IBM Opteron Intellistations arrive Friday

BIG BLUE IS READYING the launch of a series of Intellistations this Friday which use AMD Opteron 200s up to 2.2GHz and dual configurations.

The machines, dubbed the A Pros, come with Windows XP Professional 32 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS3 64, pre-loaded.

They will also support dual channel DDR ECC memory up to 16GB and can be configured with either Nvidia Quadro NVS 280, 128MB Quadro FX1100 or QuadroFX 3000, which has 256MB of graphics memory.

All the three models include Gigabit Ethernet, but basic memory configs are 1GB, 1GB and 2GB for the $2,488 economy model, the $3,770 "value" model and the $6,098 "performance" model. The "economy" model uses the 244 (1.80GHz), the other two the 248 (2.20GHz).

IBM will describe the Opteron workstations in marketing slang as "64 bit performance, 32-bit convenience: the platform of choice for your evolving world". µ