newsletter selections

[Michael Jay Tucker]

Hello Everyone,

I do a twice a month emailed newsletter, TECH DESK. It's for people who
have an interest in scientific, technical, and engineering oriented
computing in an age of cost controls -- which is a fancy way of saying
that it is for people who are interested in workstation-style computing,
but want it as cheap as possible.

I do charge for the newsletter, but some of the topics might be of use and
interest to readers of this group. So, I thought I might occasionally post
selections from the n'letter here.

Oh, before I go to the text, the usual disclaimers: 1) the opinions here
are my own and may not reflect those of anyone else, 2) the material here
is copyrighted, and 3) I have no connection with any of the companies I
write about. Oh, and if you'd like to see the issue that this editorial
came from, I'd be happy to send you a sample of TECH DESK.

That said ...

July 30, 1996

THE TECH DESK:

An online journal of scientific and technical systems in an
age of cost-controlled computing

Contents: HyperStations (Ross #1) and SPARCplugs (Ross #2) * SGI Does
Bubbles ... But Does Anyone Care? * Intergraph's Serious Games * Target:
Bulleted Items * Editorial: The Don't-Call-Us-Workstation Vendors

*ROSS DOES MORE PALATABLE 'PATIBLES

The lads and lasses at Ross Technologies, Austin, TX, have been busy.
They've just announced two neat toys for people who need Sun-compatible
desktops without having to buy Sun systems -- a workstation and a spark
plug.

(Background: during the '80s, Sun Microsystems said that anybody who
wanted to could license its OS and/or use the SPARC processor to develop
Sun-compatible systems, in effect Sun-Compatibles. Then Sun crushed almost
anyone who tried. Lately, though, Sun's decided that Compatibles ain't so
bad after all ... at least as long as they stay at the low end and don't
compete with Sun itself.)

Ross makes the high- powered hyperSPARC version of the SPARC processor.
This year, it created a new division, Ross Microcomputer. Now it has
products to go along with it, the hyperSTATION 20 and 30. Prices start at
about US$10K ... not exactly the half-grand workstation we're all waiting
for, but still cool.

Here's the feeds and speeds: The 20 comes with dual or quad 125 MHz
hyperSPARCs each with 256 KByte secondary cache. It has a 50 MHz
MBus-compatible motherboard with four SBus expansion and up to 512 MByte
system memory. The 30, meanwhile, comes in a number of different
configurations ranging from one to four CPUs and 512K to 1 Mbyte of cache.

So, all in all, looks like a good little box for Sci-Tech users,
particularly if your application runs under SunOS and not Solaris (though
the system will support either) and you don't need 64-bit just yet.
hyperSPARC is 32-bit, unlike Sun's own UltraSPARC. But then, UltraSPARC
won't run SunOS applications.

Okay, now for something that's purely fun ... the SPARCplug.

About the same time that Ross showed the HyperStation, it was also showing
around the SPARCplug. This is cool. It is a pretty complete workstation
that fits into a disk drive into a PC. No kidding.

The idea is that you want to do mostly PC-style computing, but you've got
one or two applications that need a little push over the top in terms of
performance. Say, for instance, you're doing 3D graphics and you want your
rendering done in a day rather than a month. So, you do most of your work
on the PC and then farm out the hard stuff to the hyperSPARC system in
your drive bay.

The idea's not new, of course. Opus Systems, for instance, has sold UNIX
co-processors for PCs for years, though theirs was a bus-based solution.
And it is a real good question what sort of market there is for hybrid
systems like these. You have to wonder if people aren't going to shy away
from the system configuration problems they might encounter when two such
very different worlds collide. (Some of us are old enough to remember
fiascoes like MacCharlie, a pint-sized PC that was supposed to snap on the
side of your Macintosh and give you an Apple-based PC. It was a disaster.
I still get queasy when I recall the time I tried to review it.)

Still, SPARCplug's cute, whether or not it sells. And here's something
really cool: remember the movie TOY STORY? Well, when Pixar did the
rendering on that, they created their own supercomputer to do it. The
supercomputer in question was dozens of rack-mounted Sun workstations sans
monitors and with their cpus replaced by Ross hyperSPARCs. They called it
the RenderWall.

Should you happen to be doing something similar, says Ross, you can get
one of the small deskside disk array systems that have come on the market
recently ... say, an eight drive model. Then, you fill half the drive bays
with SPARCplugs and leave storage in the others. Voila! Your own mini
RenderWall.

---

SGI BOILS BUBBLES, FEELS HEAT

Speaking of movies, FX, and fun stuff like that, Silicon Graphics Inc. is
continuing its anti-NT campaign ...

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©1996, Tucker Communications
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