Sun beefs up its Ultra workstation line Introduces new Ultra 450 and a speedier Ultra 10 By Stephanie Steenbergen, SunWorld staff

July  1998

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The Ultra 450 will support up to four processors and up to two advanced Elite3D m6 graphics cards. A two 300-MHz UltraSPARC II processor system with 512 MB of memory starts at $32,865. This includes two nine-gigabyte (GB) hard disk drives, a 21-inch monitor and one Elite3D m6 graphics card. Sun says the system can support up to four GB of memory, 180 GB of hard disk space, and 10 PCI slots.

The upgraded Ultra 10 includes a 333-MHz UltraSPARC IIi processor, one Sun Elite3D m3 graphics card, two megabytes cache, 128 MB DRAM, a 4.3-GB hard drive, and a 19-inch monitor. It's priced at $11,095.

Early response to the new Ultra 450 and the enhanced Ultra 10 is less than enthusiastic from one user who requested anonymity: "The Enterprise 450 is significantly overpriced. With the new 450 you're talking about $10,000 per chip. I expect to pay more for Sun, but they don't quite get it yet."

The Sun user cautions that he isn't representative of the entire user community; he owns a CAD company and considers himself a "dyed in the wool Sun person." But he says, "[Sun] is not offering a $5,000 to $8,000 SCSI-based workstation, which is what they really need to do. They're getting decimated in that market by NT." He feels this is an opportunity for Sun to respond to "Silicon Graphics drifting away." Sun has the potential to dominate in that market he says.

Of the new Sun product and the faster Ultra 10, Dataquest analyst, Peter ffoulkes, says, "Fundamentally it's good news that Sun's moving forward with a faster processor on the Ultra 10." He says, "The 450 is a little more significant. As a high-end platform it takes Sun into areas where they haven't really played before."

Resources

• "Ultra workstation prices slashed with three new models," January 1998 SunWorld news story http://www.sunworld.com/swol-01-1998/swol-01-ultras.html
• "Sun's new Darwin: How's it faring?" May 1998 SunWorld news story http://www.sunworld.com/swol-05-1998/swol-05-darwin.html
• Sun's Ultra workstation line http://www.sun.com/desktop/products/

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