Hyundai Electronic America Inc’s Santa Clara, California-based Sparcsystems builder Axil Workstations Inc says it will begin selling clones of Sun Microsystems Inc’s Ultra 1 workstations by the end of the year. As with the offerings from other Sparcsystems builders, the first generation of Axil’s UltraSparcs will be indistinguishable from the Sun units – apart from their pricing and packaging. As it did for SuperSparc, Axil will develop a set of custom ASICs to differentiate subsequent UltraSparc products. Axil says that between 15% and 20% of its units are shipped to its parent (not the 75% claimed in some places). In the US, Tech Data Corp has signed to begin pushing Axil boxes through up to 300 resellers it will begin to recruit; some 30% of Axil’s turnover is derived from US sales.
