Lenovo has unveiled two new workstations for professionals in specialized fields such as computer-aided design, game development, and digital content creation as well as oil and gas exploration.
Lenovo’s ThinkStation S20 and D20 can be configured to function as desktop supercomputers. Adding the Nvidia Tesla C1060 GPU platform to the workstations, Lenovo said, offers 240 additional cores of dedicated math-processing power to speed up complex calculations.
“Designers, engineers, developers and scientists require the highest levels in computing performance to help them produce breakthrough innovations,” said Tom Tobul, Lenovo’s executive director of enterprise, software and peripherals. “The new ThinkStation workstations deliver not only the utmost in performance, but also a user-centric design with an emphasis on quiet operation, even during heavy processing.”
Turbo Boost Technology
Under the hood, the workstations are equipped with cutting-edge technologies, such as the user’s choice of the latest Intel Xeon quad-core and dual-core processors, together with Nvidia’s new Quadro line of professional graphics cards. Additionally, users have the option of choosing an ATI FirePro graphics card from AMD.
Lenovo’s new machines also sport Intel’s Turbo Boost technology, which is an innovative component of Intel’s new Nehalem microarchitecture. The capabilities should make Lenovo’s new workstations particularly attractive to video-game developers and other professionals in search of extra performance during peak processing periods.
Turbo Boost enables all active cores to intelligently clock themselves up in steps of 133 MHz over the design clock rate as long as the CPU is operating below its power, current, and temperature specification limits. Conversely, when any of the limits are reached or exceeded, Intel says the processor frequency will automatically decrease by 133 MHz until the processor is again operating within its limits.
However, perhaps the hottest option available is Nvidia’s Tesla C1060 GPU, which delivers computational power of up to 936 billion floating-point operations…