September 15, 1997

Wintel Gains In Workstations Quality graphics--and lower prices--help makers of new `personal' models steal market share from Unix vendors By Gerald Lazar nce upon a time, "workstation" meant Unix, pure and simple. But the rise of the Pentium Pro microprocessor and the Windows NT operating system has changed all that. Today, two kinds of workstations make up the market: Unix-based "technical workstations" from vendors such as IBM, Silicon Graphics, and Sun Microsystems, and Intel-based "personal workstations" running Windows NT and sold by vendors including Dell Computer, Gateway 2000, and Intergraph. Both NT and Unix workstations share some characteristics. "A workstation must have a high-perfor mance CPU, high-performance I/O, the ability to go to half a gigabyte of main memory, large disk capacity, and high graphics capabilities," says Niraj Swarup, VP of marketing for Accel Graphics Inc., a graphics board vendor in Milpitas, Calif. Unix workstations continue to dominate the high end of the workstation market. Products from the traditional vendors, including Sun and Silicon Graphics, provide processing capabilities that the Intel-based machines simply can't touch. Graphics accelerators for these machines are almost always produced by the hardware vendors themselves, just as the systems' CPUs are. Although both Digital Equipment and Hewlett-Packard workstations run Unix, for example, you can't put a Digital graphics card into an HP workstation. Also, they are selling to a captive audience, with little pressure to keep prices down. The good news is that vendors can fine-tune their graphics boards to get the most out of their systems. After less than two years on the market, Wintel-based pers onal workstations are already making inroads into the workstation market's low end and midrange. "We're seeing startled reactions from people when they compare Wintel and Unix performance," says Accel Graphics' Swarup. Even though Intel machines can't reach the high-end performance of Unix machines, they're getting a good share of the entry-level market because they're considerably less expensive. "It's a trade-off," says Peter Ffoulkes, principal analyst and director of the advanced desktop and workstation computing program at market research firm Dataquest Inc. in San Jose, Calif. "You can equip 30 engineers with reasonable equipment, or you can equip 20 with very good equipment." The market for graphics cards is tied, not surprisingly, to the market for workstations as a whole. The workstation market is growing by about 8% a year; this year, that growth will translate into industrywide sales of about $13 billion, up from approximately $12 billion last year, says Dataquest. Unit shipments of works tations are growing much faster, reflecting the emergence of lower-priced Wintel machines. About 1 million will be shipped worldwide this year, up from roughly 870,000 units last year, for a growth rate of about 15%, according to Dataquest. Nearly a quarter of this year's machines-about 230,000 units-will be Intel workstations running Windows NT, Dataquest predicts. (Many more NT systems will be shipped this year, of course. The 230,000 represents an estimate of the number that will be used in workstation applications.) Wintel machines are still a relatively tough sell because many workstation users are more concerned with total performance than with getting the most for their money. Also, many engineering companies are already Unix users. It's hard to convince them to switch hardware, operating systems, and application software to save a few bucks. The market for add-in graphics cards is harder to figure, though. Many analysts and vendors say that about half of all workstations are shipped with graph ics accelerators. Although graphics cards technically can be swapped out or added later, the vast majority are added at the time the workstation is shipped. A card stays with the workstation for the life of the machine. Prices for workstation graphics cards begin at $2,000, which means the market this year will be worth at least $100 million. Top-of-the-line graphics cards for Unix machines can cost more than $15,000, so until analysts can get a better handle on board shipments, the real worth of the market will be hard to determine. The Wintel graphics-card market is volatile. Except for Intergraph, which makes its own chips, the chips found in the personal workstations all are provided by third parties. The key players in the chip market are 3Dlabs, Mitsubishi/Evans, and Sutherland, as well as smaller players such as Dynamic Pictures and Real 3D. "One of the typical things about the commodity approach is that it allows small companies to make a reasonable living," notes Dataquest's Ffoulkes. "They may n ot dominate the market, but they are able to do quite well." Graphics add-in cards for the personal workstation market reflect the PC market as a whole. Like most equipment for Intel-based machines, the graphics accelerators are built not by the systems vendors, but by third parties. There are more than a dozen major board vendors. This means competition-and lower prices-among the vendors. But it also means that the boards are less likely to be optimized for performance within a given system. With its dual line of workstations-some Unix, some Intel-based-Digital may be in a good position to evaluate the two approaches. "Sun and SGI spend all internal engineering dollars on graphics," says Lynn Thorsen-Jensen, director of a graphics product line for Digital, in Maynard, Mass. "The Intel vendors rely on external engineering resources. Neither model works well: You are either limited by your engineering budget, or you don't have control over development." Like many finely tuned devices, graphics ac celerators are good at what they do. Moving to a graphics accelerator can bring a three-fold increase in throughput, and as much as a 100-fold increase for specific applications, according to Greg Weiss, a graphics and workstations research analyst at D.H. Brown in Port Chester, N.Y. Throughput is measured by such metrics as the number of polygons drawn per second. Same Chips, Same Cards Because all Wintel board vendors use chips from the same handful of vendors, you'd expect very little difference among them. Indeed, "in many respects, there isn't a lot of difference among the cards," notes John Latta, a principal of 4th Wave, an Alexandria, Va., research firm. "Vendors like 3Dlabs and Mitsubishi create a reference design, and many board vendors just implement that." Others, such as market leader Diamond Multimedia and Accel, work closely with specific software vendors and configure their drivers to work well with particular applications. Graphics accelerators aren't strictly necessary. S ome CPUs, especially the RISC processors in mid- and high-end Unix machines, are perfectly capable of rendering polygons. But it slows down performance, and speed is frequently of the essence. Silicon Graphics is one vendor that says it has gone beyond the need for add-in cards. "We use an architecture called unified memory architecture," says Steve Proffitt, a marketing manager for the Mountain View, Calif., company. "There's only one piece of memory, and applications, data, memory, and video all live in that one space. That means we don't require add-in cards." Nevertheless, many applications do require such cards. Applications that need 3-D graphics, simply need 3-D graphics. "For some applications," says 4th Wave's Latta, "you don't cost-justify." For smaller companies, justifying the expense can still be done by the "seat of the pants" approach. Pyros Pictures Inc., which started as an architecture firm in Newport Beach, Calif., did its own projects in 3-D. "Then we started doing other people's p rojects in 3-D," says CEO Greg Pyros. "Being so close to Hollywood, we started doing animation, special effects, forensic animation, and more." Lately, the company has been working on graphics for computer games such as Zork: Inquisitor. Pyros Pictures works on 3DStudio Max systems. Sixteen of the computers are in-house; of these, three use Diamond Multimedia graphics accelerators. Pyros' criteria for adding graphics accelerators are simple: "If I can make money with it, it's a good investment," he says. More concrete measures are needed for larger companies. Graphics accelerators have two major benefits: They can improve quality and decrease time to market. P&H Mining Equipment credits graphics accelerators with greatly improving the quality of the mining equipment designed by its engineers. A $500 million com-pany, P&H Mining Equipment designs and builds above-ground mining equipment such as electronic shovels. The company has more than 200 IBM RS/6000 workstations worldwide; most of them are loca ted at the company's Milwaukee headquarters. Several years ago, P&H switched its finite-design analysis from the corporate mainframe to workstations with graphics accelerators. Now, P&H designers can model a design, check it for flaws, and make modifications several times a day, instead of just one finite analysis a day, as before. "They're being used for all equipment design today," says Chuck Hemann, distributed computing systems manager for P&H. "We're seeing great improvements in quality because we're able to do many more iterations." The Wintel workstation market will continue to take large bites out of the low- and midrange workstation markets. The graphics add-in card market will therefore increasingly switch from proprietary to open cards. Indeed, some forecast that the Unix market will eventually dry up entirely, as research into Unix graphics becomes increasingly expensive. Still, other industry watchers maintain that the high-end applications will keep the Unix market healthy far into the future. Back to News in Review Send Us Your Feedback Top of the Page

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