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I'm not sure workstations did suffer a demise? If workstation vendors like SGI, NeXT, Sun, HP-UX workstations etc. still existed in 2020, what would their produ

I'm not sure workstations did suffer a demise? If workstation vendors like SGI, NeXT, Sun, HP-UX workstations etc. still existed in 2020, what would their products look like? Surely just like a modern Mac or PC? Powerful multi-core CPUs, as much RAM as you have money to spend (e.g. >1 TB), high resolution full-colour graphics (e.g. 5k iMacs or similar PC monitors).

tinus_hn 6y ago
There’s still a market for supported, super high end workstations. There just isn’t a market for these weird operating systems these companies were selling. The operating systems may have been the best since sliced bread, they are useless without applications. And then without the operating system you get commoditized and it’s impossible to charge the amount of money these companies were charging.
blihp 6y ago
Basically what the workstation companies did was sell capabilities that would be available years down the line at a premium with much better margins. The problem (for them) was that Wintel kept shrinking the gap. In 1981 they were selling stuff that PC's wouldn't have for 10-15 years. In 1991 they were selling stuff that PC's wouldn't have for 5 years. By 2001 they had been largely lapped on their core systems. Had a company like SGI managed to survive their business model would have likely remained the same[1]: they might have looked like a boutique nVidia selling extreme high-end parallelism solutions (i.e. graphics, neural net hardware etc) that GPU makers wouldn't yet be able to match with commodity hardware. Probably some combination of extreme transistor count and boatloads of FPGA/specialized silicon coupled with extreme power consumption and cooling. They also would have been able to go after smaller verticals than nVidia can. That was always their game: selling solutions that were relatively harder to produce because they had to be engineered and hadn't been commoditized yet. The problem is, those doing to the commoditizing can move faster than those doing the innovating. When those doing the innovating die off, the technology doesn't advance as quickly. [1] I say this because all of these companies seemed to have a similar fault: they were never able to move down market so that they could scale up their volumes. The same thing is slowly killing Intel right now.
- rwmj 6y ago
  Essentially what IBM are doing with POWER.
  - girvo 6y ago
    I really enjoyed the time I got to spend with a POWER9 server all to myself; “remotely” accessed on the local intranet while at IBMs offices on a neat project they partner with us on, it was like an old school minicomputer. Parallelism out the wazoo, some absolutely silly amount of RAM, and I enjoyed playing with POWER’s vector instructions

tinus_hn 6y ago

There’s still a market for supported, super high end workstations. There just isn’t a market for these weird operating systems these companies were selling. The operating systems may have been the best since sliced bread, they are useless without applications. And then without the operating system you get commoditized and it’s impossible to charge the amount of money these companies were charging.

blihp 6y ago

Basically what the workstation companies did was sell capabilities that would be available years down the line at a premium with much better margins. The problem (for them) was that Wintel kept shrinking the gap. In 1981 they were selling stuff that PC's wouldn't have for 10-15 years. In 1991 they were selling stuff that PC's wouldn't have for 5 years. By 2001 they had been largely lapped on their core systems. Had a company like SGI managed to survive their business model would have likely remained the same[1]: they might have looked like a boutique nVidia selling extreme high-end parallelism solutions (i.e. graphics, neural net hardware etc) that GPU makers wouldn't yet be able to match with commodity hardware. Probably some combination of extreme transistor count and boatloads of FPGA/specialized silicon coupled with extreme power consumption and cooling. They also would have been able to go after smaller verticals than nVidia can. That was always their game: selling solutions that were relatively harder to produce because they had to be engineered and hadn't been commoditized yet. The problem is, those doing to the commoditizing can move faster than those doing the innovating. When those doing the innovating die off, the technology doesn't advance as quickly. [1] I say this because all of these companies seemed to have a similar fault: they were never able to move down market so that they could scale up their volumes. The same thing is slowly killing Intel right now.

rwmj 6y ago
Essentially what IBM are doing with POWER.
- girvo 6y ago
  I really enjoyed the time I got to spend with a POWER9 server all to myself; “remotely” accessed on the local intranet while at IBMs offices on a neat project they partner with us on, it was like an old school minicomputer. Parallelism out the wazoo, some absolutely silly amount of RAM, and I enjoyed playing with POWER’s vector instructions