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Sun Cranks Up the Volume on Technical Computing With Workstation Price Cuts And Performance Enhancements

Posted on: Tuesday, 11 November 2003, 06:00 CST

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Nov. 11 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Ever increasing its price-performance value in the 64-bit technical computing market, Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced performance enhancements to the Sun Blade 150(TM) workstation and a price cut to the Sun Blade 2000 workstation. The Sun Blade 150 workstation will feature double the memory and disk capacity as well as a DVD-ROM with no price increase. The higher-end Sun Blade 2000 workstation will be available for $3,000 less than the base configuration -- a price reduction of 30 percent.

"We know that today's technical computing customers need high-quality, high-performance systems at an affordable price," says Fred Kohout, product line director, Workstations Product Group and Scalable Systems Group, Sun Microsystems. "Today's move underscores Sun's commitment to producing the most advanced, powerful and affordable workstations available. Sun is the number one manufacturer of technical computing 64-bit UNIX(R) workstations in the world, and we plan to stay number one through continually refreshing the features and pricing of our workstation product portfolio."

The refreshed Sun Blade 150 workstation will now offer up to two internal 80 gigabytes (GB) of 7200-RPM EIDE hard drives to provide high internal storage capacity. The base memory will double to 256 megabytes (MB) of RAM for the small configuration and 512 MB for the medium configuration. Additionally, the new Sun Blade 150 workstation will come standard with a DVD-ROM and optional 48x CD read/write option. These performance enhancements offer 83 percent better price/SPECint performance and 81 percent better price/SPECfp performance than IBM's RS/6000 44P model 170.

The Sun Blade 2000 workstation price has been slashed by $3,000, dropping from $9,995 to $6,995 U.S. list price for the base configuration. Targeted at the high-end technical computing market, the Sun Blade 2000 workstation sports up to two 1.2 GHz UltraSPARC(R) III processors, eight MB of Level 2 cache per CPU and a maximum of eight GB of RAM.

With this latest price cut, the Sun Blade 2000 workstation now offers 67 percent better price/SPECint performance and 73 percent better price/SPECfp performance than the comparable IBM pSeries 630 model 6E4. Additionally, the Sun Blade 2000 workstation supports the Sun(TM) XVR-100, Sun XVR-500, Sun XVR-1000 and Sun XVR-1200 graphics accelerators, allowing many combinations of powerful graphics solutions such as dual displays for graphics-intensive use or quad displays for vertical markets.

As with all Sun workstations, the Sun Blade 150 and the Sun Blade 2000 workstations run the powerful 64-bit Solaris(TM) Operating System and are 100 percent binary compatible across the Sun portfolio. The performance enhanced Sun Blade 150 workstation will be available to customers on November 20, 2003. The newly priced Sun Blade 2000 is available now.

More information on these products can be found at: http://www.sun.com/desktop/products/ws.html

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision -- "The Network Is The Computer(TM)" -- has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc. to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that make the Net work. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the World Wide Web at http://sun.com/

NOTE: Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, and Sun Blade are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries.

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 U.S. and other countries, exclusively licensed through X/Open Company, Ltd.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

George Teixeira

Sun Microsystems, Inc.

(650) 786-6025

george.teixeira@sun.com

Tara Sims

Alexander Ogilvy for Sun

(415) 677-2803

tara.sims@ogilvypr.com

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