New Sun workstation lurks in the channel

Jalepeno on your desktop

Sun Microsystems has a new workstation geared up and ready for delivery.

Sun has yet to announce the Sun Blade 1500, but a keen Register reader made us aware of the new kit, and other users say it can be ordered at this time. The new workstation will ship with Sun's latest UltraSPARC IIIi processor - code-named Jalepeno - running at 1.06GHz. The system will cost under $5,000 with one processor, 1GB of memory and an 80GB disk.

Sun is the king of the Unix workstation market but has seen its systems lose ground to Windows and Linux hardware from the likes of Hewlett-Packard and Dell. Ever faster Intel CPUs have helped the non-Unix systems compete better in the engineering and design markets where workstations rule.

Sun is likely to announce the Sun Blade 1500 any day now and follow with the two processor Sun Blade 2500.

The UltraSPARC IIIi processor was once billed as the Xeon killer, but delays in bringing it out have made the chip a bit of a sore spot within Sun. The chip only found its way into servers in April. ®