Sun Puts Out Single-Socket Ultra 25 Workstation

Published: September 14, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Sun Microsystems this week added a new single-socket Ultra workstation to its product lineup based on the "Jalapeno" UltraSparc-IIIi entry processor.

The machine appears to be a kicker to the Sun Blade 1500 workstation, launched in September 2003, which was based on 1.06 GHz UltraSparc-IIIi processors. The new Ultra 25 workstation is based on a 1.34 GHz UltraSparc-IIIi chip. In the brief mention that this Ultra 25 workstation got in the announcements, Sun said that the new box had a 300 percent performance increase over its predecessor. This seems unlikely, at least if one is gauging processor performance. Unless the Ultra 25s also come with that "new math" I never did quite learn. You know the kind--the math that marketeers use to pump up their products.

In any event, Sun has a vast installed base of about 1 million Sparc-based workstations, and lots of customers still want to stay on the Sparc platform. Many of their applications are more graphics intensive than processor intensive, and the Ultra 25 workstation is really aimed at such uses. The Ultra 25 workstation comes with a single 1.34 GHz processor, 1 GB of main memory (expandable to 8 GB), and five PCI slots (three PCI-Express slots, mostly for graphics, and two PCI-X slots for peripherals). The machine supports the XVR-100 2D graphics card or the XVR-2500 high-end 3D card. Solaris 10 does not support the driving of two graphics cards right now, so you have to pick one. A base configuration with the XVR-100 card and an 80 GB SATA drive costs $2,895. With the better graphics card, it costs $3,995.

The Ultra 25 comes with Solaris 10, Sun Studio, Sun Java Studio Creator, Sun Java Studio Enterprise, and NetBeans all pre-installed and included in the price. It also has a copy of Sun's N1 Grid Engine grid computing middleware on it.

Back in January, Sun launched a heftier UltraSparc-IIIi workstation, the Ultra 45, at the same time it announced an Opteron-based workstation, the Ultra 40. The Ultra 40 can accommodate two Opteron 200 Series processors (either single-core or dual-core) and up to 16 GB of main memory and up to four 3.5-inch SATA drives; it has six PCI slots (four PCI-Express and two PCI-X). The Ultra 40 can use 2D and 3D graphics cards from nVidia, and the base box only costs $2,295 with the same 80 GB disk but using an nVidia Quadro graphics card. This machine has the same software stack as the Ultra 25.

The Ultra 45 is a two-socket workstation that uses the UltraSparc-IIIi processors, but one is running at 1.6 GHz. It costs $3,695 with the XVR-100 graphics card, 1 GB of memory, and a single processor. A heavier configuration--including all the same software--with two processors, 2 GB of memory, and the XVR-2500 graphics card costs $7,895.

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