The Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)

Tadpole-RDI Ultra Book lli

This transportable SPARC workstation is more than just a toy for wealthy geeks

Today, thex86 PC architecture scales from PDAs to enterprise servers, and it's difficult to point to a line that separates PCs from RISC workstations and servers. Traditional delimiters - lots of storage, high-speed buses, fast processors and multi-user operating systems - are increasingly blurred. Still, differences remain in scalability and reliability.

High-end Unix systems support dozens of processors and hundreds of gigabytes of memory, and multiple machines can be clustered together to share the load. As the hardware and software are closely controlled, unlike the thousands of independent vendors of PC components, these systems can offer 99.999 per cent availability. This means downtimes of a few minutes per year and the ability to remove and replace hardware and software components while the system is in use.

This is why companies such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and SGI still sell these sophisticated and expensive computers. Arguably the dominant supplier is Sun, whose SPARC processor-powered systems, running Sun's Unix variant, Solaris, are popular in educational, scientific and financial markets, and run many lnternet and ecommerce servers.

The UltraBook lli is a laptop-sized transportable Sun compatible SPARC workstation with an internal battery that is claimed to last for one hour. Normally, though, you'd wire it to a network and the mains.

The base specification is impressive: 400 MHz UltraSPARC lli processor, 256 MB of RAM, integrated 10/100Base-T Ethernet, UltraWide SCSI and a 14.1 inch, 1024 x 768 TFT LCD display driven by an ATi Mach64 graphics adaptor capable of both 8-bit and 24-bit operation. There are three device bays, two of which hold a 12GB EIDE hard disk and a battery as standard. Supported options include one battery and two disk drives, or three drives and mains-only operation. Our machine had the maximum 1GB of RAM and a second 12GB drive.

There are also two CardBus slots for two Type ll or one Type III device, although Tadpole only supports certain LAN and 56K modem cards. External floppy and CD drives are available as optional extras, as is a Sun Creator3D graphics module that occupies the left rear bay. With either display, the machine supports simultaneous use of LCD and external Sun monitors - or SVGA with a supplied converter cable. Another cable provides one parallel and two serial ports.

Despite offering a choice of OpenWindows or CDE/Motif GUIs, Solaris feels distinctly clunky and old-fashioned compared to Linux, and we would have liked to see tools such as Perl and Samba supplied as standard. More recent versions of Solaris should fix this, and Sun plans to offer the GNOME desktop as an option in the future. The machine should also run Linux (or xBSD) happily, and this is likely to offer better peripheral support and more personal productivity applications.

This isn't a personal computer; its target market is engineers and salespeople who need to take substantial Solaris applications, from large databases to network management packages, into the field.

Compared to a conventional Sun UltralO workstation of equivalent specification, the UItra Book is about twice the price. However, Tadpole estimates that if it were carried on-site three times a month, against the cost of shipping a conventional workstation to a customer's site, an UltraBook would pay for itself in just over a year.

For such users, the UItraBook is unbeatable -- and it's also a desirable toy with serious pose factor for wealthy geeks.

At 326 x 296 x 58 mm (W x D x H), the unit is nearly 1.5 times as big as an average notebook PC. This leaves room for an excellent 97-key US-layout keyboard, although the layout is idiosyncratic, with the cursor keys above and to the right of the main block. There's a three-button touchpad and a single Sun mouse/keyboard port for external devices.

The components are good, but build quality is disappointing, with flimsy plastic protective flaps and external labelling in blurry white paint. This may be RDI's influence -- early Tadpole systems exuded quality, but this one feels more like an economy clone notebook than a £16,000 top-of-the-range machine.

There's no meaningful way to compare its performance with a PC's, though in workstation terms it has a SPECint95 score of 16.1 and SPECfp95 of 20.4. The MHz rating belies the power of the RISC processor - by comparison, a 500M Hz Pentium III returns around 20.5 and 14.2 respectively. Although Tadpole also offers Solaris 2.51 and 2.6, our machine came preloaded with Solaris 7, plus Star Office 5.2 and the HotJava browser, with Netscape 4.51 on CD. Tadpole also preloads some useful accessories for power management, suspend/ resume and hot-switchable network configuration.

DETAILS

★★★★

PRICE $24,640 (approx. £16,993)

CONTACT Tadpole-RDI 01223 428 200

www.tadpolerdi.com

PROS: Workstation-class power in a laptop; versatile expansion options

CONS: Large; heavy; fragile external parts; cheap feel