Determined not to be left behind as things begin to hot up in the Sparcstation 10 clone market, South Korean giant Hyundai Electronics Co has announced plans to release its first Sparcsystem 10 effort in October, along with other Sparc-compatible products. The company, whose workstation and systems business is now housed in a wholly-owned subsidiary called Axil Workstations in San Jose, California, reckons Sun Microsystems Inc will only have a month’s head start on it in the SuperSparc market. Hyundai’s Sparcstation 10-compatible, the HWS-S310-30, uses Texas Instruments Inc’s 33MHz Viking SuperSparc and will come with a base configuration of 32Mb memory, 434Mb disk and 19 colour display, priced at $14,000 against Sun’s Model 30 which is $20,500. The Hyundai HWS-SS10-41, with the same configuration is expected to debut at $19,000 – Sun’s Model 41 costs $27,000. Without memory, disk or display the SS10-30 is $9,000, $13,400 – SS10-41. Add-on memory modules are $700 for 16Mb and $2,800 for 32Mb, it says, in contrast to Sun’s $13,000 and $64,000 respectively. Rumours of a laptop version are also doing the rounds. Axil says it is also working with third parties on Sun-compatible applications. Hyundai, meanwhile, is also partnering Metaflow Technology Inc on the high-performance Thunder Sparc, formerly the abandoned LSI Logic Corp Lightning development, and has poached staff from Sun, IBM Corp, MIPS Technology, Pyramid Technology Corp and Opus Systems Inc to aid that effort. Hyundai has also been helping Empress Software Inc to do a Korean version of its relational database and proprietary language under X Window System 11 and Open Look. It will become an Empress reseller when the implementation is finished and will bundle it with its Sparc and Pyramid machines. Hyundai says it plans to put the system onto other machines as well.
