Graphics

Graphics Evolved NVIDIA launched the era of desktop workstations with its first Quadro card. The Quadro FX now carries on the family name with some of the best professional graphics performance in the world.

After endless discussion of Radeon and GeForce performance, DirectX support, shaders, and frame rates, it can be difficult to switch gears and realign a graphics discussion toward workstation priorities. It's true that some, even many, companies use desktop cards for fairly high-end applications, but the bulk of popular workstation graphics applications are still written to take advantage of optimizations wholly absent from consumer cards.

"The amount of geometry that goes into applications for high-end professionals is very different than the geometry in a game," says Danny Shapiro, senior marketing manager for workstation products at ATI. "In fact, games try to simplify objects and come up with textures or shaders that simulate certain types of effects, whereas in the professional space, you actually build very, very detailed models to get it to look as real as possible. Geometry in the workstation world is far more complex."

The Top Name in Modeling Maya from Alias (formerly Alias|Wavefront) is the leading workstation title for modeling, animation, effects, and rendering. Fields from print design to game development use Maya for 2D and 3D content creation.

Many consumer graphics cards emphasize DirectX performance because that's what most cutting edge games are now written for. In contrast, most workstation apps descend from UNIX and OpenGL. You also see different feature sets on workstation cards than their desktop brethren. Workstation cards are likely to sport things like dual DVI output (only just now appearing on the highest-end consumer cards), stereo 3D connectors for doing left and right stereo paired images, and support for the Dual-Link technology found on ultra-high resolution displays. For example, IBM and Viewsonic make 9-megapixel displays that are used in professional markets for mapping and visualization. Even Apple's deservedly famous 30" Cinema HD Display requires Dual-Link.

Perhaps the biggest differentiator between the two graphics spheres is antialiased lines.

Cool Flicks, Hot Tech Movie houses are a huge market for workstations. This designer uses a Quadro-based workstation to fine-tune imagery from The Polar Express. Note the dual-monitor capability, which is something used on most workstations these days.

"Half of what CAD designers do is in wireframe," says Jeff Brown, general manager of NVIDIA's professional solutions group. "Consumers don't care about line performance; designers care about it a lot. Think of a car fender wireframe. There are so many lines there that if you didn't antialias the lines, it would just look like a blur of light. But what's really important is being able to zoom in and see those lines as sharply as possible. Anyway, there are about three dozen examples like that of how workstation cards are different, some more obvious to the eye than others."

Put differently, Radeon and GeForce cards are ideal for when users have a single display and are trying to get as many frames per second on that display as possible. FireGL and Quadro cards are more designed toward multi-window applications. Both vendors provide hardware acceleration in their workstation cards not found in their desktop counterparts. For example, if you have Alias's Maya (www.alias.com), a very popular animation and effects package, open with different windows showing different views of a scene, workstation cards can accelerate those views in ways desktop cards can't. That's not to say that such applications are incompatible with desktop cards. They're not. But desktop cards simply won't render them as efficiently in many circumstances.

You'll note that there are far fewer workstation cards available from graphics vendors than desktop cards. NVIDIA, for instance keeps about 40 GeForce cards on the table at any given time but only about six Quadro cards. Some of this may have to do with cost, as both ATI and NVIDIA manufacture their workstation cards in-house. More likely, the population reduction has to do with quality control and certification. ISVs don't give away certifications for free, and six cards is easier to swallow than three dozen.

NVIDIA Rules in Film NVIDIA set out to dominate film production and succeeded. Quadro graphics are now at the heart of everything from garage-produced indie flicks to mega-hits such as Super-Man 2, pictured here.

NVIDIA more or less founded the desktop-class workstation market in 1999 with the first Quadro card, and the company decided early on that it wanted, as on the desktop side, to own the most glamorous, high-profile portion of the market, which was film production. Six years on, NVIDIA still dominates this field, fueling the graphics behind such mega-blockbusters as The Matrix, Spider-Man 2, and The Lord of the Rings. Alternatively, ATI, which bought the assets of FireGL in 2001 in order to enter the workstation market, is the heavier player in CAD and design. Such distinctions are a bit artificial, though, since both brands now perform exceedingly well across all workstation applications, with ATI having made up the most ground.

"In the last 12 months, ATI has made a quantum leap not just in performance but in the attention they put into their drivers," says BOXX's Caracappa. "Days gone by, you could get an ATI card with rock solid performance but the drivers were weak, it wouldn't run right, and it turned into a support nightmare. These days, that's not true. And the customer base knows that now. Twelve months ago, you wouldn't find a single ATI card on our site. Now our configurator offers a full complement because people want them."

There are other names in this field, most notably 3Dlabs and Matrox, but ATI and NVIDIA have pushed all competitors at the workstation low-end into the background.

Disk Storage

Common wisdom says that workstations, like servers, need SCSI hard drives. This is like saying that all servers need Itanium processors. Some do; many don't. SCSI and Fibre Channel are full-duplex technologies while SATA is only half-duplex, and this becomes more important when dealing with workstation applications that need to render to display on-screen while simultaneously rendering to file on the hard disk. In many cases, this is a bi-directional data operation that benefits from full-duplex technology. (This is also why some workstation graphics cards support technology allowing them to display and send video-out with no quality loss simultaneously.)

This Cheetah Flies Seagate's Cheetah 15K.4 is one of the fastest SCSI/SAS drives this side of the savannah. The 2.5" platters hamper capacity size, but the dizzying seek and transfer times make amends.

From a data performance standpoint, especially on low-end stations, there may sometimes be no advantage to going with anything more robust than SATA. Ultra 320 SCSI is roughly equivalent to 3 Gbps SATA in terms of bandwidth on the bus, but for workstation applications, the transfer bandwidth across the bus is a secondary consideration. What really matters is the transfer rate from platter to drive circuitry, and this "internal" rate still lags considerably behind external bus rates regardless of interface technology. In fact, higher-end approaches can actually hamper lower-end systems.

When Size Matters When your workstation configurations need capacity without heavy-duty cost, Maxtor’s MaXLine III offers the reliability of enterprise drives with high performance “SATA II” features, such native command queuing, hot plug, and staggered spin-up.

"If you're going to put a SCSI drive in a desktop environment," says Seagate's Pete Steege, product marketing manager for enterprise storage, "the overhead of the SCSI interface may be so heavy that it may actually bring down your performance, so you'd be wasting money."

The one clear advantage SCSI offers is the ability to command drives in parallel, in effect bonding their respective transfer rates. You could easily build a dual-channel Ultra 320 SCSI RAID 0 or RAID 5 for clients that would be delivering 600 or 700 MB/sec transfer rates. Naturally, those needing that higher performance understand that there will be a premium to pay for it.

At this point, a review of disk storage solutions from last month's RAM may be in order. RAID systems are very prevalent in the workstation world, and a quick look at some numbers will show why. Take the "full frame 2K" standard used in high-definition film production. That involves a 2048 x 1152 resolution (6.75MB) at 24 frames per second (162MB/sec) for two hours. Not only do clients want a high-bandwidth way to handle and stream such massive data loads but they also don't want to deal with the risk of corruption on such a large scale. This is where the higher MTBF ratings and duty cycles of enterprise drives really come to the rescue.

A Note on the OS

Workstation datasets often scale well above 4GB, the addressable limit of 32-bit operating systems. (This is also why servers and workstations often require registered memory. Large loads on unregistered memory can overwhelm the memory controller.) In this realm, Linux has been a favorite for years because the kernel has long supported 64-bit code. Distribution vendors such as Red Hat and SuSE (now owned by Novell) offer widespread support for many workstation applications, and some now offer channel programs to resellers. For example, hit www.novell.com/partners to sample the many benefits Novell offers to those selling its new SuSE Linux Professional through its PartnerNet program, and, while you're there, browse through the applications listed on the Novell YES Certified program. This may prove valuable for selling clients on the stability of your Novell Linux platform.

Linux for 64-Bit Workstations Novell’s SUSE LINUX Professional comes in 32- and 64-bit versions and delivers a strikingly versatile and user-friendly interface. The OS is small enough for end-users but big enough to tackle advanced workstation environments.

Of course, Microsoft is now out with its 64-bit Windows iteration, which seems to have kept a very low profile since its recent launch. The appeal of 64-bit Windows for many will doubtless be its familiarity. The interface and functionality is almost identical to conventional Windows XP, and the move finally cements Microsoft as a first-run choice for serious workstations. Of course, we don't need to remind anyone about Microsoft's track record with stability in its initial OS versions, so waiting a few months before rushing out to your client base with 64-bit Windows boxes might be a good idea. Nevertheless, we have every confidence in Microsoft's ability to make a solid showing with its new operating system going into the future.

"All those who said Linux would kill Windows in the workstation space were wrong," says Alex Hererra. "It might be vice versa, because once Windows has 64-bit hits its stride, it might actually be a bigger threat to Linux."

Seizing the Workstation Opportunity

The need for PC-based workstations continues to rise as companies' workflow habits change with the advancing of technology. For example, the engineers at JAK Films, which does post-production effects work on the Star Wars movies, note that they used to give George Lucas a project, some snippet of the film, that had been rendered overnight and output so he could review it on his own time in his own space. Later, Lucas would return with input for revision. However, in the current era of Episode III, JAK's Opteron-based workstations are so fast that the director can look at clips on JAK's machines, tell workers the changes he wants, and they can render it on the fly so he can sit down and tweak scenes with them.

Not all workstation users rank alongside JAK Films, but most of them turn over their hardware regularly to keep up with advances. After all, the companies that use workstations are usually in very competitive, cutting edge fields, and the ability to turn around jobs faster and better only builds over time. New machines on a regular basis are essential, so this is a terrific repeat business—if you know what you're doing. Burn a workstation client, though, and you'll regret it.

"You can make money in workstations, but you can also lose your shirt," cautions Mike Iem, PC consultant and president of the Ziem Group. "If you miscalculate, I've seen guys lose tens of thousands of dollars because they underestimated upgrading them or other problems. That's why I think some guys are leery of dealing with workstations, because it's a hard thing to quote."

Thinking Inside the BOXX BOXX Technologies is one of the best examples of a system builder that seized on the potential of the workstation market and ran with it. The company makes workstations aimed at the CAD, visualization, effects, animation, broadcast, HD, and other markets ranging from 1U render nodes to dual Opteron towers to Intel-based mobile workstations.

Expertise is necessary and hard-won. Fortunately, most of the vendors we've discussed here have aggressive channel programs that, in part, aim to educate partners and qualify them to meet the needs of the client community. Additionally, vendors such as Autodesk deliver bundle and white box products to help system builders flourish alongside the ISV's direct business. (As a case in point, see Autodesk's Reseller Center at usa.autodesk.com.)

"The barriers to entry with workstations really depend on how you're going to focus on the marketplace," says BOXX's Ed Caracappa. "To just offer workstations across the board is very, very hard. There's a support component to this. A workstation brings some stigma. It's a higher-end machine people have paid more for. So if they have a problem, you had better have someone they can get on the phone with to solve that problem right away. And because this is a software-related business, if they have a problem with software, even if I didn't sell the application, I still get the phone call. And because this is all we do, typically my guys can answer the question. This is not like building Grandma's desktop for sending email."

Once you're ready, there is no shortage of profitable opportunity out there for the eager. Margins are still quite good because technology prices keep dropping so fast. A system that cost $100,000 two years ago now sells for $10,000—a fact that often sells itself—but then there's extra potential for maintenance packages on these expensive, mission critical machines.

Within TrendWatch's FX/dynamic media scope, Jim Whittington observes that "the top markets/segments that plan to buy PCs include animation/FX studios, corporate film and video companies, cable systems and production companies. Nearly twice as many animation/FX studios than the other top PC markets/segments plan to buy one or more PC workstations in 2006." Additionally, one in four freelancers within this market will buy a PC workstation in 2005.

Expect a small but growing segment of workstation buyers to emerge from the consumer space. Some of these are CAD dabblers taking their hobby to the next level, but most will be film amateurs. I recently had the chance to speak with Shane Carruth, director, writer, and actor for the Sundance award-winning film Primer, who made the entire movie for $7,000 on his home computer. (Carruth told me that many of his editing decisions were carefully meditated because one unneeded render operation could cost him hours of lost productivity.) More people like Carruth will emerge as technical and cost barriers to making quality movies recede, and many of these will need stand-alone workstations.

Workstation Graphics on Fire If NVIDIA has a solid market lead in film, ATI can claim the same in the design arena. The FireGL family has gained legions of workstation fans around the world, including the U.K.’s Triple Eight Race Engineering, which uses FireGL cards such as the V7100 (right) to virtually design and test every component and model of the team’s award-winning Vauxhall VX racing cars.

"A lot of rendering programs actually can't execute on a desktop because there's still not enough horsepower to render, say, a full HD film in real-time," says AMD spokesman Damon Muzny. "Even if I threw an FX-57 box at you, you couldn't do it in real-time. That's why folks are using dual- and quad-processor and doing shared computing with professional graphics cards. Bringing dozens of channels of content at once requires a massive amount of CPU, memory, and I/O bandwidth. When you have multithreaded applications with a single CPU core, it's going to take a lot longer to work those applications through."

Going forward , the difference between the workstation and the desktop is going to be the ability to handle large amounts of data. Xeon and Opteron systems are now able to go beyond 2GB of workspace memory, but they're still comparatively limited in their capabilities when you consider that a low-end Silicon Graphics workstation can address up to 96GB. We now have the ability to put more memory into systems. The industry must now work on ways to make utilizing this capacity easier within applications. Most apps today fail on this point.

"Expect the near future in workstations to emphasize collaboration," says Michael Brown, product line marketing manager for the visual systems group at SGI. "You're going to see many more people using their workstations in ways that allow them to collaborate with their colleagues whether they're across the hall or the country. The demands of collaboration will put different demands on systems, and we already have software showing this."

This is excellent news for system providers since collaborative solutions obviously multiply the amount of hardware sold. Of course, it also compounds the complexity of a solution. This is why the one-on-one sales approach of system builders will be increasingly necessary and valuable in the workstation market.

"We have a Buy Now button on our site, but that's less than 1% of our business," says BOXX's Carapacca. "I don't want to call it an interrogation, but that's really how our sales reps work. They don't just take orders. They want to know what software you're running, how you're planning on using the machine, your budget, and then they'll guide clients through the right configuration."

Most SMB white box resellers have never dealt with workstations, but that needs to change. The field is exploding with potential and need for cost-effective solutions. Now is the time to make sure your operation can deliver more benefit to its customer base by managing its workstation needs, too.