Sun Microsystems Inc’s new low-cost Darwin workstation may have spawned a raft of headlines suggesting Sun has a workstation for under $3,000 but the reality, according to one large US government agency buyer, is it’s like the ad car in the automobile business: No radio or air, power nothing, single- speed wipers, optional back seat, but alas, the ad can read Only $7,999! The user reminds us Sun’s $2,995 Ultra 5 is another in a series of low-cost hardware which is not meant to be chosen and purchased by an individual or end-user organization: Rather, it is a bid box. It is there for the convenience of systems integrators who bid on government and large corporate RFPs. It serves the purpose of lowering the overall cost-per-seat in a proposal. Although the UltraSparc IIi-powered $2,995 system does not include a CD, floppy or monitor, system integrators which bid the box anyway can then specify a raft of add-ons the user will require which somewhat conveniently results in change orders after contract award. Previous bid boxes from Sun include the 4/110, ELC, IPC, Classic and, most recently, the SparcStation 4 workstations. The user suggests anyone evaluating Darwin might do better to pay attention to the new Ultra 10 which with 128Mb RAM and Elite-3D graphics has a SPECfp95 of 12.9 and can draw three million 3D triangles per second, for $10,400. To match this performance with a PC, you’re looking at something like the Compaq M6300, which sells for about $7,700. But the processor/memory bandwidth, the floating point performance, and the graphics performance of the Compaq all suffer in comparison to the Ultra 10.
Per-processor RAM
The user’s biggest gripe with the Darwin announcement is that Sun didn’t offer a server configuration (the primary issue being the operating system license): I’d really like to take about 30 of those Ultra 5s, put them on shelves in a few racks, and let our users run their long-running econometric models there. Since many of our jobs are extremely processor/memory intensive, the context-switching rate and locality-of-reference assumptions that go into designing the big multiprocessor systems go straight out the window; we do much better with an array of uniprocessor units each with dedicated DRAM. Notice, he says, Sun’s forthcoming UltraSparc III RISC includes provision for per-processor RAM in addition to per-processor extended-cache. Sun is selling the Darwin hardware under a Discount Category H scheme; each of Sun’s product lines generate a different profit margin and are subject to different discounting policies. Category A is the usual discount offered by Sun. On systems such as the Ultra 2 it’s around 20% to 30%. Best discounts however – 5% to 10% less than the open market price – are offered to agencies which qualify for NASA’s Scientific and Engineering Workstation Procurement contract.
Market in transition
Meantime, industry analyst Andrew Allison’s expectation for the Unix workstation market through 1998 is more bearish than BancAmerica Robert Stephens (CI No 3,324), figuring a 5% to 10% in units in 1996 and a 20% fall in 1997 will be followed by a 30% to 40% drop this year. Sun Microsystems Inc, being more determined than others in this market is expected to pick up a larger share of a shrinking revenue base at the expense of Hewlett-Packard, SGI, IBM and DEC. BancAmerica’s Bret Rekas reckoned Unix workstation shipments were essentially unchanged in 1997 at around 700,000, and expects 1998 shipments to increase 5% on revenue declining between 5% and 10% to some $10bn.
