Confirming that the performance of Unix workstation technology is more or less doubling every year or so, and that it is getting serious about the commercial market, Sun Microsystems Inc today wheels out go-faster versions of its year old, low end IPC and diskless SLC workstations. The Sparcstation IPX essentially a Spracstation 2 – uses 40Mhz Sparc parts sourced from Fujitsu Ltd and Weitek Corp and is rated at 28.5 MIPS, 4.2 MFLOPS and 24.2 SPECmarks, the same performance mark as the original Sparcstation 2 box. It comes with from 16Mb to 64Mb of RAM, the GX graphics accelerator – now taking up only one Sbus slot, 207Mb of disk, floppy drive, two Sbus slots, SCSI, Ethernet, serial ports and and a choice of 17 greyscale or 16 colour monitors. The ELC – which replaces the SLC – comes with a 33MHz Sparc CPU, again from Fujitsu or Weitek, goes to 21 MIPS, 3MFLOPS and 20.1 SPECmarks. It comes with from 8Mb to 64Mb RAM, SCSI, Ethernet and serial ports on a card which fits into the back of a 17 monochrome monitor. While the performance of workstation technology is going skywards, prices are moving in the opposite direction. The IPX comes in at a $12,000 entry level; a diskless ELC with a 17 monochrome screen is priced at $5,000 – with 270Mb disk the price rises to $6,300.
