With a burst of indoor fireworks, Sun Microsystems doubled the power of its Sparcstation range this bonfire night with the launch of the Sparcstation 2, for an entry-level price of UKP11,000. With ratings of 21 SPECmarks, 28.5 MIPS and 4.2 MFLOPS, the new station is the fastest ever offered by Sun, using a 40MHz Sparc sourced from Cypress Semiconductor. Clearly smarting from launches from IBM, DEC and Silicon Graphics over the last few weeks positioned directly against it, Sun claimed the new system was smaller and cheaper than IBM and Silicon Graphics, while dismissing DEC’s offering as similar to its Sparcstation 1 Plus announcements back in April. Sun also launched graphics versions of the new box, including the 2GX for two- and three-dimensional wireframe, the 2GS for three-dimensional solid modelling, and the 2GT for high performance three-dimensional graphics, incorporating an 80860 RISC chip from Intel Corp. And the company dropped the price of its low-end IPC to UKP8,850, including GX graphics capability to create an entry-level graphics box. The diskless SLC now costs UKP3,500. As for the Sparcstation 1, around UKP2,000 cheaper than the new models, Sun says it will continue while people want to buy it, with board-swaps available from early next year. Sparcstation 2s come with 19 colour or mono monitors, up to 96Mb main memory and up to 7.6Gb disks. The entry-level mono version is UKP11,000, including 19 mono monitor, 16Mb memory and 207Mb disk; a colour version costs UKP13,000, and a server with 876Mb drives and 2Gb tape is UKP18,000.
