Sun Microsystems yesterday took the wraps off its latest portfolio of Sun Ultra Workstations, including what it claims is the fastest x64 workstation in the industry.

The range features the AMD Opteron-based single-core and dual-core capable Ultra 40 Workstation and the enterprise-class UltraSPARC-based Ultra 45, alongside the Dual-Core AMD Opteron-based Ultra 20.

All models feature a choice of operating system, including Solaris 10 and standard distributions of Linux and Windows, as well as fully licensed versions of Sun's developer tools.

The Ultra 40 and 45 workstations ship with a licence for Sun's N1 Grid Engine 6 software at no extra cost.

Entry-level pricing for the dual-core capable Ultra 20 starts at $895, featuring an AMD Opteron processor 144, 512MB of memory, 80GB serial ATA hard drive and ATI entry level 2D graphics card.

The Ultra 40 entry-level configuration comes with Solaris 10 OS, AMD Opteron processor 246, 1GB of memory, 80GB serial ATA hard drive, nVidia Quadro graphics accelerator, DVD-RW drive and a licence for the Sun N1 Grid Engine software, all for $2,295.

Meanwhile, the Ultra 45 entry-level configuration comes with Solaris 10, UltraSPARC IIIi processor, 1GB of memory, 80GB serial ATA hard drive, Sun XVR graphics accelerator and DVD-RW disk drive, all for $3,695.