IBM unveils Opteron workstation
The new workstation will be the first Opteron workstation from a major vendor to ship in North America, said Sarang Ghatpande, an analyst at research company D.H. Brown Associates Inc. Last December, Fujitsu Ltd.'s European subsidiary, Fujitsu Siemens Computers (Holding) BV, unveiled a dual-processor Opteron workstation called the Celsius V810, which is not sold in the U.S.
By being quick to market with the 64-bit Opteron system, IBM may be able to sell the workstation outside of the computer-aided design (CAD) market, where most of its workstations traditionally have been sold, Ghatpande said. The workstation should appeal to customers doing digital content creation, visualization, and seismic analysis, who want 64-bit systems that are less expensive than RISC offerings, he said. "There is basically a need for this. The traditional 64-bit solutions have been higher priced than what customers need."
Ghatpande expects other hardware vendors to follow suit with Opteron workstations of their own. "I'm sure somebody else will do an Opteron-based workstation," he said. "It has a good value proposition for workstation applications."
computerworld.com |
