Can somebody provide an example why would someone prefer such a workstation over a Windows workstation back then? I.e., which specific programs/applications demanded it?
CATIA V5 was the first version to support Windows NT. However, it was a complete rewrite, resulting in a very different UI and workflows. Even the file formats were largely incompatible with V4, so the automotive industry and their suppliers stayed with CATIA V4 for many years after the release of V5. And the only way to run CATIA V4 was on a UNIX workstation.
Also AIX was a safer and better certified system back then (think DoD stuff).
Mind that this was early Windows XP era. The Windows "workstation" would probably have something like a RIVA TNT with 16MB of graphics memory. Meanwhile the Intellistation had way more powerful options (e.g. 128MB on a single card, or exotic 4 cards x 16MB configurations).
But even if you could beef your PC hardware to similar specs, the CAD software was probably just not there (yet). Not to mention that pre-SP2 Windows XP were pretty terrible on their own.
The ATi equivalent was FireGL.
> At that point Windows XP 32-bit was the most commonly used variant, and while you could run XP 64-bit (and IBM did have native support for it on the IntelliStation 9228), XP 64-bit had so many problems so most users were stuck with 3.9 GB of RAM. Therefore if we were to assume that UNIX and said UNIX hardware offered way more memory, it starts to make sense
Windows was slow, with limited memory, a crappy scheduler and almost no professional SW written for it. Its security was also (until Win XP) nonexistent.