Vowing it will not yield to Windows NT like the rest of the Unix community, Sun Microsystems Inc today revamps its weakly low-end workstation line with a new PCI bus-based Sparc RISC chip it claims outpaces the newest WinTel designs using 300MHz Pentium II CPUs. Sporting a 300MHz UltraSparc IIi RISC with an integrated PCI bus interface and 512Mb RAM, Sun claims its U10 uniprocessor workstation matches a similarly configured Pentium II-based Dell Computer workstation instruction for instruction on integer execution – 11.7 according to the SPECint95 benchmark – while outpacing the PC 12.8 SPECfp95 to 8.15 SPECfp95 on floating point execution. Moreover Sun claims it will all-but remove the confusing distinction between list and street-level pricing when it introduces the new $4,000-up Unix workstations today (CI No 3,321). Sun says it has been working with distributors and resellers to ensure that the boxes, even after they’ve gone through the channel, will actually cost the tag each carries at the announcement. The U5 Ultra 5 will cost below $5,000, the U10 around $13,000 with 24-bit 3D graphics and the U60, under $23,000 with 3D graphics. Sun says the very fact that it has been able to get the workstations to market at these price/performance points should demonstrate to nay-sayers it can achieve similar economies of scale to WinTel manufacturers and dispel the notion it’ll have to give up on future development of its Sparc RISC due to the financial burden. Sun is leveraging PC manufacturing, assembly and testing cost models by having Taiwanese company Mitac Corp build and distribute the new workstations to the channel. The systems take advantage of standard desktop and deskside PC chassis, PC power supplies and IDE peripherals. If the arrangement works well Mitac could be in line for more of its business, Sun says. Sun’s going after WinTel workstation vendors plus crippled Silicon Graphics Inc’s lucrative animation and imaging base. What margins Sun will get or the size of discounts it can offer on the new workstations are unknown but insiders say it managed six points on the existing Ultra 30 UltraSparc II engine which is fitted with PCI on the motherboard. Sun will shortly announce an ATX form factor version of the new UltraSparc IIi Darwin motherboard for Sparc-compatible system builders.
Better graphics performance than Intel
The U5 and U10 uniprocessors use a new UltraSparc IIi RISC manufactured for Sun by Texas Instruments Inc which integrates PCI and other services on to the CPU itself, reducing complexity on the motherboard. The chip uses a slave implementation of Sun’s proprietary UltraSparc Port Architecture bus for graphics but not for memory, which supports lower-cost memory chips, plus integrated cache and memory controllers. At 800Mbps, Sun says U10 provides higher graphics throughput than Intel’s 512Mbps Accelerated Graphics Port 2x architecture, claiming Intel won’t match it until a 4x AGP revision. Trade-offs means the integrated PCI unit is currently a uniprocessor-only architecture, though with SMP capability in development, it shouldn’t be long before the technology is made available up and down Sun’s workstation line. Nevertheless Sun says it will continue to use the Sbus- based UltraSparc design for high-performance requirements. The 270MHz U5 supports 500Mb RAM, three 33MHz PCI slots and 8-bit graphics – UPA graphics is not enabled – in a pizza-box design. 24-bit graphics can be attached via PCI cards. The 300MHz U10 sports a graphics-enabled UPA bus, up to 1Gb RAM and four 33MHz PCI slots plus Creator or the new 24-bit Elite3D M3 graphics. A new U60 uses one or two conventional 300MHz UltraSparc IIs, supports up to 3Gb RAM, 2Mb cache, includes UltraSCSI I/O, three 33MHz and one 66MHz PCI slot, two PCI busses and two monitors, said to be a key requirement for the oil and gas and medical imaging markets. The 2 UPA graphics slots will accommodate a new 120MHz turn of the UPA architecture expected later this year plus the recently-announced UltraSparc III ‘Cheetah’ CPU. The existing U30 fits between U10 and U60 and offers 66MHz PCi, UltraSCSI, two UPA slots and supports for 2Gb RAM. Four-way Ultra 30 and OEM Ultra AX cards are expected shortly. Sun says all of the PCI cards now ported to U30 can be used on U5 and U10. Solaris 2.6 will be pre-installed on Darwin models beginning next quarter. The new 24-bit Elite3D graphics comes in two versions; with three integrated floating point units as the M3 model (supported on U10) and with six FPUs as M6 (also supported on U30 and U60 workstations). PC interoperability is provided by the Sbus-based SunPC card – a PCi variant is due mid-year – plus Insignia Solutions SoftWindows PC-on-Unix emulator and NTrigue Windows NT software which is being sold to Microsoft Corp partner Citrix Systems Inc (see separate story), a PC document viewer due this year and new whiteboard technology which can share PC and Unix application information also due this year.
