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www.postmagazine.com 41 POST NOVEMBER 2016 T he workstation mar- ket is one of the most important, least volatile and high-performance demanding segments of the computer industry. It doesn't grow fast, and in terms of units, it's about as large as that of enthusiast gaming machines. However, in terms of revenue, it's almost an order of magni- tude greater. Although workstations, mainstream PCs and laptops share the same basic design, workstations have a distinct ecosystem, with special requirements. The market is enabled by semiconductors from AMD, Intel and Nvidia. Those parts find their way to specialized motherboard and add-in board builders, which incor- porate high-end memory, disc drives or flash memory, heavy-duty power supplies and so forth. Some of those products get sold to independent system builders, big OEMs like Apple, Dell, Fujitsu, HP and Lenovo, and also to users who build their own workstations to get exactly the con- figuration they want. The adjacent market includes display suppliers, and they are pushing the limits on resolution, refresh rate, physical size and even curved displays. Connecting the displays to the workstation's add-in board (AIB) are state-of-the-art high-speed cables known as DisplayPort 1.4 and sometimes HDMI 2.0. Often the worksta- tion user will have two or more displays, only limited by desk space. THE CPU/CHIP FACTORS And as the chips get smaller and faster, and miraculously use less power, work- stations are being built in notebook form. They come with 17-inch displays and 4K or better resolution. When AMD and Intel have new CPUs (x86), the workstation builders — cus- tomizers, independents and big-brand OEMs — usually introduce a line of machines, and we just saw that this summer as machines have been intro- duced with Intel's Broadwell and Skylake, and the latest workstation graphics cards from AMD's FirePro and Nvidia's Quadro lines. Although AMD CPUs haven't had any traction in the workstation space for the past few years, the industry is anxiously awaiting the arrival of AMD's new CPU, the Zen. AMD revealed more details about its forthcoming Zen x86 CPU that will target the high-end PCs for gaming and workstations, as well as servers. The Zen is expected in early 2017. During the summer, Intel introduced three new low-power, albeit powerful, processors in the Skylake family, which sparked the announcements of several new workstation laptops (as well as sever- al gaming laptops) usually co-configured with an Nvidia GPU and, to a lesser extent, AMD GPUs. Intel's powerhouse workstation and server CPU is the Xeon, and the newer workstations will incorporate them, as well. Likewise, when AMD and Nvidia come out with new GPUs, the workstation build- ers will either try to sync it up with a new CPU release or do what's known as a mid- life kicker, upgrading the current version of the workstation with more powerful graphics, and we just witnessed that, too. In August, AMD introduced the Polaris- based Radeon Pro WX — WX 7100, WX 5100 and WX 4100 workstation AIB — and Nvidia introduced the Pascal-based Quadro P6000 and P5000. AMD's new Polaris-based WX7100 AIB comes with higher clock speeds and 2,304 cores that offer more than 5 TFLOPs of single-precision (FP32) com- pute performance. Nvidia's new Quadro AIB is based on the Pascal graphics architecture, and it uses a GPU with 3,840 processing cores. It can reach 12 TFLOPs. And lest we forget, you have to have the latest, fastest memory possible, and a lot of it. So workstation AIBs have 8GB to 16GB in the mainstream, and up to 24GB in the high end of local RAM (random access memory) for the GPU (known as GDDR5), and a sea of system RAM (typically 32GB to 64GB) — and the latest version of that is DDR4. And that is all backed up with at least a terabyte of solid state storage (SSD). Sound expensive? It is. Sound fast? It's killer fast. However, the amount of memory varies depending upon the class of workstation. For ex- ample, a mainstream option will typically have 256 SSD and a 1TB HDD. In that category/realm/segment, AMD announced the Radeon Pro SSG, an AIB with a Polaris GPU and 1TB of SSD on board. A LOOK AT THE MARKET However, as mentioned, the market is not a high-growth segment; rather, it sees steady growth, just not heart-poundingly so. Therefore, the second quarter of 2016 not only represented a welcome bounce- out of the recent market doldrums, it set ket is one of the most important, least volatile and high-performance demanding segments of the computer industry. It doesn't grow fast, and in terms of units, it's about as large as that of enthusiast gaming machines. However, in terms of tomizers, independents and big-brand OEMs — usually introduce a line of machines, and we just saw that this Quadro P6000 and P5000. HP's entry-level Z240 workstation.