Big Blue Debuts Opteron-Based Windows Workstation

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM has announced that it will ship an Opteron-based workstation aimed at high-end technical end users. While IBM has been selling its IntelliStation M Pro uniprocessor and Z Pro dual-processor workstations, which are based on the Xeon DP processors from Intel, for years, the advent of the IntelliStation A Pro is the first 64-bit capable X86 workstation that IBM has ever sold, since it opted out of supporting the 64-bit Itanium processor from Intel in its workstation line.

IBM's party line for years has been that if customers needed a high-performance workstation with 64-bit memory support and the most advanced graphics, then they should buy one of its Power-based workstations running AIX. Recently, Power customers could choose Linux instead of AIX on the platforms thanks to IBM's relationship with Red Hat, which has a workstation version of its eponymous Linux distribution.

But choosing to put the Opteron inside the IntelliStation product line is less about getting 64-bit than it is about putting more performance in a box for 32-bit X86 applications. Make no mistake about it. IBM's benchmark tests on number-intensive technical applications show that a dual-processor IntelliStation A Pro using Opteron processors running 32-bit applications at 2.2 GHz can deliver between 14 and 36 percent more oomph than a two-way Z Pro using Intel's Xeon DPs running at 3 GHz.

This performance difference is the real reason why IBM was the first tier-one vendor to support Opteron in servers and why it is now the first one to support Opteron in workstations. Big Blue is hedging its bets that Opterons could look attractive to many technical customers who are not yet ready to use 64-bit memory support, but who are keen on having a faster 32-bit machine than Intel can deliver with its Pentium 4 Xeon DP processors today, and who want a machine that can upgrade to 64-bits and PCI-Express (PCI-E) graphics down the road without replacing the box.

According to Bob Leonard, director of eServer workstation marketing at IBM, the IntelliStation A Pro is based on a motherboard design created by Big Blue that will facilitate such an upgrade. The Opteron, by supporting both 32-bit and 64-bit modes today (as future "Nocona" Xeon DP processors will be when they are launched in the second quarter of this year), already goes a long way toward making upgrades simpler, since it supports both modes inherently.

But sometime in the second half of 2004, probably in the fourth quarter, the high-powered AGP 8X graphics cards that companies like IBM are selling today will be bumped out by faster PCI-E cards that offer wider and faster buses from the graphics card to the processor and main memory complex. This is why the IntelliStation A Pro has a planar board design that puts the AGP 8X slot on a daughter card that can be removed and replaced with a PCI-E daughter card. Companies buying this workstation can get Nvidia nVS200, 3000, and 1100 and Wildcat 7110 AGP 8X graphics cards today for the box, and down the road, they will be able to swap out this daughter card and get a PCI-E graphics card.

Leonard says that IBM is supporting the 32-bit version of Microsoft's Windows XP Pro and Red Hat's 64-bit Enterprise Workstation operating systems on the IntelliStation A Pro, and both are preloaded on the machine. The 64-bit version of Windows--whatever Microsoft calls it--will be certified on it as well. The open source FreeBSD Unix variant is not supported on the box, even though the FreeBSD Foundation has just made the Opteron a tier-one platform for that operating system (which means it will probably work, even though IBM isn't supporting it). And it may even turn out that Solaris 9 for X86 gets certified on this platform as well. Wouldn't it be funny if customers bought IBM Opteron workstations to run Solaris? The one thing these boxes won't run is a version of AIX that is ported to Opteron, since it does not exist.

Customers who want a fast and cheap AIX workstation from IBM will have to wait until the company gets the PowerPC 970 or 980 into workstations or jumps all the way to the Power5 processors, maybe even sometime this year. Leonard would not say what Big Blue's plans are for these processors, except to say that the company was evaluating its options.

The IntelliStation A Pro comes in a 4U chassis that IBM says has been optimized to be very quiet compared to dual processor Xeon machines. The workstation supports Advanced Micro Devices' 8111, 8151, and 8131 chipsets, which have HyperTransport links to main memory and which can deliver 19.2GB/sec of peak bandwidth per processor. The Opteron 244 (1.8 GHz), 246 (2.0 GHz), and 248 (2.2 GHz) processors are supported in the machine. It has four DIMM memory slots per processor, and using 2 GB DIMMs (which are available but very pricey) it can support up to 16 GB of main memory. The IntelliStation A Pro configured with an operating system will have a base price of $2,619, but with the best graphics cards, lots of memory, and two processors it will probably cost closer to $8,000 to $10,000. This may sound like a lot, but it is less costly than spending $15,000 on a RISC/Unix workstation.

The IntelliStation A Pro will be available worldwide in May.