Workstations at Work

Autodesk, one of the leading software vendors in the workstation world with titles ranging from AutoCAD to 3ds Max, classifies workstation workflow into three different environment types: desktop, production, and dedicated. In the desktop environment, the user is using multiple types of applications and switching between them. This is less specialized and more in line with the types of architectures which the PC has evolved (i.e., Hyper-Threading and universal graphics drivers). Many independent content producers need to tackle a wide range of jobs, and such freelancers generally don't go into the same depth or skill levels as the more expert segments of the business.

Big Screen Meets the Desktop In addition to applications, Autodesk also provides full hardware/software solutions to its channel resellers. The Discreet Lustre (above) is a digital intermedia color grading system running on a conventional PC workstation. At right is a frame from the film “Master and Commander” undergoing color grading within Lustre.

Then there is the production environment, where games, movies, and much more complex projects are being produced. These are very pipeline-based workflows based around specialized users involved in more collaboration. Customers will employ a wide range of machines here from desktop to workstation, but the emphasis is all about process efficiency because users are managing huge amounts of data across potentially hundreds of people.

Finally, dedicated systems involve an operator who is on one system all the time and needs huge amounts of bandwidth for realtime visualization and brainstorming. Dedicated configurations are very deadline-based, where users and pressured for error-free output and have limited time to wait for things to happen. These projects tend to be higher budget and under direct client supervision. DigtialFilm Tree is one example of a company that uses dedicated systems. The effects house does production on the TV show "Scrubs" and has to deliver finished jobs every week without fail.

"Stability is so critical in a workstation environment that most clients will not install anything on their workstation apart from the application that's meant to be used on it," says Maurice Patel, lead of product management at Autodesk Media and Entertainment (formerly discreet). "We all know that the more we load onto our work computers, the less stable they become. With workstations, very often installations can only be done by system administrators."

According to BOXX's Ed Caracappa, 70% of the companies buying workstations with ATI or NVIDIA workstation graphics cards have ten or fewer employees. This is prime ground for resellers and system builders because such companies don't have internal tech support staff. The local IT "guru" is probably a design artist who built his own PC. Such companies depend heavily on reseller expertise for both pre- and post-sale support as well as the resellers inside access to support resources within manufacturers.

"That same 70% of the market typically has three different types of workstations," notes Caracappa, "Macs, a tier-one like Dell, and then stuff from someone like me. That's not unusual, because in smaller companies artists tend to pick the design they want. If you get an artist who knows Mac, he'll get a Mac. If he likes BOXX, he'll get a BOXX. If he doesn't care, management will probably get him a Dell out of habit. That said, if you price one of our configurations through Dell's site, you'll find we're usually very close, especially on the higher-end configurations."

The Un-Workstation Apple's Power Mac G5, while obviously not a channel play, remains important to note because it's your main competition in several segments and will soon be x86-based.

Apple Power Mac systems, such as today's G5, were the first systems to deliver workstation-class performance on a desktop and thus gained an early hold on the low-end workstation market. (Apple resists all efforts to call its Power Mac machines "workstations" because that would imply pigeonholing them into a certain usage model. But if it walks and quacks like a duck, you get the idea.) Most G5 configurations use dual PowerPC 970 processors ranging from 1.8 to 2.5 GHz, AGP 8X graphics, and PCI-X slots. PCI Express has yet to hit the Mac, but with nine million PCI-X cards on the market, Apple is in no rush to switch over.

In recent times, the Xeon and Opteron families have eaten significantly into Apple's presence in this market, and speed increases have helped to compensate against Apple's original architectural superiority. According to Jon Peddie Research's Alex Hererra, 92% of all workstations now use x86-based processors.

"This is a very exciting time," says Ramy Katrib, founder of effects and production house DigitalFilm Tree, "because now we can build PCs that run like Silicon Graphics computers, stuff that was previously unavailable to guys like us. I mean, we sharpened our teeth on Macs and Final Cut Pro, but I think people who argue over that whole Mac vs. PC thing have a lot of time on their hands. In a real-world environment, it's not about how religious you are about this or that. It's about execution. The client doesn't want a philosophical debate about what tools you use. He wants you to get things done."

According to Jim Whittington, founding partner with TrendWatch, Macs still retain a 10% market share advantage as of winter 2005 among the 39,000 FX/dynamic media studios and facilities the company tracks. Macs command roughly 40% of that market to the PC's 30%, and Whittington sees no sign of that distribution changing anytime soon. Still, it's fair to assume that Macs have a higher share within the effects and content creation markets than in other workstation segments. The overall opportunity for resellers in PC workstations is considerable. If you can demonstrate a workflow efficiency benefit to using PCs over Macs, most purchasers are now willing to listen.

Workstation Segment Snapshot TrendWatch’s market numbers on this slice of the workstation pie show Apple with a 10% lead over PC-based units, but the FX/dynamic content market remains very receptive to PC workstations overall.

"We have found a good niche over the years," says Justin Smith, president and COO of Brite Computers, a workstation white box specialty shop that has been reselling since 1983. "We have a lot of organizations using our equipment with high-end NVIDIA Quadro FX or ATI FireGL for graphical design, CAD engineering, and visualization types of projects. We see a big play in secondary schools, colleges, universities, trade schools, and the industries those flow into, such as engineering and graphic design firms using 3ds Max or Maya for advertising."

There is also a definite line between workstations and desktops when it comes to creating the underlying technology on which subsequent products are built. In the example of games, application producers create an engine, such as the famed engines behind DOOM 3 and Half-Life 2 that control the physics within the virtual worlds, as well as the character and object models on workstations. For instance, when a character fires a gun at a window, the trajectories, velocities, glass particle counts, distances, and everything else involved in that event are governed by the physics within the engine, and it takes a workstation to devise those rules. Autodesk's Maurice Patel notes that over half of all console games are designed using his company's 3ds Max workstation application.

Once the engine and models are complete, they are rendered out for realtime use on consoles or PCs. The console doesn't have to figure out the physics of the glass spread from scratch, only follow the handful of rules present within the environment created by the engine. It's a bit like the difference between CD audio and MP3. CD is the raw, full bitrate experience you have to create in order to compress and reproduce the experience in a more portable format.

Interestingly, such workstation engines are not only beneficial to gaming. Autodesk's Patel recounts that one client created the plans for a New York subway station renovation, then put it into a workstation gaming-type environment so that the customer could walk through and visualize it using joystick controls as if it were a game. Rather than the traditional way of looking at plans with some 3D renderings, users could actually be in the environment.

Note, too, that as powerful as a workstation might be, one box may not always be enough to do the job. Savvy workstation resellers can often assess the bandwidth requirements of an application even better than the customer and upsell multiple systems to work in tandem.

"We had a company designing a Flash video for us," recalls Seagate product marketing manager Joni Clark. "When I walked into their workroom, I expected to this guy sitting at one machine crunching away at this video. He had it separated on three workstations. That's how complicated this Flash video was. Just one workstation couldn't handle it."

The need for workstations has become so ubiquitous throughout the business, academic, and government worlds that it would be surprising if any reseller with a non-consumer client roster lacked existing and potential workstation clients. But with a need established, we now turn to some of the key considerations when building PC-based workstation systems.

Primary Workstation Components

Unlike the server market, rack mounting in slim chasses is usually not a factor in workstations. If anything, fat towers with generous power supplies and ample airflow tend to be more the norm. Peripherals are more application-centric, so your usual cordless desktop is likely to be accompanied by something like a Wacom Graphire tablet (www.wacom.com) or a Contour Design ShuttlePro (www.contourdesign.com). Ultra-high resolution displays from Samsung, LG, and others are all but mandatory because visualization requires all the pixel precision you can muster, and high resolution usually goes hand in hand with larger screen sizes.

Within the chassis, though, there are a handful of components on which much of the debate and concern surrounding workstations focuses.

Processors

Once again, we arrive at the perennial battle between Intel and AMD, only this time the story is more interesting. For workstations, Intel has the Xeon line while AMD has the Opteron, and while Intel evolved Xeon from older designs, the Opteron was a radical departure for AMD that initiated the idea of dedicated front-side buses for each processor on a low-end workstation. In contrast, the Xeon routes all memory calls and CPU-to-CPU traffic as well as traffic to the northbridge across one shared link.

In researching this article, I was struck by the divergence between reseller and end-user opinions on the CPU issue. Many firms who had used Xeons and Opterons side by side testified that the Opteron's more advanced HyperTransport design yielded faster, sometimes multiple times faster, renders. Resellers, on the other hand tended to gravitate more toward Intel for several reasons, although this was definitely open to debate.

"AMD has a very strong roadmap for the next 12 months, and Intel does not," states BOXX's Ed Caracappa. "What AMD did in positioning the Opteron with 64-bit was just genius. And now we have 64-bit Windows...and dual-core! Intel will catch up starting in early 2006, but that's then and this is now. I mean, we still sell a lot of Intel systems, but the majority is AMD."

And, of course, there were plenty of opposing views.

Opteron Roars AMD took the workstation market by storm with Opteron, a brilliantly designed processor family built for scalability and wide pipes in the low- to mid-range workstation market.

"We sell a very small amount of AMD," says Brite Computers's Justin Smith, "and the reason is that the platform—not just the processing technology but the overall consistency of the platform and its support—is most important to us when supporting the customer. When I say platform, I mean the processor technology and the board and some of the add-on cards together. These are validated together and designed to coexist with each other. I can always depend on the quality of an Intel product.

In talking further with Smith, I found that his experiences with AMD itself have always been positive, but matters were far more sporadic when it came to AMD's workstation board partners. Whereas Intel makes its own boards (as do several other Intel partner manufacturers), AMD can only create design guides and recommendations. And since AMD's board partners have fewer resources than Intel, board platforms tend to be shorter-lived and less supported. Smith also notes that if there is ever a support or RMA issue associated with an Intel workstation product, Intel doesn't waste time placing the blame elsewhere, even if it deserves to be. The company just steps in and handles it. With AMD's board partners, there is more finger pointing and pushing back to the distributor in order to handle warranty work.

Xeon Reigns Intel’s Xeon may not yet be dual-core, and its architecture is waiting for a 2006 overhaul, but the chip family still dominates the low-end workstation world based on other benefits.

Early on, I was frustrated when interviewing Intel because I wanted a response regarding Opteron's arguable architectural superiority but instead I heard a lot about "the platform." This struck me as a great way to dodge the question.

"Innovating one dimension of the workstation platform may make a lot of noise, but it certainly doesn't improve the workstation experience," says Intel's Thor Sewell in one example. "A balanced platform is really critical. Intel introduces new technologies at the appropriate times to ensure a balanced platform. That's what customers have come to expect and why they trust us."

So with not much of a comparative leg to stand on for performance, Intel falls back on stability. At first, this struck me as unsatisfying, but after interviewing several resellers, I've reformed my opinion. In many workstation situations, speed and even scalability are not the primary concerns, although Intel is plenty willing to find benchmark results showing that Xeon can still win the day. Rather, the emphasis, once again, stays on ROI. If recovery from failure and minimal downtime are paramount concerns, then the processor of choice may not be the one that renders out, say, 10% faster. Given that Opteron market share remained flat Q4 2004 over Q4 2003, perhaps the workstation community supports such a view.

That said, we've already shown in RAM that Intel is planning to add a second front-side bus to its Blackford (Xeon DP) chipset architecture in 2006. Intel is also almost certain to reach 65nm fabrication before AMD and will reap the rewards that brings. It remains to be seen which manufacturer has the more aggressive multi-core strategy 12 months from now, although smaller fabrication would seem to help decide that battle.

For AMD's part, the company now finds itself in a rare window of opportunity. On a technical level, few outside of Intel would argue that Opteron is the superior product. While Intel scrambles to build a suitable reply, AMD is converting thousands of users over to its platform. Yet as of Q4 2004, according to Jon Peddie Research, those thousands still amounted to 1% workstation market share.

"AMD is as well positioned as it's ever been," says JPR's Alex Hererra, "but its advantages might be short-lived. So AMD better giddyap and make some gains while it can."

The trouble is that Intel has all of the marketing money, leaving the burden of discovering and comparing the AMD platform with resellers and end-users.

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