The death of the Workstation

Long gone is the Unix Workstation. Even Sun is no longer going as SUNW, but as JAVA. Software is the new game. And, for the most part, I love it. Linux has matured and is an excellent workstation OS. Solaris is moving forward in giant steps lately and still has an edge, at least IMHO. And Mac OS, the latest Unix(TM) OS looks just fine. Just one of these is an original workstation OS, but at least the new players are a nice replacement. AIX still lives, but it was never popular. HP/UX seems to be gone from the workstation market, and Tru64 and IRIX are no more. But they aren't the reason the workstations died. Hardware is.

In the old days workstations were proprietary, well optimized for their tasks and expensive. Now, they are mostly PC based, and only Sun still makes UltraSparc Workstations (hurray for the return of the Ultra name), but those look a lot like PC's too. Simply put Xeons and Opterons gave us several gigaflops on the desktop, and we don't need more. It's just fine. Also, nVidia gave us the Quadro graphics which, in general 3D can run circles around the Wildcats, Creators and Impact graphics of the day. No complaints from me. The new CPU's support virtualization and are an excellent tool for both the developers and technical users, and the new cheap graphics are just wonderful. What I'm missing is the other stuff.

First, we seem to have lost the idea of purpose building. While this has brought the cost down, we lost something in the way. Sure, major vendors put in ECC memory, good PSU's and high-quality motherboards, but all of those machines just look the same. It's not just that I miss the good looks of the SGI O2, I miss expansion options. Now your typical workstation is just a PC with several graphics slots and not much else. Even if you do get extra slots you have to look for options elsewhere, the manufacturers offer graphics, and nothing else. And that is what we really lost: I/O. Back in the day a workstation had a lot of I/O. You rarely saw a bus, like PCIe of today, instead there were ASICS, bridges and even crossbar switches in Octane2 or Sun Blade 2000. In those machines there were no bottlenecks, any piece of I/O had it's own dedicated bandwidth. Sure, RAM was slower, but it was more closely matched to CPU speed and well interleaved so that, unlike today, CPU had to wait for a lot less cycle's for RAM. Old SGI O2's could map video as a texture for rendering graphics in real time. It wasn't because of the great CPU, it was because they had an ASIC to do it, and a dedicated datapath to transfer the data. But since most people don't want to pay for that these days, we ended up with generics. Generics who work fine for most people, most of the time, but still can't replicate all the performance of a ten year old machines.

As if that wasn't enough, look at the hard disc. While i do ADORE the fact that I can get the same storage in 10 times less space, for 10 times less money and using 10 times less power I somehow still feel robbed. Probably because I've ended up with 10 times less uOPs as well. Solid state is being promised for almost a decade, but there is still no one offering something even comparable to a modern SAS drive, or a few of those. So, economics wins, and we and up with slow drives. People storing mp3's don't care, and they make the economy work.

While economics of scale do work, and do bring advantages, we seem to have lost a lot on the way. We all love faster CPU's but we are wasting them most of the time. I rarely see my CPU being utilised over 10%, and my I/O is always slow. We made a trade-off to get a lower price, but did we make a good one? I'm having a feeling that what we're getting is just what you would get if you would've swapped a trusty IBM Model-M for a new wireless, bluetooth, low-profile flat keyboards with 13 extra buttons, volume control, backlit and with a smart card reader. I don't know about you, but I still own a Model-M. It's sturdy, reliable and it works. And it still has the best tactile feeling I've ever experienced. It's nice to have new features, but I first and foremost need my keyboard to provide a good typing experience, and that is what Model-M does. Now, we have all the new features, but instead of the buckling springs we get a piece of rubber. It's cheap.

The sad truth is that the Workstation is dead. No more nice and reliable machines. If the fact people now call Dell as a workstation vendor doesn't convince you nothing will. The PC has won and, for better or for worse, you're stuck with it. At least we got something in return - the software. Linux, Solaris and OpenSolaris bring many innovations to the desktop (I'm not an Apple user, at least for now). Virtualization, new file systems like ZFS, and tools like DTrace make desktops a great place to be, and something I'll probably blog a lot. But somehow, something is missing. I just feel like those old workstations had a soul.