Sun Microsystems Inc has expanded its Sparcengine IE Eurocard family of boards with five new hardware and software products. The 4E60-GX Graphics Expansion Board combines graphics acceleration hardware with SunOS and a graphics library, and is claimed to support interactive manipulation of complex objects with significant realism and clarity. The 4.1e release of SunOS is aimed at Sparcengine customers and adds asynchronous input-output commands for multiple reads-without-wait, synchronous SCSI driver support for faster disk input-output, and 40% faster Ethernet driver throughput; it offers loadable device drivers, SBus and VMEbus support for Sun peripherals and devices, and full Posix 1003.1-1988 and FIPS 151-1 adherence. The Sparcclusters Software enables SunOS 4.1e to support up to 16 Sparcengine 1E processor boards on a single VMEbus backplane, and is included in SunOS 4.1e. The 4E60-SRX SBus/RAM Expansion Board enables developers to add a second SBus connector to a Sparcengine 1E and has sockets for memory expansion; and the 4E60-16 Board uses 4M-bit memory chips to offer 16Mb. The 4E60-GX graphics board is $6,000 and is available now. Sun says that SunOS 4.1e will be available in 30 to 45 days, will be delivered on quarter inch tape and will cost $350. The 4E60-SRX SBus/RAM board costs $900 with no memory fitted; the 16Mb 4E60-16 costs $12,000 including a two-user SunOS right-to-use licence, and both are available now.
