The high-end ThinkStation D20 and low-end ThinkStation S20 workstations will run on Intel's upcoming Xeon 3500 and 5500 series dual-core and quad-core chips, the company said. The processors belong to the Nehalem-EP line of server and workstation processors that Intel plans to officially launch next week.

The announcement comes a few weeks after Apple became the first major PC vendor to announce Xeon-based workstations. Apple earlier this month started taking orders for new Mac Pro workstations also powered by Xeon 3500 and 5500 quad-core chips. The Mac Pro workstations will run Apple's Mac OS X operating system.

The PCs are targeted at users who need powerful systems to render high-end graphics, like digital content creators, game developers and engineers, said Kristy Fair, a Lenovo spokeswoman.

The D20 workstation is a dual-socket system, which allows up to two processors to work together, and it supports 96GB of memory. The S20 has a single-processor slot and supports up to 12GB of memory. The systems offer hard drive storage of up to 1TB.

The processors should enable faster application performance on the workstations compared to older Xeon chips. Nehalem cuts the bottlenecks of Intel's earlier Core microarchitecture to improve system speed and performance-per-watt. The microarchitecture integrates a memory controller and provides a faster pipe for the CPU to communicate with system components like a graphics card and other chips.