5 ms·

What makes a workstation, anyway? Exotic graphics hardware? (I thought you could get Apple to build you a Mac Pro with a stack of Quadros, although I just check

What makes a workstation, anyway? Exotic graphics hardware? (I thought you could get Apple to build you a Mac Pro with a stack of Quadros, although I just checked the Apple Store and that doesn't seem to be an option anymore, so maybe you've got a point there.) A RISC processor? (Good luck with that, these days.) If the Mac Pro is insufficiently workstation-y for you, how about the Cray CX-1 family, which last I checked is still in production?

rbanffy 17y ago
A Mac Pro is just an overgrown PC, much like any Intel server you can get from Dell. It's pretty and classy and, while it runs a real Unix, the whole platform was really designed to run Windows, much like every Intel box has been for a long time. It was a compromise made when Apple switched away from PowerPCs. What made a Unix workstation something unique is that it was built not to run legacy software (I bet the latest Dell can still boot MS-DOS 3.3) but to be the fastest possible machine that given amount of money could buy. That involved, of course, custom graphics hardware, weird disk controllers and exotic buses with hardware-assisted everything. It's a shame most people never experienced this and, for the time being (can you imagine someone building a desktop computer that cannot run Windows?), won't. As for the CX-1, it's a cluster of PCs in a deskside package. Lame. Seymour would never approve it.
- wmf 17y ago
  Today the fastest possible machine that given amount of money can buy is an x86 PC. The cost of the backwards compatibility crap is more than subsidized by the huge economy of scale. Removing DOS/Windows support would actually cost money and would make no performance difference.
  - rbanffy 17y ago
    "backwards compatibility crap" You said it better than I would. Also, "the fastest possible machine that given amount of money can buy" is an x86 PC precisely because there are no more Unix workstation manufacturers left.
    - wmf 17y ago
      I disagree about cause and effect. If you tried to make a RISC workstation today, it would be so slow or expensive that no one would buy it.
    - nailer 17y ago
      You can still buy SPARC servers, and they've benchmarked behind Intel for some time now.
      - rbanffy 17y ago
        I bet it depends on the benchmark you are running.
        nailer 17y ago
        How much do you bet?
  - tesseract 17y ago
    In particular, the fastest possible machines that any amount of money can buy tend to be, these days, basically just piles of x86 PCs. http://www.top500.org/lists/2009/11 http://www.top500.org/lists/2009/11

rbanffy 17y ago

A Mac Pro is just an overgrown PC, much like any Intel server you can get from Dell. It's pretty and classy and, while it runs a real Unix, the whole platform was really designed to run Windows, much like every Intel box has been for a long time. It was a compromise made when Apple switched away from PowerPCs. What made a Unix workstation something unique is that it was built not to run legacy software (I bet the latest Dell can still boot MS-DOS 3.3) but to be the fastest possible machine that given amount of money could buy. That involved, of course, custom graphics hardware, weird disk controllers and exotic buses with hardware-assisted everything. It's a shame most people never experienced this and, for the time being (can you imagine someone building a desktop computer that cannot run Windows?), won't. As for the CX-1, it's a cluster of PCs in a deskside package. Lame. Seymour would never approve it.

wmf 17y ago
Today the fastest possible machine that given amount of money can buy is an x86 PC. The cost of the backwards compatibility crap is more than subsidized by the huge economy of scale. Removing DOS/Windows support would actually cost money and would make no performance difference.
- rbanffy 17y ago
  "backwards compatibility crap" You said it better than I would. Also, "the fastest possible machine that given amount of money can buy" is an x86 PC precisely because there are no more Unix workstation manufacturers left.
  - wmf 17y ago
    I disagree about cause and effect. If you tried to make a RISC workstation today, it would be so slow or expensive that no one would buy it.
  - nailer 17y ago
    You can still buy SPARC servers, and they've benchmarked behind Intel for some time now.
    - rbanffy 17y ago
      I bet it depends on the benchmark you are running.
      - nailer 17y ago
        How much do you bet?
- tesseract 17y ago
  In particular, the fastest possible machines that any amount of money can buy tend to be, these days, basically just piles of x86 PCs. http://www.top500.org/lists/2009/11 http://www.top500.org/lists/2009/11