Fujitsu Ltd’s majority-owned Ross Technology Inc in Austin, Texas wants to offload lots of its Sparc chips onto personal computer users that want to add some Sparc oomph to their existing machines. The company is promising to preview what it calls the Sparcplug system at Comdex/Spring in Chicago next month. The Sparcplug is an add-in workstation module for tower personal computers which requires a full- height drive bay, which when fitted means the user has complete Sparc workstation and a full Pentium system in a single box, with cut-and-paste Windows interoperability. The module will be available with up to 256Mb of its own memory and can be configured with up to 4Gb of disk. Such configurations usually only really appeal to developers, and Ross suggests you might want to create Java applets under Solaris and immediately test them with a Windows browser. It reckons Sparcplug will deliver performance superior to Sparcstation 20-class machines at entry-level workstation prices, which it is not revealing yet. It will demonstrate it with one or two Sparc processors as a Java Development Station; an Intranet Server; an Internet Firewall and Server; an Engineering Workstation and, with two Sparcs only, as a three-dimensional Multiprocessing RenderStation to combine development within the Pentium environment with multiprocessor rendering capabilities within the Sparc environment. All Sparcplugs conform to the Sparc Standard MBus specification and use standard CPU daughterboards that are upgradable and multiprocessing-capable, Ross asserts.
