Long ago, the difference between workstations and desktop computers was remarkable. However, in recent times the difference has been narrowing more and more. The actual situation? Workstations could disappear in the future . And it seems that AMD has stopped manufacturing its Threadripper 3000X. Is this the end of the HEDT market?
There is no doubt that technology continues to advance, the problem comes when it advances faster than users need. Although not all of us have the same requirements, it is clear that any power level beyond what we are going to use is a waste of money. That is why there are specification and product ranges. However, the point is reached where even at the top of the range what is required by the most demanding market is exceeded.
In recent years, we’ve seen Intel pull out of the workstation processor market altogether. Instead, AMD has continued with its Threadripper, version 5000 of which has been released on the market. However, most of the potential users are moving to the higher end PC ranges. The reason? Simple, they are considered good enough in terms of performance. Thus, the new workstations mount an i9-12900K or a Ryzen 9 5950X before versions with more cores for workstations.
Why might workstations disappear?
On the part of Puget Systems we have been able to know the total number of workstations that have been sold month after month from January 2022 to the current month of May 2022. As can be seen, AMD has been dominating the market due to the absence of its rival . However, in the last two months it has been possible to see a drop in sales of this type of computer.
To what is due? Well, the explanation seems to lie in the fact that it has taken almost two years for AMD to release a Zen 3 architecture CPU for workstations. What has caused the demand to move towards the top-of-the-range Ryzen 5000 . At the same time, they have stopped manufacturing the Zen 2-based Threadripper 3000X , in order to free up the most in-demand chip wafers. While Intel is also to blame, if we want a simple, single-chip workstation processor, then we have to settle for 2019 tech.
To this we must add the fact that they require components such as special motherboards when using unique sockets , which makes them much more expensive . In general, if we take into account the performance relative to the price, then a workstation becomes much more expensive than a high-end gaming PC. And this only counting the processor and the motherboard and not the rest of the components. The situation is expected to change with the return of Intel with its Xeon Workstations. However, everything indicates that workstations could disappear. It is what you have when a company has a monopoly and takes advantage of it to inflate prices beyond what is necessary.