IDG Contributor Network: Threadripper and Titan: the best workstation you didn’t know about
Last week I was hanging out with a bunch of engineers and it was a fun trip that I can’t yet talk about. However, one discussion jumped out at me because it was so orthogonal to how we think of two of the component vendors in the workstation space. We typically think of AMD and NVIDIA (disclosure: both AMD and NVIDIA are clients of the author) and that they are likely pounding on and bad mouthing each other every chance they get.
Apparently, that isn’t the always the case, when it comes to cooperation on a workstation solution they both seem to agree that a blended AMD/NVIDIA solution is best and the engineers at the event seemed to agree that the hottest workstation you can buy right now has a Threadripper processor and an NVIDIA graphics card. This is anything but a cheap date but given the shortage of engineers and that performance allows fewer engineers to do more work, this configuration is very at the moment. But the two leading workstation vendors, Dell and HP (disclosure: both Dell and HP are clients of the author) don’t make one of these providing a huge opportunity for the second tier to move up, or for one of these two to steal a march on the other. It also suggests that the most powerful workstation (depending on load) in Dell likely comes from Alienware.