Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/749700
www.postmagazine.com 43 POST NOVEMBER 2016 gain sequentially and 12.3 percent year over year. (The reason more AIBs ship than workstations is because some are used for upgrading existing machines, and some users have two AIBs in their systems.) Moreover, the increasing sophistication of software pipelines is demanding more compute power, not less. At the same time, workers do not want to be tied to their desk, and in many cases their work is enhanced by an ability to go work in the field, interact with customers and col- leagues or stay home and work in peace and quiet. Business Advantage, a London-based research firm, has conducted a series of worldwide surveys asking CAD users about their awareness of trends and their actual usage of applications. In its sur- veys, the company found a decline in the use of desktop workstations in favor of mobile computers, mobile workstations, tablets, and virtual CAD workstations. JPR has found likewise in its own studies, and the workstation vendors also see these trends. Indeed, HP and Dell have fielded a cou- ple of generations of thin workstations. The vendors are required to walk the line between maintaining performance and durability against weight and battery life. Workstation customers are not inclined to compromise. HP has an upcoming announcement that changes the equation between desktop and mobility. Meanwhile, Lenovo has excelled in ingenious new designs. For instance, its ThinkPad P40 Yoga enables a multi-mode workstation with a screen that folds all the way around to become a tablet. The high-end performance offered by workstations is always going to be required, but we are seeing that power being distributed to enable professionals to call on processors when they need them. In addition, the ability to collabo- rate in real time with high-quality visu- alization and performance is a growing driver in the professional environment of today and will be even more so in the future. Thus, we don't see the overall demand for workstations declining, and in fact, we find the demand for high-end processing to be a growing trend. The workstation companies also have been building out their remote computing offerings. Dell has gone to the extreme with the acquisition of EMC, making it the largest private tech company with poten- tial revenues at $80 billion. The company says it will enable companies to build out infrastructures incorporating private, pub- lic, and hybrid clouds. Its aim is to lessen the IT burden for companies. Lenovo has upped its game in the data center with ThinkAgile, pre-integrated in- frastructure solutions to enable customers to build on-premise and hybrid virtualized systems. HP, Inc. has been offering Remote Graphics Software (RGS) as a simple way to extend processing power to lower power clients. The company has suggested RGS as a solution to firms that prefer Macs for video editing and content creation, but crave the power of full workstations. And, this trend will continue. The de- mand for performance will not decrease, and the need for ever more powerful processors will always be there, but the power of those processors will be distrib- uted and accessed flexibly, depending on the job requirements and workplace resources or restrictions. WANTING MORE For the people doing work requiring the compute power of a workstation, there is no post-PC era. The demand is always for more realistic effects and rendering, faster time to a decision, accurate analysis, and more detailed visual information available at once. That adds up to more and faster memory, more processors, better dis- plays…more of everything. Increasingly, there is a ghost world forming around us as reality is repeated in digital counterparts that can be explored, analyzed, and understood in order to better manage reality. So, even if much of that power can be transferred and shared via remote compute technologies, we're always going to want that information in Fujitsu's workstation lineup AMD's new Polaris-based Radeon Pro WX workstation add-in board in AMD's new YinMn Blue.