Most engineering workstations don’t become obsolete overnight. They get annoying first. A model that used to finish before lunch now runs into the afternoon. A parameter sweep gets started before everyone leaves and is still chewing through cases the next morning. Someone needs the machine for CAD work, but the solver has 73 percent left and nobody wants to kill the run. That’s usually the point when people start looking at bigger hardware. The trouble is that “bigger” can mean almost anything. More cores. More RAM. A GPU. Another workstation. A cloud instance. A physical server sitting somewhere else. Without knowing what’s actually slowing the job down, it’s surprisingly easy to spend a lot of money and end up only slightly faster. First, figure out what the workstation is struggling wit ...