A Workstation Is A Computer Designed For Individual Use That Is Faster And More Capable Than A Personal Computer

 

Workstation

An exclusive computer system created for technical or scientific uses is called a Workstation. They typically connect to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems while being designed primarily for a single user. The term "workstation" has been loosely used to describe everything from a mainframe computer terminal to a PC connected to a network, but the most popular usage refers to the category of hardware made available by a number of active and former companies, including Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, Apollo Computer, DEC, HP, NeXT, and IBM, which helped fuel the 3D computer graphics revolution in the late 1990s.

Since the late 1990s, popular PC capabilities have increased, making it harder to tell a PC from a Workstation. Workstations from the 1980s typically include pricey proprietary hardware and operating systems that set them apart from regular PCs. IBM's RS/6000 and IntelliStation, which date to the 1990s and 2000s, are powered by RISC-based POWER CPUs running AIX, whereas its IBM PC Series and Aptiva corporate and consumer PCs are powered by Intel x86 CPUs. Since workstations employ highly commoditized hardware and are mostly sold by large PC suppliers like Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Fujitsu, who sell x86-64 systems running Windows or Linux, this gap mainly vanished by the early 2000s.

The consumer and Workstation markets have further converged since the late 1990s. The price difference has decreased as many low-end workstation components are now the same as those sold to consumers. For instance, the majority of Macintosh Quadra computers, all of which include the Motorola 68040 CPU and are backwards compatible with 68000 Macintoshes, were built with scientific or design work in mind. The Quadra 700 can be added to the consumer Macintosh IIcx and Macintosh IIci versions. As resource-intensive software like Infini-D delivered "studio-quality 3D rendering and animations to the home desktop, the Quadra 700 was an intriguing choice at a tenth of the cost in an era when many pros preferred Silicon Graphics workstations."

The Quadra 700 is a Unix Workstation since it can run A/UX 3.0. An further illustration is the Nvidia GeForce 256 consumer graphics card, which gave rise to the Quadro workstation graphics card, which has the same GPU but different driver support, certifications for CAD applications, and a substantially higher price.