, a technology just beginning to appear in the PC desktop and server market in the mid-2000s.
• Operating system: early workstations ran the Unix operating system (OS) or a Unix-like variant or equivalent such as VMS. An operating system (commonly abbreviated OS and O/S) is the software component of a Computer system that is responsible for the management and coordination Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX, sometimes also written as Unix with Small caps) is a computer A Unix-like (sometimes shortened to *nix) Operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system while not necessarily conforming Open Virtual Memory System ( OpenVMS) initially known just as Virtual Memory System ( VMS) is the name of a High-end Computer server The PC CPUs of the time had limitations in memory capacity and memory access protection, making them unsuitable to run OSes of this sophistication, but this, too, began to change in the late 1980s as PCs with the 32-bit 80386 with integrated paged MMUs became widely affordable. In computing protected mode, also called protected virtual address mode, is an operational mode of X86 -compatible Central processing units (CPU The range of Integer values that can be stored in 32 bits is 0 through 4294967295 or −2147483648 through 2147483647 using Two's complement encoding A memory management unit ( MMU) sometimes called paged memory management unit ( PMMU) is a Computer hardware component responsible for handling
• High-speed networking (10 Mbit/s or better): 10 Mbit/s network interfaces were commonly available for PCs by the early 1990s, although by that time workstations were pursuing even higher networking speeds, moving to 100 Mbit/s, 1 Gbit/s, and 10 Gbit/s. A computer network is a group of interconnected Computers. Networks may be classified according to a wide variety of characteristics However, economies of scale and the demand for high speed networking in even non-technical areas has dramatically decreased the time it takes for newer networking technologies to reach commodity price points.
• Large displays (17"-21") and screen resolutions: common among PCs by the late 1990s.
• High-performance 3D graphics hardware: this started to become increasingly popular in the PC market around the mid-to-late 1990s, mostly driven by computer gaming. 3D computer graphics (in contrast to 2D computer graphics) are graphics that use a three-dimensional representation of geometric data that is stored in the computer
• High performance/high capacity data storage: early workstations tended to use proprietary disk interfaces until the emergence of the SCSI standard in the mid-1980s. Although SCSI interfaces soon became available for PCs, they were comparatively expensive and tended to be limited by the speed of the PC's ISA peripheral bus (although SCSI did become standard on the Apple Macintosh). Industry Standard Architecture (in practice almost always shortened to ISA) was a Computer bus standard for IBM compatible computers Macintosh, commonly nicknamed Mac is a Brand name which covers several lines of Personal computers designed developed and marketed by Apple Inc SCSI is an advanced controller interface which is particularly good where the disk has to cope with multiple requests at once. This makes it suited for use in servers, but its benefits to desktop PCs which mostly run single-user operating systems are less clear. These days, with desktop systems acquiring more multi-user capabilities (and the increasing popularity of Linux), the new disk interface of choice is Serial ATA, which has throughput comparable to SCSI but at a lower cost. Linux (commonly pronounced ˈlɪnəks
• Extremely reliable components: together with multiple CPUs with greater cache and error correcting memory, this may remain the distinguishing feature of a workstation today. Although most technologies implemented in modern workstations are also available at lower cost for the consumer market, finding good components and making sure they work compatibly with each other is a great challenge in workstation building. Because workstations are designed for high-end tasks such as weather forecasting, video rendering, and game design, it's taken for granted that these systems must be running under full-load, non-stop for several hours or even days without issue. Any off-the-shelf components can be used to build a workstation, but the lifespans of such components under such rigorous conditions are questionable. For this reason, almost no workstations are built by the customer themselves but rather purchased from a vendor such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sun Microsystems, SGI or Dell. International Business Machines Corporation abbreviated IBM and nicknamed "Big Blue", is a multinational Computer Technology Sun Microsystems Inc ( is a multinational vendor of Computers computer components Computer software, and Information technology services Silicon Graphics Inc (commonly initialised to SGI, historically sometimes referred to as Silicon Graphics Computer Systems or SGCS) is a company The multinational technology company Dell Inc develops manufactures sells and supports Personal computers and other computer-related products
• Tight integration between the OS and the hardware: Workstation vendors both design the hardware and maintain the Unix operating system variant that runs on it. This allows for much more rigorous testing than is possible with an operating system such as Windows. Windows requires that 3rd party hardware vendors write compliant hardware drivers that are stable and reliable. Also, minor variation in hardware quality such as timing or build quality can affect the reliability of the overall machine. Workstation vendors are able to ensure both the quality of the hardware, and the stability of the operating system drivers by validating these things in-house, and this leads to a generally much more reliable and stable machine.

These days, workstations have changed greatly. Since many of the components are now the same as those used in the consumer market, the price differential between the lower end workstation and consumer PCs may be narrower than it once was. For example, some low-end workstations use CISC based processors like the Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon 64 as their CPUs. The Pentium 4 brand refers to Intel 's line of single- core mainstream desktop and Laptop Central processing units (CPUs introduced The Athlon 64 is an eighth-generation AMD64 architecture Microprocessor produced by AMD, released on Higher-end workstations still use more sophisticated CPUs such as the Intel Xeon, AMD Opteron, IBM POWER, MIPS or Sun's UltraSPARC, and run a variant of Unix, delivering a truly reliable workhorse for computing-intensive tasks. The Xeon brand refers to many families of Intel 's x86 Multiprocessing CPUs – for dual-processor (DP and multi-processor (MP configuration The Opteron is AMD 's X86 server processor line and was the first processor to implement the AMD64 Instruction set architecture (known POWER is a RISC Instruction set architecture designed by IBM. MIPS Technologies Inc ( formerly MIPS Computer Systems, is most widely known for developing the MIPS architecture and a series of pioneering RISC SPARC (from Scalable Processor Architecture is a RISC Microprocessor Instruction set architecture originally Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX, sometimes also written as Unix with Small caps) is a computer (PA-RISC and Alpha CPUs are still sold in workstations but are excluded in the above list as they are reaching their end-of-life soon. )

Indeed, it is perhaps in the area of the more sophisticated CPU where the true workstation may be found. Although both the consumer desktop and the workstation benefit from CPUs designed around the core concept (multiple processors on a chip, essentially, of which the P5 was a forbearer of this technique), workstations may use multiple core based CPUs, error correcting memory and much higher on-chip cache memory. Such power and reliability are not normally required on a general desktop computer. IBM's Power processor boards and the workstation level Intel based Xeon processor boards, for example, have multiple CPUs, higher on-chip cache and EEC memory, which are features more suited to demanding engineering work than to general desktop computing.

Some workstations are designed for use with only one specific application such as AutoCAD, Avid Xpress Studio HD, 3D Studio Max, etc. AutoCAD is a CAD (Computer Aided Design Software application for 2D and 3D Design and drafting, developed and sold by Avid Technology Inc ( is an American company specializing in video and audio production technology specifically digital non-linear editing (NLE 3ds Max (formerly 3D Studio MAX) is a modeling animation and rendering package developed by Autodesk Media and Entertainment. To ensure compatibility with the software, purchasers usually ask for a certificate from the software vendor. The certification process makes the workstation's price jump several notches but for professional purposes, reliability is more important than the cost.

History

The Xerox Alto workstation, first to use a graphical user interface with mouse and origin of ethernet. The Xerox Alto was an early Personal computer developed at Xerox PARC in 1973. Ethernet is a family of frame -based Computer networking technologies for Local area networks (LANs

Perhaps the first computer that might qualify as a "workstation" was the IBM 1620, a small scientific computer designed to be used interactively by a single person sitting at the console. The IBM 1620 was announced by IBM on October 21, 1959 and marketed as an inexpensive "scientific computer" It was introduced in 1959. One peculiar feature of the machine was that it lacked any actual arithmetic circuitry. To perform addition, it required a memory-resident table of decimal addition rules. This saved on the cost of logic circuitry, enabling IBM to make it inexpensive. The machine was code-named CADET, which some people waggishly claimed meant "Can't Add, Doesn't Even Try". Nonetheless, it rented initially for $1000 a month.

In 1965, IBM introduced the IBM 1130 scientific computer, which was meant as the successor to the 1620. The IBM 1130 Computing System was introduced in 1965. It was IBM 's least-expensive Computer to date and was aimed at price-sensitive computing-intensive Both of these systems came with the ability to run programs written in Fortran and other languages. Fortran (previously FORTRAN) is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative Programming language that is especially suited to Both the 1620 and the 1130 were built into roughly desk-sized cabinets. Both were available with add-on disk drives, printers, and both paper-tape and punched-card I/O. A console typewriter for direct interaction was standard on each.

Early examples of workstations were generally dedicated minicomputers; a system designed to support a number of users would instead be reserved exclusively for one person. A minicomputer (colloquially mini) is a class of multi-user Computers that lies in the middle range of the computing spectrum in between the largest Multi-user A notable example was the PDP-8 from Digital Equipment Corporation, regarded to be the first commercial minicomputer. The PDP-8 was the first successful commercial Minicomputer, produced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC in the 1960s Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering American company in the Computer industry

The Lisp machines developed at MIT in the early 1970s pioneered some of the principles of the workstation computer, as they were high-performance, single-user systems intended for heavily interactive use. Lisp machines were general-purpose Computers designed (usually through hardware support to efficiently run Lisp as their main software language. The first computer designed for single-users, with high-resolution graphics facilities (and so a workstation in the modern sense of the term) was the Xerox Alto developed at Xerox PARC in 1973. The Xerox Alto was an early Personal computer developed at Xerox PARC in 1973. PARC (Palo Alto Research Center Inc formerly Xerox PARC, is a Research and development company in Palo Alto California that began as a division of Other early workstations include the Three Rivers PERQ (1979) and the later Xerox Star (1981). PERQ, often referred to as the Three Rivers PERQ, was an influential Computer Workstation first released in 1979. The Star Workstation, officially known as the Xerox 8010 Information System, was introduced

In the early 1980s, with the advent of 32-bit microprocessors such as the Motorola 68000, a number of new participants in this field appeared, including Apollo Computer and Sun Microsystems, who created Unix-based workstations based on this processor. The range of Integer values that can be stored in 32 bits is 0 through 4294967295 or −2147483648 through 2147483647 using Two's complement encoding A microprocessor incorporates most or all of the functions of a Central processing unit (CPU on a single Integrated The Motorola 68000 is a 16/32-bit CISC Microprocessor core designed and marketed by Freescale Semiconductor (formerly Motorola Semiconductor Sun Microsystems Inc ( is a multinational vendor of Computers computer components Computer software, and Information technology services Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX, sometimes also written as Unix with Small caps) is a computer Meanwhile DARPA's VLSI Project created several spinoff graphics products as well, notably the SGI 3130, and Silicon Graphics' range of machines that followed. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA is an agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of new Technology DARPA 's VLSI Project provided research funding to a wide variety of University -based teams in an effort to improve the State of the art in Microprocessor Silicon Graphics Inc (commonly initialised to SGI, historically sometimes referred to as Silicon Graphics Computer Systems or SGCS) is a company It was not uncommon to differentiate the target market for the products, with Sun and Apollo considered to be network workstations, while the SGI machines were graphics workstations. As RISC microprocessors became available in the mid-1980s, these were adopted by many workstation vendors.

Workstations tended to be very expensive, typically several times the cost of a standard PC and sometimes costing as much as a new car. However, minicomputers sometimes cost as much as a house. The high expense usually came from using costlier components that ran faster than those found at the local computer store, as well as the inclusion of features not found in PCs of the time, such as high-speed networking and sophisticated graphics. Workstation manufacturers also tend to take a "balanced" approach to system design, making certain to avoid bottlenecks so that data can flow unimpeded between the many different subsystems within a computer. Additionally, workstations, given their more specialized nature, tend to have higher profit margins than commodity-driven PCs. Profit margin, Net Margin, Net profit margin or Net Profit Ratio all refer to a measure of Profitability. A commodity is anything for which there is demand but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market

The systems that come out of workstation companies often feature SCSI or Fibre Channel disk storage systems, high-end 3D accelerators, single or multiple 64-bit processors, large amounts of RAM, and well-designed cooling. Fibre Channel, or FC, is a Gigabit -speed network technology primarily used for Storage networking. '64-bit' CPUs have existed in Supercomputers since the 1960s and in RISC -based workstations and servers since the early 1990s. Additionally, the companies that make the products tend to have very good repair/replacement plans. However, the line between workstation and PC is increasingly becoming blurred as the demand for fast computers, networking and graphics have become common in the consumer world, allowing workstation manufacturers to use "off the shelf" PC components and graphics solutions as opposed to proprietary in-house developed technology. Proprietary software is Computer software on which the producer has set restrictions on use private modification copying, or republishing. Some "low-cost" workstations are still expensive by PC standards, but offer binary compatibility with higher-end workstations and servers made by the same vendor. This allows software development to take place on low-cost (relative to the server) desktop machines.

There have been several attempts to produce a workstation-like machine specifically for the lowest possible price point as opposed to performance. One approach is to remove local storage and reduce the machine to the processor, keyboard, mouse and screen. In some cases, these diskless nodes would still run a traditional OS and perform computations locally, with storage on a remote server; in other cases (on machines that would today be described as thin clients), the local device would fill a niche much closer to a terminal than a computer, displaying tasks executing on the remote server. A diskless node (or diskless workstation) is a Workstation or Personal computer without Disk drives which employs Network booting A server is a Computer dedicated to providing one or more services over a computer network typically through a request-response routine A thin client (sometimes also called a lean or slim client) is a client computer or client software in Client-server architecture networks A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device that is used for entering data into and displaying data from a Computer or a Computing These approaches are intended not just to reduce the initial system purchase cost, but lower the total cost of ownership by reducing the amount of administration required per user. Total cost of ownership (TCO is a financial estimate designed to help consumers and enterprise managers assess direct and indirect costs

This approach was actually first attempted as a replacement for PCs in office productivity applications, with the 3Station by 3Com as an early example; in the 1990s, X terminals filled a similar role for technical computing. The 3Station was a Diskless workstation, developed by Bob Metcalfe at 3Com and first available in 1986. See also HP X-Terminals Sun has also introduced "thin clients", most notably its Sun Ray product line. A thin client (sometimes also called a lean or slim client) is a client computer or client software in Client-server architecture networks The Sun Ray is a Stateless Thin-client solution aimed at corporate environments introduced by Sun Microsystems in September 1999 However, traditional workstations and PCs continue to drop in price, which tends to undercut the market for products of this type.

Workstation class PCs

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 Xeon and Opteron CPUs, and the Quadro line of video processors. The Xeon brand refers to many families of Intel 's x86 Multiprocessing CPUs – for dual-processor (DP and multi-processor (MP configuration The Opteron is AMD 's X86 server processor line and was the first processor to implement the AMD64 Instruction set architecture (known The Nvidia Quadro series of AGP and PCI Express graphics-cards comes from the NVIDIA Corporation.

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 processors
• multiple displays
• run a "business" or "professional" operating system version

List of workstations and manufacturers

Note that many of these are extinct.

• @Xi Computer
• 3Station
• Acecad
• Alienware
• Apollo Computer
• Apple Inc.
• Commodore Amiga 3000UX
• Ardent Computer
• Atari Transputer Workstation
• BOXX
• CAD2
• Callan Data Systems (Unistar)
• Core Hardware Systems
• Corvus
• Computervision
• Datamax UV-1
• Dell
• Digital Equipment Corporation
• EUROCOM
• Evans & Sutherland
• Fujitsu-Siemens Computers
• Hewlett-Packard
• IBM
• Intergraph
• Lilith
• MIPS Magnum
• NeXT
• Omron LUNA
• Silicon Graphics
• Sony NEWS
• Stardent Inc.
• Sun Microsystems
• Techpc
• Torch Computers
• Unisys ICON
• Xerox Star

Footnote

See also

• Music workstation

This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, which is licensed under the GFDL. A music workstation is piece of electronic musical equipment providing the facilities of a Sound module, a Music sequencer The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing ( FOLDOC) is an online searchable encyclopedic Dictionary of Computing subjects The GNU Free Documentation License ( GNU FDL or simply GFDL) is a Copyleft License for free documentation designed by the Free Software