Many industries could use the processing power
Guys, I know a lot of you cannot imagine nor would ever need more processing power. God knows I have quite a few boxes at home and work that are perfectly fine as they are (primary router is a 486 that keeps chugging; I have beem tempted to retire it a time or time because of power reasons, but I did the calculations--the difference in energy costs are miniscule).
Two concrete examples of why more processing power is needed in some workstations, in two different fields (not the standard answer about video encoding, though that is a huge market that should not be overlooked):
My girlfriend works for a . . . not-so-secret, secret agency. Yeah, I really hope the sniffer program they installed on my box because I sleep with her correctly renders smiley faces.
She is working on a project that deals a lot with fuild and projectile dynamics. Some of the requirements of what they need to be able to do are crazy-complicated--they need lots of ram and cpu. They have server farms doing stuff, but a lot of the time, it would help to have a personal workstation that the engineer can pre-test things on. So enter in the concrete example. There team has a couple of the new Dell 390s--the ones that come with the QX6700 and 4gb ram (ddr2--apparently, Dell will only ship them with 4gb of ram (4 slots), but I know there are 2gb ddr2 chips out there; it could be they do not want to canabilize sales of the 490/690 Xeon line). Anyway, they were under the impression that a workstation like this with plenty of internal raided space would be sufficient to run existing models for short periods of time, and also allow them to plan for the future. They unboxed it, set it up, and found out in the first day that they were wrong. In their two boxes, both memory and cpu were still saturated. This is a $4500 box. Suffice it to say that this "institution" has no funding problem, so no doubt they could keep buying more. But up until now exactly how would you get a much more "powerful" workstation?
Second concrete example. I work for one of the very large biotechs in the San Francisco Bay Area (yeah stock options!). Anyway, we use some pretty intensive software for discovery (anyone work with BLAST?) When you submit a job to our clusters, you have to have a damn good idea of what you are doing. Grid time is expensive (even with today's computers). In my opinion (and my bosses) this limits that creative-scientific thought process in many ways. I persuaded her to get a Mac Pro (2.66ghz) and a Dell 390 (quad configured). Both 4gb ram. In my simulations, I think the ram is fine for now (we can limited the variables we ask in any question, but with memory prices falling, too, at least for ddr2, we are thinking of asking bigger ones in each chunk). We got both so we could do the comparison (the bufferred memory really does slow it--in our sims about 7%, but you can have so much more memory on one of those boards). Anyway, just like my girlfriend, we found out we could use much more processing power. Much more. And for an added $2k, this is a no-brainer for us. Or for many large companies (uhm . . . and agencies
Again, these are highly specific applications to our industries, but they are widely used applications. And by people who have money. If you, Steve Jobs, are reading this, we will buy crazy amounts in a heartbeat. The time/energy spent in crafting a job so that you do not waste processor time on a grid or cluster is, I feel, enough to justify spending more on personal workstation.
A couple more things in this ridiculously long posting. Does no one remember the SUN and SGI workstations of old? Lots of memory, IO, processing power? There are many industries just salivating at the way Intel and AMD have been beating the hell out of each other. And the modelling folks in our company consider NVIDIA cards first now (thanks to the NVIDIA/ATI wars). A lot of this power may never be used by 99% of people (do not know the numbers), but that 1% who does use them will pay!!!
Also, god love SATA/eSATA. For $1200, I put together a little raided array to have my datasets on. 5 500gb 7200 sata drives, an enclosure, and a port multiplier card. 2TB, raid5. And the performance is great. I am getting 190MB/sec (raid5!) on ZFS. I tested it on the Dell 390 (running Solaris and ZFS). In HFS+ tests before I got this new hardware, I was getting about 25-30% less speed than on ZFS. Will test in the next week or so. So, again, Steve, make sure there are plenty of PCIe cards available, and please give us ZFS, even if only on non-root volumes.
We tend to go on buying plurges every 2-3 years. Our Apple reps smiles when asked about the 53xx in the Mac Pro/Xserve lineup. Strangely, he seems to think we should wait a little while before investing heavily (and I mean heavily) in these boxes. Kind of nice when he could take the commission now, even though the bastard will not tell me when these come out. The last round of buying, I have to convince our IT guys to open up and allow Macs/OSX to be considered for a lot of these things. This time (wether because they have learned more about OSX or because they are now Intel-based or because the Mac Pro acually seems to be prised better than the comparable Dell), they are the ones who started pushing this round of upgrades first.
