Computer Graphics World

November 2008 27 Hardware ■ ■ ■ ■ is year, 2008, marks the year Moore's law gave us the most mobile workstations ever. ey are laptop computers with 17- inch or greater screens, powerful dual- and quad-core processors with gigabytes of fast DDR2 DRAM, powerful GPUs with lots of graphics memory, high-speed and large- capacity disks with RAID, optical drives with Blu-ray, every kind of I/O you can imagine, and more features than you can fi nd on many desk-bound machines. ose are the facts. But what does it all mean? Aside from the sheer pleasure of being able to take your work with you all the time, what would be the motivation for having a portable workstation, and how portable are we talking? What about the workstation side? Are there compromises? It seems like there are some incontrovert- ible confl icts in the premise. What Is A Workstation? A workstation is distinguished from an or- dinary PC by a few critical items. ere's a fairly regular debate about what a work- station is and what it isn't. And too many vendors try to market high-end PCs as a workstation in order to get a higher price for them. Workstations cost more than a typical PC, and there are good reasons for that. For one thing, a workstation is often used in a mission-critical situation and, therefore, has to work 24/7, 365 days a year with no hiccups or glitches. Workstations are used with high-performance and often expen- sive software, and have to be qualifi ed by the software vendor. at is done to give assurance to the buyer that the machine is going to work, and work well. Generally speaking, a workstation has a high-resolution display and high-perfor- mance graphics, a large capacity of high- speed (high-bandwidth) memory, top-of- the-line CPUs, and fast high-capacity disk drives. Furthermore, a workstation will have application-certifi ed drivers that guarantee reliable operation with an application. Also, the certifi ed drivers are tuned to the specifi c applications—a qualifi cation that is not just a label but really means something. One of the distinguishing hardware fea- tures of a workstation is its error-correction memory (ECM). However, in the case of mobile workstations, there is no ECM. Ad- ditionally, a workstation is equipped with a power supply that contains extra capacity. erefore, cooling and noise design is criti- cal, and more care is put into baffl es and routing than is found in an ordinary PC. ese are some of the most challenging aspects in building a mobile workstation that, ultimately, limit the system's abilities. Categories Jon Peddie Research (JPR) categorizes the workstation market into fi ve classes, or seg- ments: entry, midrange, high-end, ultra high-end, and mobile. e entry level has no 3D capability, whereas the ultra high- end is, as you can imagine, the most pow- erful machine that can be built with dual graphics boards, dual processors, and zil- lions of megabytes of memory. Somewhere in between is the mobile workstation, which, like the mobile PC, is the fastest-growing segment. e workstation market in terms of unit shipments is about the same size as the en- thusiast gamer market, which is an inter- esting correlation with regard to the user's demand for high performance and a will- ingness to pay for that performance. Can I Take It with Me? So, considering all the above information, why would a person want a workstation to be mobile? Collaboration is a big buzzword in the industry, and among distributed workforces and partners, being able to share a design or a problem is critical. But what if you're on a campus or in an aircraft manu- facturing facility? In those situations, being able to grab the workstation and scoot off to a meeting, or jump on a jitney and go to the other end of the production line, would be an enormous advantage. However, working on a design while traveling in an airplane, although often mentioned, isn't a realistic application. For one reason, these portable workstations are big, and for another, the design work is so sensitive you'd never want to risk exposing it in public. at tends to mitigate the argument about battery life. And for those workstation users who fl y in 0 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% Q3 '04 Q4 '04 Q1 '05 Q2 '05 Q3 '05 Q4 '05 Q1 '06 Q2 '06 Q3 '06 Q4 '06 Q1 '07 Q2 '07 Q3 '07 Q4 '07 Q1 '08 Q2 '08 mobile entry midrange high-end ultra high-end Workstation Segment—Worldwide Market Share Courtesy Jon Peddie Research

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