Longmont, Colorado-based Solbourne Computer Inc duly announced the first workstation built around Matsushita Electric Industrial Co’s Panasonic MN10501 64-bit implementation of the Sparc processor. The S4000 has an entry price of $9,000 with a 19 mono configuration with 8Mb memory and three available SBus slots; rated at a SPECmark of 12, 25.5 MIPS, it takes up to 40Mb on the motherboard, 104Mb with a second board. The firm also has an SBus Graphics Accelerator, which improves two- and three-dimensional graphics performance for X and PEX and Pixrects graphics with no software modifications, with X and PEX graphics primitives in microcode. There is also a hardware Z-buffer option for accelerated hidden surface removal. The eight-plane SGA40 version draws 540,000 lines per second in two-dimensional operations, 270,000 in three-dimensional. The S4000 ships next month, the accelerators, for which no prices were given, follow in December.
