When you are looking for a workstation or new desktop there are a seemingly infinite number of potential solutions available. So where do you start? Well if you are after a powerful AMD based computer then you might want to take a look at the Sun Ultra 20 M2, a workstation based around AMD Opteron 1200 dual-core CPU, and available at a surprisingly reasonable price.

Workstation or desktop?

Historically from a Unix vendor like Sun, the workstation was the desktop equivalent of the big server (or servers) you had in the server room. Workstations were typically of two types. At the lower end of the scale was the workstation that was designed to operate on the same CPU and platform type as the rest of your Unix hardware and was designed as developer’s workstations so that they could build and test the software that would ultimately be executed on the company servers.

At the other end of the scale, the high-end workstations were designed to be used in environments where the real power was required, for example in engineering environments, computer aided design, fluid dynamics and 3D modeling (including many of the computer generated animated films we’ve seen recently).

For Sun, workstations of any type were based on the SPARC processor—I cut my teeth on a Sparc2 and later a Sparc10 and over the years have owned an IPC, Ultra5, Ultra1, and currently own an Ultra60, while having an Ultra 3 Mobile Workstation on test from Sun for more than the last year now (and I still love it, I don’t care how noisy it can be). SPARC was the standard, at least up until recently.

Today the market and environment have changed, the “big iron” servers are not always based on specialized CPUs like the SPARC series used by Sun. Today a number of the servers that run our internet systems and companies operate on the Intel/AMD platform, and the role of the desktop PC now stretches from the requirements of the typical desktop right through to the advanced workstation style environments that were the preserve of the custom Unix workstation.

SPARC is still a big part of the Sun hardware environment, and still powers their servers. With CPUs like the T1, which provides a higher number of cores and more simultaneous thread executions but at a lower clock cycle.

When Sun started selling AMD based servers, it made sense for them to develop a workstation

When Sun started selling AMD based servers, it made sense for them to develop a workstation that could solve the problem of the standard desktop PC and be scalable up to the workstation.

The hardware

This is where the Ultra 20 fits in, and it manages to suit from the low-end, where the developers will appreciate the high power and low price, right up to providing support for professional level 3D graphics. The Ultra 20 M2 is the new incarnation that includes a dual-core AMD Opteron 1200 CPU. The unit I’ve had on test consists of a dual-core Opteron at 2.8GHz, 4GB of ECC RAM, a 250GB SATA hard drive and the top of the range NVidia Quadra FX video card.

Figure 1: The Ultra 20 M2’s clean design

The Ultra 20 M2 will support up to 8GB of ECC RAM, and with a suitable 64-bit OS you’ll have full access to all the memory for your applications. Having that much memory on tap can be incredibly useful for applications like database development and 3D graphics, where the amount of RAM can be used to hold much more data in memory.

They were also kind enough to loan me a 20” LCD panel (a rebadged NEC unit—I already have one attached to the MacBook Pro). By using an AMD CPU, Sun have produced an interesting machine. Unlike SPARC based workstations which are limited in their operating system choices (basically Solaris or GNU/Linux), the AMD workstations are able to run a whole host of OS, including Solaris, GNU/Linux (SuSE and Red Hat are certified) and, of course, Windows.

With either of these latter two choices you could run your alternative OS at the same time as your host OS. Alternatively, you could just multi-boot into whatever you needed at the time. This makes the Ultra 20 M2 a wonderful choice if you are a developer who needs to develop on one these platforms, but still needs access to the corporate email service or applications.

The box itself is a full size tower case (see figure 1), but is quite a clean design, with only the CD drive, power button, headphone and some USB (six in total) and Firewire ports (two). There are also a full complement of high definition audio in/out ports, both on the front and back of the case.

Support is provided on the motherboard for one PCI Express x16 (taken up by the graphics card), an x16 slot wired as an x8 (and therefore suitable for a second graphics card, at a reduced rate), plus three conventional PCI slots. Two SATA hard disks are supported and you can take advantage of RAID 0/1 support (currently only in Microsoft Windows).

Finally, the motherboard provides two Gigabit ethernet interfaces. I’ve used these ports simultaneously, first to provide connectivity to the network, and provide a test interface to the T1000 I currently have on test. I’ve been able to keep both ports at full capacity with various tests.

Inside the case (see figure 2) you’ll find a similar clean design to the outside—there’s a massive amount of space in the case, which means you could add a couple of full size PCI cards and fill up on hard drives and still the case wouldn’t feel cramped. Right in the middle of the motherboard is one of the largest heatsinks I’ve ever seen on a commercial PC system from a mainstream vendor. It’s small compared to the heatsinks on the T1000 or T2000 CPU, but still impressive.

All that space in the case means that the airflow is efficient. There are a number of fans on the case, and at full blast the workstation is almost as noisy as the T1000. In normal use though, it’s hard to identify among the other noises in the room whether the machine is on or not. Given that fan noise can be one of the more annoying aspects of the modern computer, it’s nice to see that Ultra 20 M2 is both quiet and effective.

Right in the middle of the motherboard is one of the largest heatsinks I’ve ever seen

Figure 2: Inside the Ultra 20 M2