Getting more aggressive in the face of the growing number of Windows NT workstations on offer, Sun Microsystems Inc will this week cut prices and re-jig configurations at the low-end of its Solaris Unix workstation line as well as reduce prices on graphics and peripherals. The $2,500 Ultra 5 ‘bid box’ uses a 270MHz UltraSparc II and now includes on-board 24-bit graphics and a faster disk. It will also offer a 333MHz version with 2Mb L2 cache and 128Mb RAM for $3,700 – effectively a higher-end U10 deskside in a pizza box housing which it says customers have asked for. The 333MHz U10 is $4,300 with 128Mb RAM. It has also put the 360MHz UltraSparc II into the U10 form factor – the 360MHz chip uses a higher-performance 120MHz Ultra Port Architecture bus. With 256Mb RAM and Elite 3D m3 graphics the box costs $8,000 compared with the $10,000 tag on the previous high- end U10 configuration. Sun says many EDA users are now shifting front-end workstation tasks on to back-end Solaris servers that support a greater number of ASICs, to free up budgets for other workstation purchases. Many are moving from 2D to 3D solutions as they make the transition from wireframe to solid modeling design applications. The 10-month old Elite 3D m6 graphics accelerators are now $5,000, from $7,285; m3 is $3,400 from $4,530; the three year-old Creator 3D is $1,380 down from $1,200. Every base configuration now ships with 128Mb RAM and Sun says its PCI bus workstations are now on six-month upgrade cycles. It calls Sbus – used only in the Ultra 2 – a legacy architecture. Research company Dataquest says Sun leads sales in the combined Unix and NT workstation market. It estimates that in the second quarter of 1998 Sun did $930.2m on workstations (29.9% of the $3.11bn workstation market); compared with Hewlett-Packard Co’s $833.8m, which includes NT workstation sales.
