NVIDIA Corporation announced that initial mainboards based on the nForce3 Professional, the company’s first single-chip, core-logic solution for professional computing environments powered by AMD’s 64-bit Opteron processor, is now in volume production.

The first workstation core-logic from NVIDIA is the nForce3 Pro 150 manufactured using 0.15 micron technology and provides essential mix of features for workstations based on AMD Opteron processors, including, Hyper-Transport link, AGP 8x, PCI, 3 ATA-33/66/100/133 channels with RAID 0,1 and 0+1 support, 10/100Mb/s Ethernet, USB 2.0, AC’97 audio and so on.

The first ever mainboard based on the first workstation core-logic from NVIDIA is ASUS SK8N also officially announced today. Our readers probably know its specifications from this news-story, however, I will list them once again:

• Socket 940 AMD Opteron processor;
• NVIDIA nForce3 Pro 150 chipset;
• 4 DIMM slots for up to 8GB of registered PC1600, PC2100 or PC2700 DDR SDRAM memory;
• AGP 8x; 5 PCI (32bit/33MHz) slots;
• 2-channel ATA-33/66/100/133 integrated controller;
• 2 Serial ATA-150 ports and 1 additional Parallel ATA-33/66/100/133 port (controller from Promise);
• CK8 MAC+ RealTek RTL8201BL PHY 10/100Mb/s Ethernet;
• 6-channel ALC650 audio solution with S/PDIF out interface;
• 6 USB 2.0 ports;
• Overclocking Feature: ASUS JumperFree; Memory voltage adjustments;
• Proprietary features from ASUS;
• ATX form-factor.

The ASUS SK8N mainboard will be available in early July. Full 1P workstation solutions from a variety of workstation system integrators will be available in late July, NVIDIA said.

Later this year NVIDIA will launch yet another core-logic for AMD 64-bit server and workstation processors. The official name of the newcomer will be nForce3 Pro 250 and it will boast the support of 4 Serial ATA-150 ports as well as Gigabit Ethernet in addition to existing capabilities provided by the nForce3 Pro 150 (see this news-story for more information).