Sun Ultra 20M2 workstation review - part 1

I've had on my desk for the last few months a Sun Ultra 20M2 workstation. Over the next few days I'll be reviewing/commenting on the box and my experiences with it.

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 - the low-end workstation (a comparatively recent invention) provided support for the same CPU as used in the datacenter, but in a format that was useful for developers. The high-end workstation is more usually targeted to solving the high-end computing requirements for, say, 3D graphics.

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).

SPARC was the standard, at least up until recently. When Sun started selling AMD based servers, they needed a workstation to go with it. 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 the high-end 3D graphics.

The Ultra 20M2 is the new incarnation which includes a dual-core AMD Opteron. The unit I've had on test consists of an dual-core Opteron at 2.8GHz, 4GB of RAM and the top of the range Quadra FX video card. 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 Linux), the AMD workstations are able to run a whole host of OS, including Solaris, Linux (SuSE and RedHat are certified) and, of course, Windows. With either of these latter two choices you could run VMware and 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 20M2 a wonderful choice if you are a developer that 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, but is quite a clean design, with only the CD drive, power button, headphone and some USB and Firewire ports. Inside you'll find a similar clean design - 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. This is definitely a good thing, because right in the middle of the motherboard is the biggest heatsink I've ever seen in a workstation. There are also a number of fans, 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. For such a big (and powerful) box that's quite impressive. Just don't expect it to last if you provide it with a big complicated processing job, when those fans can kick in with a jolt that wakes you up.

In the next instalment, I'll cover the speed, feel and usability of the box before we start to take a closer look at performance and operating systems.