Editing Workstation (section)

===Decline===
The more widespread adoption of these technologies into mainstream PCs was a direct factor in the decline of the workstation as a separate market segment:<ref>{{Cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=XGlGAAAAIBAJ&dq=%22Workstation%22&pg=PA14&article_id=6267,1290833 |title=The Daily Gazette |publisher=The Daily Gazette |language=en}}</ref>

* Reliable components
* High-performance [[3D computer graphics|3D graphics]] hardware for [[computer-aided design ]] (CAD) and [[computer-generated imagery]] (CGI) animation is increasingly popular in the PC market around the mid-to-late 1990s mostly driven by computer gaming, yielding the first official GPU in [[Nvidia]]'s NV10 and the breakthrough [[GeForce 256]].
* High-performance [[Central processing unit|CPUs]]: the first [[Reduced instruction set computer|RISC]] of the early 1980s offer roughly one order of magnitude in performance improvement over [[Complex instruction set computer|CISC]] processors of comparable cost. [[Intel]]'s [[x86]] CISC family always had the edge in market share and the [[economies of scale]] that this implied. By the mid-1990s, some CISC processors like the [[Motorola 68040]] and Intel's [[i486|80486]] and [[Pentium (original)|Pentium]] have performance parity with RISC in some areas, such as integer performance (at the cost of greater chip complexity) and hardware [[Floating-point arithmetic|floating-point]] calculations, relegating RISC to even more high-end markets.<ref name=macworld>{{cite magazine
| url = https://archive.org/stream/MacWorld_9112_December_1991#page/n141/mode/2up
| title = Macintosh Quadras - Power But No Pizzazz
| pages = 140–147
| date = December 1991
| volume = 8
| issue = 12
| magazine = MacWorld
| first = Bruce
| last = Webster
| author-link = Bruce Webster
}}</ref>
* Hardware support for floating-point operations: optional on the original IBM PC; remained on a separate chip for Intel systems until the [[i486#Models|80486DX]] processor. Even then, x86 floating-point performance lags other processors due to limitations in its architecture. Today even low-price PCs now have performance in the gigaFLOPS range.
* High-performance/high-capacity data storage: early workstations tend to use proprietary disk interfaces until the SCSI standard of the mid-1980s. Although SCSI interfaces soon became available for IBM PCs, they were comparatively expensive and tend to be limited by the speed of the PC's [[Industry Standard Architecture|ISA]] peripheral bus. SCSI is an advanced controller interface good for multitasking and daisy chaining. This makes it suited for use in servers, and its benefits to desktop PCs which mostly run single-user operating systems are less clear, but it is standard on the 1980s-1990s Macintosh. [[Serial ATA]] is more modern, with throughput comparable to SCSI but at a lower cost.
* High-speed [[computer network|networking]] (10&nbsp;Mbit/s or better): 10&nbsp;Mbit/s network interfaces were commonly available for PCs by the early 1990s, although by that time workstations were pursuing even higher networking speeds, moving to 100&nbsp;Mbit/s, 1&nbsp;Gbit/s, and 10&nbsp;Gbit/s.  However, economies of scale and the demand for high-speed networking in even non-technical areas have dramatically decreased the time it takes for newer networking technologies to reach commodity price points.
* Large displays (17- to 21-inch) with high resolutions and high refresh rates for graphics and CAD work, which were rare among PCs in the late 1980s and early 1990s but became common among PCs by the late 1990s.
* Large memory configurations: PCs (such as IBM clones) are originally limited to 640&nbsp; KB of RAM until the 1982 introduction of the [[Intel 80286|80286]] processor; early workstations have megabytes of memory. IBM clones require special programming techniques to address more than 640 KB until the 80386, as opposed to other 32-bit processors such as [[SPARC]] which provide straightforward access to nearly their entire 4&nbsp; GB memory address range.  64-bit workstations and servers supporting an address range far beyond 4&nbsp; GB have been available since the early 1990s, a technology just beginning to appear in the PC desktop and server market in the mid-2000s.
* [[Operating system]]: early workstations ran the [[Unix]] operating system (OS), a [[Unix-like]] variant, or an unrelated equivalent OS such as [[OpenVMS|VMS]]. The PC CPUs of the time have limitations in memory capacity and [[protected mode|memory access protection]], making them unsuitable to run OSes of this sophistication, but this, too, began to change in the late 1980s as PCs with the [[32-bit]] [[i386|80386]] with integrated paged [[Memory management unit|MMUs]] became widely affordable and enabling [[OS/2]], [[Windows NT 3.1]], and Unix-like systems based on [[Berkeley Software Distribution|BSD]] and [[Linux]] on commodity PC hardware.
* Tight integration between the OS and the hardware: Workstation vendors both design the hardware and maintain the Unix operating system variant that runs on it. This allows for much more rigorous testing than is possible with an operating system such as Windows. Windows requires that third-party hardware vendors write compliant hardware drivers that are stable and reliable. Also, minor variations in hardware quality such as timing or build quality can affect the reliability of the overall machine. Workstation vendors are able to ensure both the quality of the hardware, and the stability of the operating system drivers by validating these things in-house, and this leads to a generally much more reliable and stable machine.