Lenovo Intros ThinkStation E20

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Lenovo ThinkStation E20

Lenovo has introduced an entry-level workstation for under $600. The ThinkStation E20, available with a dual-core Intel Core i3 or a Core i5 quad-core, is targeted at digital content creators and CAD professionals.

The system is available with either Intel Core HD graphics or Nvidia Quadro discrete graphics up to the FX1800.

"We’ve found there are a number of CAD and DCC professionals who are currently getting by on desktop PC hardware due to budget constraints," Mark Cohen, VP of enterprise products at Lenovo, said in a statement. "They’re running workstation-class applications and could benefit from using true workstation hardware."

The E20 is built with more than 50% recycled plastic and meets Energy Star 5.0 efficiency standards. The workstation supports DDR3 memory and is certified for CAD and other software from Autodesk, Siemens, and Dassault Systemes.

The sytem is also available with a Xeon 3400 series processors. For the $599 base price, the E20 comes with a Pentium dual-core chip and Intel Core HD integrated graphics.

The E20 is available this month through Lenovo partners or the computer maker's Website.

For the higher-end of the market, Lenovo refreshed its workstation line last March with the Nvidia Tesla C1060 platform as an option for companies looking to turn the systems into desktop supercomputers. Introduced in 2008, the C1060 offers 1 teraflop, or a trillion computational operations per second, and 4 GB of memory. Nvidia claims the platform, which offers 240 processing cores, delivers 10 times the computational power of a computer with two quad-core CPUs while using about the same amount of energy.

In order to run high-performance computing applications on the systems, however, the heavily computational portions of software would have to be run through Nvidia's CUDA compiler. CUDA, or Compute Unified Device Architecture, is a development environment based on the C programming language.