For those that want to put their own intranets together rather than buy high-priced finished systems off the shelf, Sun Microsystems Inc has come out with the Sparcengine Ultra AX motherboard, which takes advantage of commodity Peripheral Component Interconnect parts. Sun reckons it is just the thing for building switched hub servers, network route servers, telecommunications intelligent networks, intranet and Internet servers, and power workstations. The board can be fitted with UltraSparc9 processors from the 167MHz UltraSparc-I to the 250MHz UltraSparc-II. The board comes in ATX-standard form factor with 64-bit and optional 66MHz/33MHz PCI bus to support commodity memory, peripherals and power supplies. The board uses a crossbar memory architecture, supporting 600M-bytes per second sustained bandwidth with 1.3Gbps peak. It has four PCI bus slots supporting the 33MHz 32-bit standard and two of these will also support 64- bit data paths. The Ultra AX supports Sun’s three-dimensional Creator graphics and imaging expansion board, and includes on- board 10/100Mbps Ethernet and supports PCI bus boards for FDDI, T1/E1 and 155M-bytes per second Asynchronous Transfer Mode local nets. Sparcengine Ultra AX boards are planned for January 1997 in four configurations at from $2,900 for a 167MHz board with 512Kb extended cache in 1,000-up quantities, rising to $4,500 for the 250MHz UltraSparc-II processor module version.
