Out in Front: March 14, 1996
Announcements at UniForum in San Francisco portend an unpredictable year in the usually staid workstation arena. Pentium-Pro-based machines promise to challenge entrenched RISC-based architectures this year, and serious challengers to Sun Microsystems will finally emerge in the SPARC world.
NeTpower Inc unexpectedly debuted the Calisto Pentium-Pro-based system that ranges in price from $5295 to $18,995. At the last minute, the company, founded and managed by former RISC zealots, shelved a new system design based on the Mips R10000 µP in favor of the Intel-based design.
NeTpower CEO Robert Miller claims that the Pentium Pro offers superior performance at a lower cost than does the R10000. Moreover, the company believes that Windows NT will soon become the dominant workstation operating system and that Pentium-Pro-based machines will prove to be the best Windows NT hosts. NeTpower demonstrated a 200-MHz Calisto costing approximately $12,000, substantially outperforming a 250-MHz Silicon Graphics Indigo II R4400 system that costs more than $30,000.
In the SPARC world, meanwhile, Ross Technology established a new, independent business unit, Ross Microcomputer. The new unit will market upgrades for Sun SPARCstations and complete SPARC-based systems on an OEM basis this year .
The hyperSTATION motherboard upgrades from Ross Microcomputer allow users of SPARCstation 5 systems to move to SPARCstation 8 levels of performance, µP scalability, and multiprocessing support. Ross' motherboards use a 66-MHz MBus-to-host processor and level-2 cache and offer 90- to 133-MHz µPs. The boards can also support one to four µPs.
Prices for Ross' upgrade boards range from $3500 to $24,000, and users can realize two to 10 times better performance than that of earlier boards. The same motherboards will form the basis of OEM system-level products that Ross Microcomputer expects to introduce this summer.
—by Maury Wright
NeTpower Inc, Sunnyvale, CA. (408) 522-5199.
Ross Microcomputer, Austin, TX. (512) 892-7802.