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IBM in May will begin shipping the company's first workstation powered by Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron microprocessor.

The IntelliStation A Pro workstation will be based on the AMD Opteron Model 244, 246, and 248 processors, at 1.8 GHz, 2 GHz, and 2.2 GHz, respectively, and will be available in dual-processor and single-processor configurations.

The new workstation will be the first Opteron workstation from a major vendor to ship in North America, says Sarang Ghatpande, an analyst with research company D.H. Brown Associates. Last December, Fujitsu's European subsidiary, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, unveiled a dual-processor Opteron workstation called the Celsius V810, which is not sold in the U.S.

Sales Strategy

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 market, where most of its workstations traditionally have been sold, Ghatpande says. 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 says.

"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 says. "It has a good value proposition for workstation applications."

A single-processor A Pro with a 1.8-GHz processor, a NVidia graphics card, and 1GB of memory will start at $2619, according to IBM. It will support the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of SuSE AG's Linux, as well as the 32-bit version of Microsoft's Windows XP Professional.

Windows 64-bit support will follow, when Microsoft ships its version of Windows for the Opteron processor, which is expected later this year.