 | ||
The Sun Microsystems Ultra 80 is a computer workstation that shipped from November 1999 to 2002.
Contents
Its enclosure is a fairly large (445 mm (17.5 in) high, 255 mm (10.0 in) wide and 602 mm (23.7 in) deep) and heavy (29.5 kg (65 lb)) tower design. At launch, it shipped with Solaris 2.5.1, and was available in a variety of different configurations, with one (model 1450), two (model 2450) or four (model 4450) 64-bit UltraSPARC II CPUs and up to 4 GB of RAM. When released, the Ultra 80 was Sun's highest performance workstation.
The Ultra 80 is similar to the lower-cost Sun Ultra 60, but is somewhat larger and supports more CPUs and memory. Although it was designed as a workstation rather than a server, it may be rack mounted using an optional kit. The Enterprise 420R is a server product based on the Ultra 80 motherboard in a specialized rack-mountable chassis, with custom power supplies and other parts more appropriate for server applications.
The last order date for the Ultra 80 was July 2002 and the last model stopped shipping in October 2002. The later Ultra 45, introduced in 2006, supports a maximum of two CPUs, rather than the four of the Ultra 80.
Operating system
The Ultra 80 shipped with Solaris 2.5.1, and is capable running later versions of Solaris through Solaris 10 (Oracle Solaris 11 dropped support for UltraSPARC II, III and IV processors), as well as Linux and various other UNIX operating systems. The Ultra 80 cannot run Microsoft Windows directly, although an internal PCI card (SunPCi II pro and similar) from Sun could be fitted to allow the use of Windows.
Power consumption
Maximum power consumption is documented as 380W; the components list specifies a Sony 670W 12A power supply (Sun part number 300-1357).
Construction quality
The Ultra 80 is a well-built workstation. It does not use cheap mass-produced commodity PC parts like some of Sun's Ultra workstations such as the Ultra 5 and Ultra 10. It is very well cooled, suffering none of the overheating problems of Sun's previous quad-processor machine, the SPARCstation 20.
Support
Support for the Ultra 80 ended in October 2007. In addition to official support, knowledgeable people, (often Sun employees), are regular visitors to the comp.unix.solaris, comp.sys.sun.hardware and comp.sys.sun.admin Usenet newsgroups.
Benchmarks
The Sun Ultra 80 Workstation - Just The Facts guide, gives the following data for the well known SPECint 95 and SPECfp 95 benchmarks, although a search of the web site of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) does not show these figures. SPEC ceased use of the benchmark before the Ultra 80 was released, so the last results submitted to their web site are in the 3rd quarter of 1998, a little over a year before the Ultra 80 was released in November 1999.
A number of results for the less-commonly-used SPECfp_rate95 and SPECfp_rate_base95 benchmarks can be found on the SPEC web site and are given below.