So... what's a 'workstation' these days? Every desktop machine has the 3M: (at least) a megapixel display, (at least) a megabyte of RAM, and (at least) a 1 MIPS processor, and that's in addition to little things like graphics cards and Ethernet (and/or WiFi) hardware, both of which were defining features at one point.
I'm torn apart whether this is a good or a silly question. On one hand it's an interesting nitpick on the change of labels / language, on the other hand it feels like Gordon E. Moore should poke you a bit with a stick or something.
In other words: Labels change, especially in IT. Duh?
I'd look at it like this: A workstation is what you use when computation power and/or memory bandwidth is a limiting factor of your work. This holds true for:
- developers of software with long compilation time
- 3d animators / professional video editors
- scientists that want to run simulations
- engineers that want to run simulations
For these people, a computer is never fast enough and they get a tangible benefit for every speedup - which is why they always have the best performing gear. And the (multicore) performance of the best gear is always [CONSUMERGRADE_PC * X].
I'd set X=3 and then you have yourself a workstation. (For example 16 core Xeon vs. 4 core i5.
For that reason I don't think it really makes sense to define workstation in an absolute number of Gigaflops/Hertz/Byte. It's just the cutting edge of desktop computing that's still feasible for work (e.g. overclocked CPUs to 8Ghz with liquid nitrogen cooling don't count, neither do machines with say more than 2kW heat - that's when you need a computing cluster).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M_computer
Does the definition of workstation come down to what the computer's used for at this point?