Let’s start with the obvious.

You may be wondering “Why haven’t I heard from Mediaworkstations.net in a while?”  Well, COVID was disruptive, but we might say that the impact on hardware availability did not start to become really acute until late 2020.  At first we were estimating this would continue for 6 months. Then it became 12 months.  Now? Ultimately we think supply constraints will be 24 – 36 months total when it’s all said and done. Many of you are perhaps aware and some of you affected by these supply chain issues, but it’s particularly acute for anything to do with semiconductors. EPYC server CPUs … small batches keep trickling in, but 3rd Gen Threadripper CPUs have been EOL (End Of Life) for a good while now.

Wide coverage of our Portable EPYC Workstation on WCCFTECH and Portable Dual EPYC Workstation on Tom’s Hardware made them our most popular product for this period, and, due to continued China supply issues our current turnaround time is 30+ days. We have a current waiting list for Portable EPYC Workstation orders, and all units were spoken for even before our custom chassis for them arrived at the port of Long Beach with the last shipment. If you are interested in the fastest Portable EPYC Workstation, or fastest Portable Dual EPYC Workstation, email us at sales@mediaworkstations.net for the latest update and/or to get on our waiting list.

Availability is challenging, but as with many things there are often hidden opportunities.  “So what are my options for the fastest workstation or server quickly?” you may be thinking.  Answer:  Intel.

With our Portable Xeon Workstation lineup, this means our i-X1P Portable Xeon Workstation or i-X2P Portable Dual Xeon Workstation.  These are nearly always lower-cost choices with faster turnaround time.  Our long popular i-X2 Dual Xeon Workstation is an excellent choice for deskside workstation which is equippable with up to 4 GPUs, which makes it ideal to double as a local render node, or to crunch through massive data sets.

Intel are also still the best choice for many predominantly single-threaded workflows like CAD, Modeling & Animation but also Photogrammetry, typified by our very popular VELO-x Mediaworkstation, which is equippable with dual 24GB RTX 3090 or Dual 48GB RTX A6000.  That said if you are working data sets or render scenarios where the fastest EPYC workstation or server wins by CPU core count, the EPYC CPU supply has begun to improve but turnaround times are still typically a couple weeks longer than with their 3rd Gen Scaleable Xeon counterparts.

The Best Workstation for Omniverse article is coming soon, and we should say we have two terrific dual boot mini workstations on clearance.  These are great Adobe Create Cloud workstations, fast workstations for Cinema 4D modeling & animation workflows, or any single-threaded centric workflow like CAD at modest prices.  Because they can boot into both Intel and Linux, they are ideal also for R&D teams for example who want to test apps and efficiency in different operating systems.

Hope you all are productive and happily engaged as we step into summer of 2022!