Historically, workstations offered higher performance than normally seen on contemporary personal computers, especially with respect to graphics and CPU power, memory capacity and multitasking ability.

Workstations are often optimized for displaying and manipulating complex data such as 3D mechanical design, engineering simulation results such as for computational fluid dynamics, animation and rendering of images, and mathematical plots. Consoles usually consist of a high resolution display, a keyboard and a mouse at a minimum, but often support multiple displays and may often use the fastest available versions of microprocessors. For design and advanced visualization tasks, specialized input hardware such as graphics tablets or a SpaceBall can be used. Workstations have classically been the first part of the computer market to offer advanced accessories and collaboration tools such as videoconferencing capability.

Following the performance trends of computers in general, today's average personal computer is more powerful than the top-of-the-line workstations of one or two generations before. As a result, the workstation market is becoming increasingly specialized, since many complex operations that formerly required high-end systems can now be handled by general-purpose PCs. However, workstations are designed and optimized for situations requiring considerable computing power, where they tend to remain usable while traditional personal computers quickly become unresponsive. Workstations perform work of such value to their owners that they are free of the requirement to run mass-market commodity operating systems. While the technology between workstations and PCs has since become similar, workstations still have many specialized features not found on their PC counterparts.

The term "workstation" has also been used to refer to a terminal or PC connected up to network.

What makes a workstation?

Consumer products such as PCs (and even game consoles) today use components that provide a level of power, at a reasonable cost, suitable to tasks which do not require heavy and sustained processing power. However, for engineering, medical, and graphics production tasks, where time is essential, the workstation is hard to beat.

It is instructive to take a detailed look at the history of specific technologies which once differentiated workstations from personal computers. The modern reader might be amused at what was considered the target for a high-end workstation in the early 1980s, the so-called "3M computer": a Megabyte of memory, a Megapixel display (roughly 1000x1000), and a "MegaFLOPS" compute performance (at least one million floating point instructions per second). As limited as this seems today, it was at least an order of magnitude beyond the capacity of the personal computer of the time; the original 1981 IBM PC had 16 KB memory, a text-only display, and floating-point performance around 1 kiloFLOPS (30 kiloFLOPS with the optional 8087 math coprocessor). Other desirable features not found in desktop computers at that time included networking, graphics acceleration, and high-speed internal and peripheral data buses.