I appreciate your agreeing mostly with me. This is a topic that,
because of the lack of a hard and fast definition, can certainly bring
up a fair number of arguments.
My comment about RAID did not say SCSI arrays. Many of the newer
machines now support SATA RAID. My statement was about the use of
redundant arrays. In the workstation environment redundancy is important
due to the fact that lost data can be extremely expensive. Imagine that
the job that you've been working on for 3 weeks is lost due to a drive
crash. Even assuming that you can recreate the job from scratch, and
that it will only take you 50% of the time that it did the first time, I
have found, from personal experience, that the process of recreating a
job will accidentally lead to errors and omissions since you may
remember the work to design some aspect of the job, but your memory is
of the first time you did the work, and the new replacement is missing
that aspect. Also, when you have to do this replacement work, you are
usually rushing to make up for the lost time. In any case, in a work
environment, lost time is always expensive. If you are redoing lost work
you are losing the money that you could be earning by doing new work.
Matt Stachoni wrote:
> On Wed, 25 Apr 2007 18:22:50 +0000, Jerry G wrote:
>
>> There is no official definition of a workstation but there are multiple
>> factors when choosing components for a workstation. These are some of
>> them, but others may modify the list.
>
> What Jerry has is essentially correct. However, with today's high-power dual
> core CPUs, we have a definite blurring of the division between run of the mill
> desktops and Workstations. This is mostly because of the gaming market, which
> pushed desktops to workstation level performance.
>
> The main difference you will see is whether you go with a Dual Core chip (Core 2
> Duo, Athlon X2) or actual dual CPUs, each of which is a Dual Core CPU, giving
> you a potential of 4 CPUs. Only a small handful of apps are built to take solid
> advantage of more than twio CPUs - 3ds max and VIZ are two that will.
>
> As Jerry mentioned, ECC RAM is the other criteria reserved for Workstations.
> Along with this is an advanced chipset that actually supports ECC RAM -
> mainstream off the shelf motherboards usually do not. Any machine that supports
> dual Xeon or Opterons will support ECC RAM. These class of motherboards - which
> might cost $500 by itself - also have highly engineered components and won't
> blow a capacitor like an off the shelf board might.
>
> Workstations will also support much more RAM than a normal mobo as well, which
> usually top out at 2 or 4 slots. A Workstation motherboard may have 6 or 8
> memory slots.
>
> True workstations always use high-end OpenGL graphics cards that have certified
> application specific drivers for graphics programs like max/VIZ, Maya,
> Lightwave, and so on. The difference in just using the driver on a decently
> polygon-heavy Max model is phenominal.
>
> RAID arrays - maybe. in the past, SCSI drived reigned king for workstations
> because they had higher throughput (great for large files), but that's been
> eclipsed by SATA drives and the fact that most folks work off of a server
> instead of local data.
>
> Matt
> mstachoni@comcast.net
> mstachoni@bhhtait.com
>
>
>> 1) Precision graphic rendering vs. speed. A workstation will
>> theoretically produce high accuracy renderings by not taking the
>> shortcuts that would be considered acceptable to enhance the speed in
>> games. The rendering better be right, and walking through walls is
>> unacceptable.
>>
>> 2) High reliability components since a computer crash will be costly in
>> lost man-hours as well as inconvenient. This is especially if work was
>> not yet backed up.
>>
>> 3) Multi-cpu capable since many workstation programs can use multiple
>> cpu's. This will mean Xeons or Opterons.
>>
>> 4) Error correcting memory, and lots of it. If a memory error is
>> undetected in a game, nobody really dies, but if an airplane is built
>> based on work from a machine that has a tendency to drop digits, the
>> plane just might crash. The cost of memory in a work environment is
>> comparatively minor if it speeds up the engineer by 1%. One percent of a
>> $100,000 a year employee's salary is $1000 and that is more than the
>> price differential for the extra higher class memory. If the employee is
>> paid less, then the time to recover the investment is longer, but it
>> still pays to spend the money.
>>
>> 5) Redundant Raid hard drives. (Heaven forbid that the drive crashes and
>> you lose data)
>>
>> John0070 wrote:
>>> Can someone tell me in a nutshell the difference between a normal pc and a workstation? I've been told it's simply the grade of components within the pc and others have said there is a definite difference in the chipset, maybe the architecture of the unit. I would appreciate any info here.
>>>
>>> Thank you
>>>
>>> John
