X64 Workstations Basically Kill RISC/Unix Alternatives

Published: January 15, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

For the past couple of years, Jon Peddie Research has been keeping track of the workstation market, and in its latest casing of the market, for the third quarter of 2007, it basically said that the market for traditional RISC/Unix workstations is dead.

This is not a surprise to anyone, of course, but it is nonetheless a remarkable event in the history of the computer business. Sun Microsystems would not exist if academics and brokerage houses didn't need fast workstations to do their calculations as well as even more powerful servers to feed them, and because of Sun's success in workstations and expansion into servers in the late 1980s, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Silicon Graphics, and others eventually embraced RISC/Unix architectures and the open systems software stack that is now called the Internet. Throughout the transition from proprietary midrange and mainframe architectures, it was the volume Unix workstation that allowed Sun, HP, IBM, SGI, and dozens of smaller players to make enough money to do the substantial investments in RISC processors and related hardware designs and Unix systems software that enabled them to produce competitive yet highly profitable Unix servers that transformed the data center. Without the success of the Unix workstation, there probably would not have been such a large investment in Unix servers by system providers. (This might not have been a bad thing, since DEC's VAXen and VMS operating system and IBM's Systems Network Architecture were both more elegant than their RISC and Unix alternatives--but having the industry line up to a standard is more important than elegance.)

According to market research done by JPR, PC-derived workstations, which are built atop X64 processors and run either Windows or Linux, accounted for 99 percent of workstation shipments. The traditional proprietary workstation sellers, what is commonly called RISC/Unix workstation makers, got a measly 1 percent of shipments. HP formally exited the PA-RISC workstation business in the third quarter, leaving IBM and Sun as the two remaining RISC/Unix workstation players left in the market.

In the third quarter of last year--the latest statistics for which are available from JPR--762,600 workstations were sold worldwide, up 23.2 percent from the year-ago period. This amounted to $1.78 billion in sales, up 18.3 percent. As is the case with so many things in the IT sector, unit shipments are growing faster than average sales prices thanks to volume economics on the components in the box. The workstation is no different in this regard.

JPR does not just count branded workstations based on X64 or RISC architectures, but also the graphics cards that can turn any desktop or server into what is ultimately a graphics workstation. According to its figures, graphics card shipments and sales set new records in the third quarter of 2007, with 1.1 million units shipped, up 32.6 percent, and $338 million in sales, up 29 percent. nVidia had 86 percent of this graphics card market (in terms of shipments), with Advanced Micro Devices getting most of the remainder. And nVidia is closing in on AMD's dominant share of graphics cards for mobile workstations. Starting in the second quarter of 2007, nVidia started to get some traction here, and in the third quarter, nVidia attained an 84 percent share of shipments for mobile graphics cards. So AMD now has Intel beating it up in the X64 processor space and nVidia hitting it hard in the graphics market.

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