Engineering workstations are evolving—for those that give them a chance.
Computers aren’t what they used to be.
The classic picture of a computer—for me, at least, someone who grew up with the internet but had to endure dial-up—is the desktop. A literal black box accompanied by a keyboard, mouse, and CRT monitor with bezels so thick you could frame a house with them.
For those who can remember further back, the quintessential computer might be a towering, tube-filled IBM mainframe. For those born this millennium, maybe a sleek silver laptop. The youngest among us, when asked to imagine a computer, may well point at an iPad or even un-pocket their smartphone.
Our conception of computers—what they look like and more importantly, what they can do—has been in flux from day one. Today, computers have more forms (and more performance) than ever before. One of the more interesting of these is, in a way, no form at all: the remote computer, an ethereal “desktop” beamed via the internet into a secondary computer. Today, remote computing has become a viable alternative for the local desktop, even for the most demanding of users—like, for instance, engineers.
So why are these users so reluctant to go remote?
The Engineering Workstation is Changing
For as long as there have been computers, there have been engineers pushing them to their limits. For these users, average computers don’t cut it—they need the fastest memory, the most powerful processors, the brawniest graphics cards. Anything less would be like a Formula 1 driver getting behind the wheel of a Corolla.
Workstations are the race cars of the computing world, and engineers used to prefer them in the form of a desktop, that classic black box. A sizeable minority, however, opted for the so-called mobile workstation—laptops with extra oomph.
And then COVID hit, and that preference changed. You could see it in the sales numbers.
“Before the pandemic, it was 40 percent mobile [workstations] and 60 percent desktop [workstations], and that’s a worldwide number. The market has flipped: It’s now 60 percent mobile, 40 percent desktop,” said Rob Herman, General Manager of the Workstation and Client AI Business Unit at Lenovo, in an interview with engineering.com in April 2021.
This shift intuitively makes sense. The pandemic forced many workers, engineers and otherwise, to rapidly relocate. Consequently, mobility-centric laptops have exploded in popularity. In 2021, PC manufacturers shipped 275 million laptops worldwide, the highest volume since 2012. Desktop sales were a mere 66 million, a near all-time low (2020 took that record).1
The market flip between mobile and desktop workstations has continued into 2022, Herman told me earlier this year, remaining at 60 percent mobile and 40 percent desktop sales. But he pointed out another trend he’s seeing among users of the most powerful workstations, those with the most demanding workloads.
“For those heavy duty workloads, [users] are either just holding onto the desktops that they have and maybe upgrading graphics, or they’re going in some way remote,” Herman said.
Remote Workstations Are Ramping Up
Remote desktop solutions have existed for decades. The hardware—typically a server, sometimes an actual desktop, possibly virtualized—is remotely accessed by the end user via an internet connection and a device of their choosing, typically one with scant processing power of its own. This provides the flexibility of a mobile device with the performance of a desktop tower.
But for workstation users, remote desktops haven’t always had a shining reputation. They’ve historically been seen as inferior to local desktops, with low image quality, laggy input and connection issues among the list of potential concerns. These problems would be annoying to any user, but they are especially pronounced to users with highly graphical workflows, such as engineers designing 3D models. These users are most likely to discern the difference between a local and remote desktop, and they are the least willing to make usability sacrifices—never mind the flexibility remote desktops could provide.
But these holdouts should reconsider. Remote desktop technology has improved markedly over the last several years, partly spurred by the demands of the pandemic but largely thanks to a steady pace of technological development. Companies like Teradici, developer of the popular PCoIP remote desktop protocol, have been refining the remote experience for decades.
And it’s ready for even the most refined of users, according to Ziad Lamman, Global Head of Teradici Product Management at HP, which acquired Teradici last year.
“For someone who’s doing dual-display engineering work on a workstation, we have a [remote] environment that meets your performance needs,” Lamman said to engineering.com last month.
Every other remote desktop solution provider I’ve spoken to—and I’ve spoken to a lot—has stood behind similar claims for engineering users. They say that their remote solutions can meet the heavy demands of engineers, including those with highly graphical workflows. The hardest part is convincing them.
And for many, COVID did that convincing.
“With COVID people had to deal with [remote desktops], and I think they found out that it wasn’t nearly as bad as they thought it was going to be,” said Cathy Lascara, Software VP at Mechdyne, developer of the TGX remote desktop protocol, to engineering.com last year.
Most if not all remote desktop developers saw the same pandemic persuasion.
“Many of our existing customers who were virtualized or remoting pre-pandemic have grown their usage, in some cases by a hundred percent,” said Lamman. “We’re seeing more manufacturing and AEC customers look this way.”
Time to Go Remote
Today, every workstation manufacturer has a foot in the remote computing market, selling server hardware as well as partnering with (or acquiring) the developers of remote desktop software. Some of this software is customised for heavy duty workloads, and some consultants even specialize in helping engineers go remote. PNY, a company which sells graphics hardware to engineering and manufacturing users, has seen increasing interest in virtual solutions.
“With enhanced on-boarding, off-boarding, and resource utilization being top of mind across many manufacturing concerns, virtualization is increasingly seen not only as a viable solution but as a vital one,” said Carl Flygare, Professional Graphics and Data Center Product Marketing Manager at PNY, to engineering.com.
Engineers are running out of reasons to hang on to their desktop workstations, and there are many reasons to ditch them. Remote workstation solutions offer simplified IT administration, tighter security, and the ability to access powerful hardware from nearly any client device, anywhere with an internet connection. Arguably, it’s the need for an internet connection that remains the largest drawback of remote computers, though with coverage and connections improving daily, this may be more of a worry than a weakness.
Computers will no doubt continue to transform in the years to come. Perhaps future generations, when asked to close their eyes and imagine a computer, will think of the ultracold tubes and tangled wires of quantum computers. Perhaps they will even be computers themselves, augmented with bionic brains and artificial intelligence.
But in the here and now, in this slice of computing history, the remote desktop is what I’ll be thinking of (well, right after that chunky CRT monitor). Engineers should be thinking of it too.
