Indicating it’s still serious about the maturing Unix workstation market which it dominates with a 46% share, Sun Microsystems Inc is attacking the competition at both end of the business. Its $2,995 Ultra 5 Darwin workstation running Solaris 2.6 Unix is aimed squarely at the Windows NT workstation vendors while the high-end Ultra 60 SMP system is designed to wrest away Silicon Graphics Inc’s lead in the $3bn market for workstations priced $25,000 and up. With a 270MHz UltraSparc IIi RISC chip, 64Mb RAM and 4Gb disk Sun puts the Mitac Corp-built desktop up against a $4,299 Compaq Computer Corp PW6000 Windows NT system with a 266MHz Pentium II, 64Mb RAM and 4Gb disk. It’s not letting its Unix brethren off the hook either (although it no doubt sees SGI as a Dark Sider now the company is doing WinTel systems). An Ultra 10 with a 300MHz part, Elite 3D graphics, 128Mb RAM and 4Gb disk costs $12,495 and outperforms a similarly-configured SGI Octane workstation with MX1 graphics by more than 35% – and the SGI box costs $45,495. It’s offering some cheekily-named competitive trade-in programs for SGI, Macintosh and Compaq workstation users called Jurassic-Back, Mac-Back and Paq-back respectively. Sun claims a high-end Ultra 60 – which uses one or two UltraSparc II chips – with Elite 3D m3 graphics, can draw triangles 37% more quickly than SGI’s Onyx2 Reality workstation and costs $20,080 versus $85,000.
