Sun Microsystems Ups Sun Blade 2000, Freezes Price

Sun Microsystems this week upped the power of the Sun Blade 2000 to 1.015 GHz with a new UltraSPARC III processor and froze the price.
Sun Microsystems this week upped the power of the Sun Blade 2000 to 1.015 GHz with a new UltraSPARC III processor and froze the price.
The Sun Blade 2000 configurations with the higher-speed processor are being offered at the same price point as Sun Blade 2000 configurations containing the 900 MHz UltraSPARC III processor.

The Sun Blade 2000 configurations with the higher-speed processor are being offered at the same price point as Sun Blade 2000 configurations containing the 900 MHz UltraSPARC III processor.

Sun claims the Sun Blade 2000 1+ GHz systems deliver floating point performance (SPECfp2000) that is 108 percent faster than SGI’s Octane2/600 MHz, 46 percent faster than SGI’s Fuel Visual Workstation/600 MHz, nearly 30 percent faster than the HP C3700/750 MHz, and 33 percent faster in floating point than HP J6700.

Phil Dunn, product line and OEM marketing manager for Sun Blade Workstations summed up the new chip as giving the workstation the power of a system with a 1.050 GHz chip for the price point of a system with a 900 MHz chip.

The Sun Fire 280R, Sun’s workgroup server, also uses this processor.

The Sun Blade 2000 features optional single or dual 1.015 GHz UltraSPARC III processors, mature 64-bit architecture, high-end 3D visualization capabilities, and the Solaris 8 Operating Environment. The workstations are designed for high-end technical disciplines, such as oil and gas, government/defense, scientific research, and
visualization. The workstations feature up to two 73 GB internal FC-AL disk drives and 4.8 GB per second throughput.

The Sun Blade 2000 workstation with the 1.015 GHz UltraSPARC III processor is
available and shipping starting at $10,995. A dual-processor version is available starting at $16,995.

Sun has no plans to discontinue the 900 MHz systems at this time, Dunn said.