alt Hacker NewsIt's worth looking at this from multiple angles, though.
Intuitively, I'm also extremely said that "workstations" aren't a thing anymore. That there are no professional, well-engineered, powerful Sun or SGI workstations anymore. In a sense, they even felt similar to sports cars: You drooled for them, often from a distance.
On the flip side, I don't miss exactly that: Not being able to afford such a thing, or even if you theoretically could, having to shell out tens of thousands of dollars (not even accounting for inflation yet).
Extremely powerful PCs are now available to nearly everyone who wants one, especially if you take into account that even a 10+ year old dumpster PC does more than almost all these past workstations in several regards.
We'd probably be lamenting the opposite if that wasn't the case. But yes, the shine and magic is mostly gone...
The end was hard for the workstation people. In the late 1990s, I went to visit a visual effects house in Hollywood. They used almost all SGI machines, with a few Windows NT machines. Two or three years later, the ratio had totally reversed.
I visited people at SGI's animation unit, which was in what's now the Computer Museum. They were trying to sell a Windows NT machine with their GPU for about $12,000. It didn't work out.
I once saw a Softimage demo at SIGGRAPH where they had a PC hooked up to a full rack of compute servers for rendering, allowing them to run the good renderer at full frame rate. All x86/NT, not Unix. Someone commented "That's Steven Speilberg's PC."
There are no AI workstations or rendering workstations, because that's now done "in the cloud". People don't buy 128 processor ARM machines and run Linux on the desktop much.
Although a game developer's machine today, with maybe 128GB RAM and an NVidia 5080, is a pretty good supercomputer.