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As the company works hard to defend its position in the market for highly technical computers, Sun Microsystems is expected on Wednesday to introduce a family of workstations running on a new generation of chip. Sun will begin shipping the new workstation computers, called Sun Blade, starting on Wednesday with prices under $10,000. The new servers and workstations will run on Sparc chips clocking in at 750 megahertz. The chips should reach 900 megahertz in January and eventually top out at 1.5 gigahertz by the end of the product's life cycle. Called Ultrasparc 3, the new chip is also expected to serve as the basis for the high-end computer servers that provide much of the raw computing muscle on the internet. According to company sources, these machines are not due out until the beginning of 2001. In recent years, the company has been fighting hard to retain its lead in the market for workstations, used by designers and engineers. Its earlier, unassailable, position has been increasingly eroded in recent years by lower-cost machines running on Intel chips and Microsoft's Windows software. While its workstation dominance has faded somewhat, Sun maintains a very strong position in the market for higher-end servers that competitors like Hewlett-Packard are trying to dent. Despite the fact that its servers run on its proprietary Solaris software and Sparc family of chips, the company has developed momentum in the internet server market in its war against new products from Microsoft and Intel. That battle is expected to heat up late next year, when the two rival companies are to begin shipping products aimed at Sun's area of strength.
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