Sun takes new shape

Electronic News, May 29, 1995 by Jim DeTar

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF.--Sun Microsystems last week disclosed more of its strategy for leveraging the UltraSPARC microprocessor--now sampling at 143MHz and 167MHz clock speeds--toward remolding the company from a technical workstation vendor into one targeting networking, medical and industrial markets.

Sun, referring last week to the new 64-bit UltraSPARC MPU as "The Net.Engine," named 13 OEM customers developing systems with the device. They include past SPARC customers such as Cray Research and Toshiba, as well as new companies--LG Electronics (Lucky Goldstar) and Korean systems companies Haitai Electronics and Hitron.

Sun also revealed UltraSPARC pricing and introduced a four-chip UltraSPARC chipset and reference platform.

After falling behind in recent years in the RISC performance, race, Sun last week during SunWorld '95 here introduced several hardware and software products to take advantage of the new UltraSPARC, plus a suite of Internet business solutions. The new MPU has an estimated 240 SPECint92 and 350 SPECfp92 performance (EN, Sept. 19, 1994) and features on-chip MPEG-2 processing.

Sun at the same time began distributing several white papers in support of its new strategic thrust as a commercial markets-oriented company. Among them: a paper titled "UltraSPARC, Multimedia Capabilities: On-Chip Support for Real-Time Video and Advanced Graphics" and another titled "UltraSPARC I: Designed for the Network."

The networking white paper makes clear Sun's intention to position its new SPARC hardware as a major contender in networking systems, including videoconferencing and video servers applications, stating, in part: "Intended from its inception for the networking environment, UltraSPARC is the processor of choice for servers, embedded systems and desktop computers attached to the network. Its entire design is tailored to promote networking functions on the operating system, connectivity and application levels of the network."

Scott McNealy, Sun's president and CEO, focused almost exclusively on the company's networking thrust at SunWorld. Mr. McNealy said OEMs should "freeze" their investment in mainframes and in personal productivity software tools such as Microsoft Office. That would pave the way, he said, for the next phase.

"And that is investing in the network. I would take all of the money you have in these environments and put it into the network and really build a network computing environment."

He concentrated on the networking side of the business to the extent that he even advised attendees to stop buying Sun workstations for a while. "The IT (information technology) people need to just invest in the network for a while. Stop buying Suns and just build your network for a while. Stop buying PCs, build your network for a while. Stop buying mainframes, build your network for a while. Get it up and running because then you can re-engineer your business."

Just as networking is one Sun wedge into the commercial market, the Internet is the spearhead of Sun's networking market thrust. Included in Sun's suite of Internet solutions is the Java programming language, an object-oriented programming environment for the Internet, and the HotJava browser, a World Wide Web tool based on the Sun-developed Java language.

Mr. McNealy asserted Java and other, similar Internet Web interfaces "are going to be words and alphabet characters and syntax that every man, woman and child on this planet in a very short period of time will be literate to."

Despite Sun's new emphasis on networking solutions, Mr. McNealy said the company does not intend to abandon its traditional workstation platform business. "Is Sun focused on the desktop? Yes. Are we going to win on the desktop? We are going to continue to grow our unit volumes." One key to continued expansion in that area, he said, is ongoing software development. "We are going to do some very interesting things with Solaris on the x86 platform and bundling some interesting technology together and making that available."

Solaris is also being ported to the PowerPC architecture and is expected to be available on that platform in 1996. Some industry observers have speculated on Sun's own hardware plans for the PowerPC, but last week's SunWorld put the new UltraSPARC in the spotlight.

Sun said production devices will be available in fall 1995 with pricing of the UltraSPARC-143MHz at $1,095 and the UltraSPARC-167MHz at $1,595 in quantities of 1,000. The 5.2-million-transistor design is fabricated by Texas Instruments in its EPIC3, a 0.5-micron, fourlayer metal CMOS process. UltraSPARC is packaged in a 521-pin ball grid array (BGA) package.

"UltraSPARC is consistently outperforming our most aggressive expectations and is one of the only high-performance processors to meet publicly announced performance and availability goals," said Art Swift, VP of marketing for Sun's SPARC Technology Business. "We are ramping UltraSPARC to production levels and expect to achieve volume quantities for shipment in fall 1995."