Lenovo Debuts 'Nehalem' Desktops

Lenovo this week refreshed its desktop line with the launch of the Nehalem based ThinkStations D20 and S20.

Just a few weeks after Apple made headlines by offering Xeon powered Mac Pros, Nehalem is hitting the new Thinkstations running on Intel’s soon to be released Xeon 3500 and 5500 series dual-core and quad-core chips. The company has said these new machines target game developers, graphic designers and high end developers -- basically anyone looking for a desktop supercomputer.

"The reason to launch a new generation of workstations is because there is a large, technological leap coming from technology partners," explained Ming Xie, ThinkStation worldwide product manager told ChannelWeb. "Intel, NVIDIA and ATI are refreshing their hardware which brings large performance increases."

The D20 and the S20 are both available with Nvidia Quadro or ATI FirePro graphics, and Nvidia's Tesla C1060 GPU co-processor platform. While Nvidia graphics in a Lenovo-brand machine is nothing to write home about, the FirePro graphics is something new:

"Before, Lenovo only offered Nvidia graphics," said Xie. "Now we're adding FirePro graphics in order to give our customers more choice. Adding FirePro graphics gives our customers more choice in the specific applications they want."

Of course, with more power comes more responsibility and those worrying about the effects these beasts will have on the environment can rest easy (well, easier). Both the D20 and S20 are Energy Star 5.0 certified and the company says 50 percent of the plastic exterior is recycled and is made up of  post-consumer plastic.