SUN CHANGES RULES OF THE GAME WITH NEW SYSTEMS THAT WILL LAUNCH USERS INTO NETWORK AGE; Sun's Ultra Systems Target Power Users; Outperform Top-of-the-Line HP, SGI and IBM Machines.

MENLO PARK, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--November 7, 1995--Network computing took a quantum leap today as Sun Microsystems Computer Company introduced an entirely new class of desktop workstation that will once again force the industry to follow Sun's design lead. The new Sun Ultra workstation family boasts innovations in networking, visual computing and performance and incorporates several patent-pending "industry firsts" that will give Sun a distinct lead over its competition. Instead of focusing solely on just maximizing chip performance, Sun spent the last several years developing a radically new system design that places equal emphasis on four key criteria and tightly integrates these to maximize overall system throughput and performance.

With its new Ultra family, Sun has brought supercomputer and mainframe technology to the desktop. The new workstations incorporate a number of technology innovations that, when coupled with a very fast microprocessor, result in a system design that will outperform computers that simply feature a fast chip.

The Ultra family, consisting of the Ultra 1 and Ultra 2 systems, boosts workstation performance to a new range, while cutting costs sharply. Ultra 1 workstations start at $16,495 and offer best-in-class performance of up to 252 SPECint_92 and 351 SPECfp_92 (SPEC is a standard metric to measure computer system performance). The Ultra 2 achieves 332 SPECint_92 and 505 SPECfp_92, making it the fastest workstation, bar none, in the industry.

"This is our most significant workstation announcement since 1989, when we rolled out the first SPARCstation," said Gene Banman, vice president and general manager of the Desktop Products Group at Sun. "We're not talking about the kind of incremental improvements you get when you just increase the speed of a system's processor. Instead, we've completely reengineered the architecture to optimize all system functions so that, together, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We call this new network-focused architecture UltraComputing."

Unmatched Technology Innovation

The UltraComputing architecture is distinguished within the industry through its use of a number of innovative technologies that allow companies to meet the requirements for high-speed networking, collaborative computing and the use of complex, multimedia data.

The linchpin of the Ultra design is the Ultra Port Architecture (UPA). The UPA is a high-performance, switch-based interconnect of the kind usually found in supercomputers. It serves as the "traffic cop" for all system components, tightly integrating the processor, I/O, graphics, memory and networking. No other desktop computer uses this kind of technology today.

In a major advance, Sun replaced the traditional bus-based system interconnect with a much faster switch-based scheme. The UPA is an interconnect that provides data transfer rates of up to 1.3 gigabytes per second - 170 to 325 percent faster than Hewlett-Packard and Silicon Graphics systems and 240 percent faster than Pentium Pro-based PCs. The UPA's packet-switched protocol is a proven, second-generation technology, derived from similar technology first used in the company's high-end SPARCserver 1000 and SPARCcenter 2000 servers.

"Sun is the only company to offer this innovative, supercomputer-class switch technology. We expect to maintain this competitive advantage for the next several years, since new development is extremely complex and would take a minimum of two to four years, if development started today," said Banman of Sun.

The UPA tightly integrates several unique technologies within the UltraComputing architecture:

-- UltraSPARC: The latest and most powerful member of the SPARC family of microprocessors. With its 64-bit, superscalar architecture, UltraSPARC is one of the fastest microprocessors available.

-- Visual Instruction Set (VIS): Sophisticated technology built on the motherboard that acts as a "turbocharger" to give up to five times graphics and multimedia performance improvements over competitive systems without expensive add-in cards.

-- Creator Graphics: An advanced graphics "engine" that, when coupled with UltraSPARC, 3D-RAM and VIS, provides extremely fast graphics manipulation.

-- 3D-RAM: Part of Creator Graphics. Breakthrough technology co-developed by Sun and Mitsubishi that integrates the best features of existing memory technologies to achieve up to ten times performance improvements for sophisticated 3D graphics at an affordable price.

-- FastEthernet: Advanced networking technology built on to the motherboard for the first time; offers ten times today's networking performance.

For all its breakthroughs, the Ultra family also remains 100 percent compatible with the huge base of applications - more than 10,000 in all - written for the Solaris operating environment.

Designed for those who need the power to create, the new workstations will boost user productivity in fields such as software development, financial analysis, medical imaging, publishing, scientific research, electronic design automation, mechanical computer-aided-design (CAD), animation and special effects.

Dazzling Performance

The Ultra workstations provide computational performance unmatched in their class. This superiority derives in part from the UltraSPARC processor, the latest of Sun's SPARC RISC engines. The 64-bit superscalar processor is designed for very high clock speeds and high parallelism. It can process up to 10 pieces of data simultaneously with a single tick of its clock - less than 100-millionth of a second. This is the equivalent of a peak rate of 1.67 billion operations per second at 167 MHz.

Integrated directly onto the microprocessor is a specialized set of graphics and multimedia instructions. Sun's unique visual instruction set (VIS), turbocharges 2D and 3D graphics, video and image processing. Each of these normally requires costly, specialized add-in cards in traditional systems. In addition, UltraSPARC allows for "block moves," or the rapid transfer of huge blocks of information, a capability usually found in mainframes and good for processing immense applications and data sets, such as large image files and those found in databases.

Visual Computing: Twice the Graphics, Half the Price

The Ultra workstations' industry-leading visual computing performance provides capabilities comparable to specialized graphics workstations costing twice as much. The Ultra architecture's graphics performance is due to the UPA and VIS technology, which is tightly integrated with new Creator Graphics, which accelerates a wide range of visual computing functions. Creator Graphics is offered in two versions: Creator and Creator3D. Both provide 24-bit true color capability, 1280 x 1024 resolution and accelerated image and video processing, windowing and 2D animation. Creator3D features additional support for very complex 3D graphics. With Creator3D Graphics, an Ultra 1 Model 170, for instance, outperforms a Hewlett-Packard J210 Visualize 24 by as much as 50 percent at nearly half the cost.

Creator Graphics is the world's first graphics systems to feature another breakthrough technology - new 3D-RAM memory co-developed by Sun and Mitsubishi and specially designed to speed up graphics. The 3D-RAM is an innovative frame-buffer memory architecture that combines the best of video RAM, dynamic RAM and static RAM and can improve complex graphics performance by as much as ten times and at a cost much lower than traditional technologies.

Fast Networking

The Ultra workstations are the first to offer a 100 megabits-per-second FastEthernet controller built right on the motherboard. Such fast speeds are becoming common in local area networks, providing capabilities that would have been impossible with older 10-megabit-per-second Ethernets. An Ultra user could, for example, view a live video feed, share visual images with co-workers on an electronic whiteboard, access a company database and download a graphic from the World Wide Web, all at once.

To ensure coexistence, the FastEthernet controller is downward compatible with older 10-megabit-per-second networks. The Ultra family also supports other networking standards such as ATM and ISDN via add-in cards.

Complete Software For UltraComputing

The Ultra architecture depends not just on hardware but also on software: applications, high-performance network-oriented operating systems, network-based development environments and programming languages and network management tools.

The Ultra architecture has it all. It provides 100 percent compatibility with the huge base of applications developed for Sun's Solaris operating environment. Existing Solaris application software can exploit many of Ultra's enhanced features to achieve performance gains of 2x to 3x and beyond. "Sun's UltraSPARC is flawless in binary compatibility," said David Culler, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California at Berkeley. "Our previous applications just run, with no recompilation."

The Ultra workstations can also run most popular Microsoft Windows applications, such as Microsoft Office and Lotus SmartSuite. This capability is provided by Sun's Wabi product, which is bundled with all Sun workstations. The Ultra workstations benefit from the most advanced and complete operating environment available, Solaris 2.5 SPARC Edition, also announced today. Designed to get the most out of any Ultra computer, Solaris 2.5 features include full support for the high-speed VIS instructions and 3D graphics, broad scalability from desktops to multiprocessor servers and fully integrated networking.

For companies seeking unprecedented application performance, Sun offers the SunSoft WorkShop 2.0 development tools, including the latest version of Sun's SPARCompiler products. SunSoft WorkShop lets customers take maximum advantage of UltraSPARC's instruction set, including VIS instructions. "With the new UltraSPARC architecture and the new compilers, we're seeing an increase in performance for some applications of up to seven or eight times," said Don Bauno, senior systems analyst at the University of Utah's Department of Radiology.

Sun also provides the industry's most comprehensive software for integrated, scalable heterogeneous system and network management. Sun's Solstice Enterprise Manager products span every facet of system and network management, including the industry's largest base of third-party partner applications.

To assist the development of network-based applications, Sun provides Java, the breakthrough Internet application language, and NEO, the first complete development, operating and management environment for networked object-oriented applications. Java and the NEO product families give customers all they need to build distributed, object-oriented application for public and private networks.

And to help users explore the possibilities of UltraComputing, Sun is bundling Ultra Pack, a collection of applications and tools, with all Ultra Creator and Creator3D systems. Included are collaborative applications such as Sun's ShowMe shared whiteboard application, World Wide Web tools like Netscape Navigator and Sun's dynamic Hot Java browser and multimedia tools such as an MPEG II player and a music player.

Economical Upgrades

The Ultra design permits cost-effective upgrades from earlier SPARCstation 20 systems to Ultra workstations. Customers need replace only the CPU enclosure, retaining their existing memory, disks and peripherals. Upgrades from other Sun systems are also available.

Range of Price and Performance Points

Ultra workstations come in a number of models and configurations, all delivering significantly better price/performance than leading competitors.

The entry-level machine, the Ultra 1 Model 140, is ideal for computationally intensive desktop applications such as software development and financial analysis. It has a 143-MHz UltraSPARC processor, 32 megabytes of main memory, a 1-gigabyte hard disk, accelerated graphics and a 17-inch color monitor. Priced at $16,495, the Ultra 1 Model 140 is more than 60 percent faster than HP's 715/100XC and is priced at 26 percent less.

The Ultra 1 Creator Model 170E has a faster, 167-MHz processor, 64 megabytes of memory, a 2-gigabyte hard disk, a 20-inch color display and Creator graphics for computationally intensive 2D graphical applications like EDA. Priced at $25,995, it outperforms Silicon Graphics Power Indigo2 XZ by more than 200 percent in 2D graphics and is priced at 35 percent less.

The Ultra 1 Creator3D Model 170E has a 167-MHz UltraSPARC processor, 64 megabytes of memory, a 2-gigabyte hard disk, a 20-inch color display and Creator3D graphics is priced at $27,995. The system is ideal for sophisticated 3D and imaging applications such as MCAD, medical imaging, modeling and scientific visualization. At a 31 percent lower price, the Ultra 1 Creator3D outperforms SGI's Indigo2 High Impact by up to 17 percent in graphics performance and as much as 213 percent in CPU performance.

The Ultra II Creator3D Model 2200 is an expandable multiprocessor system with two 200-MHz UltraSPARC processors and is designed for computationally intensive applications such as fluid dynamics, high-end animation and special effects. It has 256 megabytes of memory, a 4-gigabyte hard disk, a 20-inch color display and Creator3D graphics and is priced at $59,995. It is the fastest workstation available, outperforming Digital's AlphaStation 600 5/300, with significantly faster graphics at a lower price.

Sun Microsystems Computer Company is a world leader in the design, manufacture and sale of network computing systems and is a division of Sun Microsystems, Inc. Recognized for quality and innovation, the company's SPARC workstations and multiprocessing servers each hold the No. 1 UNIX marketshare position. These systems are used primarily by businesses, educational institutions and governments worldwide for technical, commercial, industrial, and software development applications. -0-

Note to Editors:

Sun, the Sun logo, Sun Microsystems, The Network is the Computer, Ultra, UltraComputing, Neo, Workshop, Solaris, Wabi, Solstice Enterprise Manager, ShowMe, Hot Java and Java are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries. 3D-RAM is a trademark of Mitsubishi. All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Products bearing SPARC trademarks are based upon an architecture developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc. UNIX is a registered trademark in the United States and other countries, licensed through X/Open Company, Ltd.

Press announcements and other information about Sun Microsystems are available on the Internet via the World Wide Web using a tool such as Netscape or NCSA Mosaic. Type http://www.sun.com at the URL prompt.

CONTACT: Sun Microsystems Computer Company

Larry Lettieri, 415/786-8152