Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/749700
www.postmagazine.com 42 POST NOVEMBER 2016 a new quarterly record. A total of approx- imately 1.1 million branded workstations shipped, representing a 21.7 percent sequential gain. In the cyclical workstation market, year-over-year metrics are typi- cally a better gauge of market health, and the second quarter's 7.8 percent is a very welcome figure, particularly in light of the general malaise enveloping traditional PC- related markets. Today, the workstation market looks to be the most competitive it has been in decades. HP and Dell are fighting hard for every point of share, while Lenovo continues to gain ground, albeit slowly, using China, particularly, to boost share. Meanwhile, Dell, HP and Lenovo have been bragging about how involved they are in the VR content creation market. Marketing terms such as "VR-ready" are being pushed around, and although they sound exciting, you have to dig deep to find out exactly what it means. It doesn't mean that you are going to plug in some headset and start playing games (although you could). VR-ready in workstation land means you can create content and test it on the same machine. And that may not sound like a big deal until you realize that creating VR content requires rendering in 4K (or greater), displaying at 120 frames per second, and syncing sound to it all. In VR, as in filmmaking, the production pipeline tends to overbuild, working at the highest resolution that is practical, and then scale down to fit theater screens and consumer screens. For VR, that means the VR content creation workstation has to be more powerful than the most powerful VR game machine. And that's one of the reasons they are expensive. And since they are expensive, the buyer insists they work reliably ("bulletproof" is the term they use) 24/7. The same is true of workstations put to use in design for manufacture, archi- tecture, content creation, visualization and scientific research. High-profile ap- plications, such as VR, video editing and special effects, are demanding new capa- bilities from workstations, including high resolutions, HDR (high-dynamic range), GPU-compute processing for effects and real-time visualization. Traditional workstation applications in engineering, design and AEC are becoming more in- tegrated, enabling more workers to take advantage of advanced processes such as simulation and rendering, all of which demand high-end graphics processing as well as CPU power. A modern workstation has to have the latest, fastest everything, and lots of it, be bulletproof, and able to not only run the latest software and development tools, but also make new software no one has ever seen before. And the workstation builders — from the smallest boutique shops to giants in Fort Collins and Austin — do that every day, all day. THE WORKSTATION FUTURE There is a great deal of discussion around the post-PC era. Sales of PCs are down. In our studies of the workstation market at Jon Peddie Research (JPR), we have found workstation sales to be remarkably stable. In the latest "JPR Workstation Report" (www.jonpeddie. com/publications/workstation_report/), which covered Q2 2016, analyst Alex Herrera notes that workstation sales hit a new record, with shipments of branded workstations at 1.1 million — a 21.7 percent sequential gain. Even more impressive, sales increased 7 percent year over year, while the PC market is still seeing declines (though the decline seems to be slowing). Likewise, Nvidia and AMD have shipped 1.3 million professional graph- ics add-in boards (AIBs), a 20 percent Nvidia's new Quadro P6000 workstation add-in board. Workstation market over time.