There are benefits to being one of the dominant and most vocal supporter of the Opteron processor, and in the case of Sun Microsystems, Inc, that means getting first dibs on the new socket 939 Opteron chips. To that end, Sun announced a new workstation using the chip yesterday at the JavaOne event in San Francisco.

The machine, code-named "Marrakesh" and sold under the Ultra 20, is being aimed at developers. The socket 939 Opterons, as we report elsewhere in this issue, are an implementation of the 64-bit Opteron chip that has one less pin, uses unbuffered main memory, and plugs into the same sockets as the 64-bit Athlon 64 processors do.

Moving to unbuffered memory means that there is a slight increase in the chance of soft errors caused by radiation inside the workstation, but it also means that the workstation can use the same kind of inexpensive unbuffered main memory used in PCs rather than the expensive buffered kind used in servers. Unbuffered main memory also delivers higher bandwidth and is quicker to get data after a cache miss, which are things that workstation users are usually keen on.

The Ultra 20 comes in three flavors. The value edition has a single 1.8 GHz Opteron 100 processor (that's a 939 socket, not the normal 940 socket of the Opteron chips), 512 MB of 400 MHz DDR main memory, a PCI-based ATI RageXL graphics card, an 80 GB SATA disk drive, a DVD drive, and a three-year warranty for $895. This machine is targeted at educational institutions and developers with tight budgets.

The mid-sized Ultra 20 configuration has a 2.2 GHz Opteron 100 chip, 1 GB of main memory, an nVidia Quadro NVS280 2D graphics card (PCI Express), plus the same disk, DVD, and warranty for $1,395. The high-end Ultra 20 boost the clock speed to 2.6 GHz, boosts memory to 2 GB, adds an nVidia Quadro FX1400 PCI Express graphics card, a 250 GB SATA drive, and dual DVD drives for $2,695. Because socket 939 machines only support four main memory slots and vendors can only produce 1 GB DDR 400 DIMMs, the main memory in the Ultra 20 maxes out at 4 GB right now.

This high-end box is aimed at MCAD and EDA users. In addition to the PCI Express x16 slot for graphics, the workstation has two PCI Express x13 slots and four 33 MHz PCI slots (for legacy card support). The machines currently only support single-core, socket 939 Opteron 100 Series chips, but as soon as AMD can deliver dual-core versions of the chips, Sun will drop them into the Marrakesh workstations. Sun will be shipping the machines starting in July, and is offering financing terms that allow a developer to have one for under $30 a month.

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