Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/759864
n o v e m b e r . d e c e m b e r 2 0 1 6 c g w 2 5 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, public, 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-inte- grated infrastructure solutions to enable customers to build on premise and hybrid virtualized systems. HP, Inc. has been offering Remote Graphics Soware (RGS) as a simple way to extend processing power to lower-power clients. The firm has suggested RGS as a solution to firms that prefer Macs for video editing and content creation but crave the power of full workstations. Nvidia, of course, was early into the remote graphics business with its GRID platform, which enables companies to extend GPU power through vGPU technology that enables the GPU to be extended to a virtual machine (VM) for remote clients. The vGPU technology is flexible and allows multiple guests to take advantage of the GPU as needed. In con- junction with soware from VMWare and Citrix, GRID partners enable their custom- ers to share hardware resources from servers. Boxx Technologies has offered support for GRID with its workstations, but it has found some clients who don't want to share any of the GPU with anyone. These users are work- ing with applications like Autodesk's Revit, Autodesk's Maya, SolidWorks, or Dassault's Catia, and they need all the resources they can get from the GPU and the CPU. These applications aren't heavily threaded, so they benefit more from a high-powered, over- clocked CPU than shared-server resources like multi-core Xeons. Thus, the company has introduced the XDI 8401 R-V, which, like the Apexx 2 2402 mentioned above, takes advantage of an overclocked Intel Core i7 and high-power graphics from the Nvidia Quadro M2220 up to the M6000. Using vDGA technology, remote users can be directly connected to the GPU for a full-powered workstation experience. Boxx says that in its testing, its performance for remote users is very close to the same performance one would get on the equivalent workstation. Clearly, the demand 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 distributed and accessed flexibly, depend- ing on the job requirements and workplace resources or restrictions. SUMMARY 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 displays, 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 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 the palm of our hand. ■ A LOOK AT THE WORKSTATION MARKET OVER TIME. DELL DISPLAYS ITS NEW NOTEBOOK WORKSTATION LINEUP. Kathleen Maher (Kathleen@jonpeddie.com) is a contributing editor to CGW; a senior analyst at Jon Peddie Research, a Tiburon, CA-based consultancy specializing in graphics and multimedia; and editor in chief of JPR's "TechWatch."