page_title: Workstation
section_title: Place in the market
hierarchical_section_title: Workstation / History / Place in the market
caption_attribution_description: English: Dell Precision 620MT workstation, with dual Pentium III 1.0GHz CPU's, 128MB RD800 RAM, 18GB SCSI 160 HDD, and Windows 98. Photo subject is named Jamie.
context_page_description: A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by one person at a time, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term workstation has also been used loosely to refer to everything from a mainframe computer terminal to a PC connected to a network, but the most common form refers to the class of hardware offered by several current and defunct companies such as Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, Apollo Computer, DEC, HP, NeXT and IBM which opened the door for the 3D graphics animation revolution of the late 1990s.
  Workstations offer higher performance than mainstream personal computers, especially with respect to CPU and graphics, memory capacity, and multitasking capability. Workstations are optimized for the visualization and manipulation of different types of complex data such as 3D mechanical design, engineering simulation, animation and rendering of images, and mathematical plots.
context_section_description: Since the turn of the millennium, the definition of "workstation" has blurred to some extent. Many of the components used in lower-end "workstations" are now the same as those used in the consumer market, and the price differential between the lower-end workstation and consumer PCs can be narrower than it once was (and in certain cases in the high-end consumer market, such as the "enthusiast" game market, it can be difficult to tell what qualifies as a "desktop PC" and a "workstation"). In another instance, the Nvidia GeForce 256 graphics card spawned the Quadro, which had the same GPU but different driver support and certifications tailored to the unique requirements of CAD applications and retailed for a much higher price, so many took to using the GeForce as a "poor-man's" workstation card since the hardware was largely as capable plus it could be soft-modded to unlock features nominally exclusive to the Quadro.
  Workstations have typically been the drivers of advancements in CPU technology. Although both the consumer desktop and the workstation benefit from CPUs designed around the multicore concept (essentially, multiple processors on a die, the application of which IBM's POWER4 was a pioneer), modern workstations typically use multiple multicore CPUs, error-correcting memory and much larger on-die caches than those found on "consumer-level" CPUs. Such power and reliability are not normally required on a general desktop computer.  IBM's POWER-based processor boards and the workstation-level Intel-based Xeon processor boards, for example, have multiple CPUs, more on-die cache and ECC memory, which are features more suited to demanding content-creation, engineering and scientific work than to general desktop computing.
  Some workstations are designed for use with only one specific application such as AutoCAD, Avid Xpress Studio HD, 3D Studio Max, etc. To ensure compatibility with the software, purchasers usually ask for a certificate from the software vendor. The certification process makes the workstation's price jump several notches but for professional purposes, reliability may be more important than the initial purchase cost.
caption: Dell Precision 620MT with dual Pentium III processors
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