Wave Issue 0304 2/14/03 Article 3-02

***Sun Unveils Sun Fire V880z Visualization System
(February 10)

Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced the Sun Fire V880z
visualization system, Sun's first workgroup system powered by
Solaris and the new Sun XVR-4000 graphics accelerator. The new
system combines 3D graphics features with a Solaris-based Sun
Fire V880 server, providing a visualization system in a compact
form-factor.

Designed to power 3D applications, the new system's capabilities
and aggressive price are targeted across several industries,
including automotive manufacturing, aerospace design, oil and gas
exploration, and medical research.

According to Sun, the new Solaris-based system is priced at less
than half the cost of an equivalent SGI Infinite-Reality system,
while providing up to four times better geometry performance and
visual quality. The XVR-4000 graphics accelerator is a MAJC
architecture-based, multi-chip rendering machine designed to meet
the needs of industrial-strength 3D applications.

Key Facts:

-- Rendering Performance and Interconnect: More than 60 million
fully lit, textured, anti-aliased triangles per second. The
graphics interconnect bandwidth is greater than 2 GB per second
utilizing Sun's Fire Plane Interconnect.

-- Anti-aliasing Filters: This architecture features four
dedicated filter chips, which process the sample data stored in
the frame buffer memory, to implement the anti-aliasing. Each
pixel in the frame buffer is represented by up to 16 subpixel
samples, randomly located. Each filter chip implements a 5 pixel
x 5 pixel programmable radial filter, coupled with 16-way
stochastic sampling--in comparison to one-box filters.

-- Performance Scalability: A master controller distributes the
data to four rendering sub-units on-board, providing a single-
pipe interface to OpenGL applications. Each rendering sub-unit
has 256MB texture memory, with a total of 1GB on-board texture
memory.

-- FrameLock and GenLock Capabilities: Enables synchronized,
multi-display environments as well as synchronization to an
external video source.

-- S-Video Support: For recording to NTSC/PAL recording devices.

-- Dynamic Video Resizing: Enables a high-resolution display to
simultaneously be recorded on a NTSC or PAL recording device.
This feature also helps to guarantee frame rate for fill-rate
limited applications.

-- Multiple Display Capabilities: A Sun Fire V880 server-based
visualization system with dual XVR-4000 graphics accelerators is
capable of driving up to four 1920 x 1200 displays, or four 1280
x 1024 stereo displays.

The base configuration of the Sun Fire V880z visualization system
with a single Sun XVR-4000 graphics accelerator includes two 900
MHz UltraSPARC III processors, 4 GB memory, and six 73 GB FCAL
disk drives. It is available today starting at $64,995.00 list
price, orderable directly from Sun and authorized Sun resellers.

www.sun.com