Mountain View, California-based Sun Microsystems Inc’s plans to release its 40MHz Sparcstation 2 widgetry to cloners failed to materialise on schedule last week, and the introduction was reportedly delayed at least in part by a reluctance by AT&T Co’s chip-making foundry to supply its gate arrays to the effort. LSI Logic Corp, Milpitas, one of the channels that Sun will be using to license the technology, makes the arrays for Sun. But Tera Microsystems Inc, and now Fujitsu Microsystems of America too, Sun’s two other prospective licensing channels, obviously need another source – without it the entire programme would be jeopardised. LSI Logic’s reassurances, however, that it will be able to provide the goods caused the Tatung Science & Technology Co subsidiary of the ambitious Taiwanese company to rush out an announcement that it will preview a 40MHz unit at Comdex next week. The system, the CompStation 40, which will be formally announced at Unix Expo, will be priced at $10,000 with a 19 monitor, $5,000 under a similarly configured Sparcstation 2. The Tatung box also has an additional Sbus slot, greater memory and internal storage capacity than the Sun 40MHz IPX for $2,000 less. The base configuration includes three Sbus slots, 8Mb RAM, a 207Mb hard drive, choice of either Solaris 1.0 or Motif/X 11 R4/X.desktop bundled and a single-slot graphics accelerator card. With a 15 monitor, the machine will come down to $9,000. Maximum on-board RAM is 64Mb expandable to 128Mb with add-on cards, up to 680Mb internal storage and room for one 3.5-inch floppy. Tatung will offer both Sun’s GX graphics accelerator and Weitek Corp’s more affordable one. Shipments are scheduled to begin by the end of the month.
