Today, Sun Microsystems Inc debuts the first of its much-heralded, if tardy, Viking boxes. Despite hopes that Sun would think up something warm and friendly to call them, the things have been dubbed Sparcstation 10s – small improvement over the Sparcstation 3s they might have been – in recognition of Sun’s tenth birthday, which it celebrated earlier this year. The new family includes two desktop workstations, the Model 30 and 41, each available in August in either single or dual processor configurations. Both models are also offered, sans monitor and keyboard, as servers. Performance will be quoted at two to three times the existing Sparcstation 2. Sun has wisely identified its fiercest competitor as Hewlett-Packard Co, currently the performance leader, and is going to go head-on with claims that its boxes beat comparable Hewlett-Packard Snakes on a sheer performance basis, let alone the price-performance ratios. As of last week, Sun was still tinkering with the Viking’s clock speeds. It is not using the 33MHz and 40MHz silicon Texas Instruments just announced (CI No 1,916), but will come in higher than both those rates. Sun will also be offering Viking versions of the Galaxy 630MP, 670MP and 690MP multiprocessors it introduced this winter, configured with one to four processors. The Sparcstation 10 comes with 32Mb RAM standard, expandable to 512Mb using 64Mb SIMMs or 128Mb with 16Mb SIMMs. There is either one 424Mb or 1Gb 3.5 drive standard, up to two 3.5 SCSI hard disks and up to 26Gb external disk capacity. There are four SBus and two MBus slots. A single-slot GX accelerator is standard with GXplus, GS and GT configurations, available for two- and three-dimensional graphics. Monitor options include a 19 grey-scale or 16 or 19 colour screens. Solaris 1.1 will be pre-installed. As Sun suggested it would do, it has built in ISDN and multimedia features such as a bundled speaker box and microphone, Compact Disk-quality audio and multimedia mail in an OpenWindows 3.0 environment. The Model 30 servers are uniprocessor only, the 41s can expand to two. Both will connect directly with 34 terminals. Sparcstation 1, 1+ and 2 users – even in some respects IPX customers – will be able to upgrade to either the Model 30 or 41 via a chassis and motherboard swap out. Old Sun-3 and Sun-386i users can exchange their CPU boards for an entry-level Model 30. No further word on pricing was available at press time except that the 10s will start between $20,000 and $30,000. Keeping its eye on what Hewlett-Packard was up to with its latest Snake, Sun was still dickering with its pricing schedule at the eleventh hour.
