Rather than cutting their already rock-bottom prices, Sun Microsystems Inc has re-vamped its Sparcstation 1 and Sparcserver 1 RISC-based workstation and server on the first birthday of its best-sellers. According to the firm, users can expect 20% more processing power and 25% faster graphics for the same price with the introduction of the Sparcstation 1+, Sparcstation 1+GX and Sparcserver 1+. Each use a 25MHz version of Sun’s Sparc chip from LSI Logic, and are rated at 15.8 MIPS and 1.7 MFLOPS, and carry a SPECmark rating of 10.0. The original Sparcstation 1 launched last April, used a 20MHz Sparc and was rated at 12.5 MIPS. The new models come with from 8Mb to 40Mb memory, supporting up to 208Mb internal disk space, and with a new 699Mb disk, they can be coupled with up to 2.7Gb of external storage. The Sparcstation 1+X is reckoned to perform graphics applications up to 25% faster than the existing Sparcstation 1GX. It will do 540,000 two-dimensional or 270,000 three-dimensional vectors per second. A Sparcstation 1+ with 8Mb memory, and a 17 monochrome display comes in at ?8,000, a Sparcserver 1+ with 8Mb RAM, 699Mb disk and 150Mb tape back-up is ?12,500. Both have been shipping to resellers and distributors for some time and are available immediately. Sun has also halved the price of an additional 4Mb of RAM to ?900, reduced the cost of a 327Mb disk drive to ?3,000 from ?5,050, and dropped the price of a 699Mb drive to ?4,600 from ?6,300. The faster version of the Sparcstation is thought to be the first move in Sun’s plan to retain its top spot in the workstation market, where, at least in performance terms, it lags well behind IBM’s RS/6000 320 and DEC’s DECstation 5000 Model 200. A diskless Sparcstation is set to follow in June priced at around $5,000, and a 25 MIPS Sparcstation 2 is said to be in the works for August launch, coming in at the same price as the Sparcstation 1.
