[TUHS] Whither Workstations? (Was Re: Demise of AT&T)

On Mon, May 19, 2025 at 12:36 PM Noel Chiappa <jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote: The CPU ISAs may be _largely_ shared, but computing has bifurcated into two distinct camps: those machines intended for use in datacenters, and those intended for consumer use by end-users. CPUs intended for datacenters tend to be characterized by large caches, lower average clock speeds, wider IO and memory bandwidth. Those intended for consumer use tend to have high clock speeds, a bit less cache, and support for comparatively fewer IO devices/less memory. On the end-user side, you've got a further split between laptops/desktop machines and devices like phones, tablets, and so on. In both cases, the dominant IO buses used are PCIe and its variants (e.g., on the data center side you've got CXL), NVMe for storage is common in lots of places, everything supports Ethernet more or less (even WiFi uses the ethernet frame format), and so on. USB seems ubiquitous for peripherals on the end-user side. In short, these machines may be called "personal computers" and they may be PCs in the sense of being used primarily by one user, but contemporary data center machines have more in common with mainframes and high-end servers than the original PCs, and consumer machines are much closer architecturally to high end workstations than to yesteryear's PCs. My desktop machine is a Mac Studio with an ARM CPU; I call it a workstation and I think that's pretty accurate. At work, one of our EE's has a big x86 thing with some stupidly powerful graphics card that he uses to do board layout. It's a workstation in every recognizable sense, though it does happen to run Windows. - Dan C.