Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!purdue!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!rice!sun-spots-request
From: fdr@solbourne.com (Russ Fellows)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun
Subject: Re: Sun 4 lookalike/thinkalikes
Keywords: Hardware
Message-ID: <3090@brazos.Rice.edu>
Date: 15 Nov 89 18:05:45 GMT
Sender: root@rice.edu
Organization: Sun-Spots
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Approved: Sun-Spots@rice.edu

I am somewhat biased, on the information that I am giving but not much.
There is currently one Sun 4 compatible workstation shipping.  Solbourne
Computers is currently shipping 100% binary compatible (guaranteed)
workstations.  Since you seemed to be most concerned wiht HEAVY compute
ability, and less so with IO performance, Solbourne's machines are quite
applicable.  Currently the price/ performance advantage over Sun's is as
high as 3 to 1.  Solbourne is the ONLY company currently shipping 33 MHz
Sun 4 SPARC machines.  Also, the machines are designed around a central
bus (about 128 Mb / sercond) with the ability to have up to 4 CPU's and 64
MB of memory in one machine.  Since the OS is designed around a
master/slave relationship some applications (particularly parallel type
programs, such as Neural Net simultaions) have a 4X performance over 1 CPU
systems.  Also, the 33MHz SPARC board gives about 2X the performance of a
16MHz Fujitsu board (Sun 4 currently uses 16 MHz Fujitsu). 

Thus for about 2 times the money of a Sun 4 you can get a Solbourne Series 5
(the 33 MHz Cypress chip), which could give you 8X the performance for your 
applications.

Solbourne's address is:

		Solbourne Computers Inc.
		1600 Pike Rd.
		Longmont, CO.  80501
		ph. 1-(303)-772-3400

	Russ Fellows
	somewhat employed by the above.