Ultra 80

The Ultra 80 is a fairly large (445 mm high, 255 mm wide and 602 mm deep) and heavy (29.5 kg) computer workstation from Sun Microsystems based on the 64-bit UltraSPARC-II microprocessor. It launched in November 1999 and shipped with Solaris 2.5.1. The Ultra 80 was available in a variety of different specifications with 1 (model 1450), 2 (model 2450) or 4 (model 4450) UltraSPARC-II CPUs and up to 4 GB of RAM. The Ultra 80 is similar to the Sun Ultra 60, but is somewhat larger and supports 4 rather than 2 CPUs and can support more memory. The Ultra 80 is no longer sold, but is replaced by the Ultra 45, although the Ultra 45 can only take 2 CPUs, not 4 like the Ultra 80. (However, the extra speed of the Ultra 45's CPUs gives higher overall performance.) The last order date for the Ultra 80 was July 2002 and the last model to be shipped was in October 2002, so it is now considered by Sun to be end of life.

Operating system

Although it shipped with Solaris 2.5.1, the Ultra 80 will run the current version of Solaris (10), as well as Solaris Express, Linux and various other UNIX operating systems. The Ultra 80 can not run Microsoft Windows directly, although an internal PCI card (Sun PCI II pro and similar) from Sun could be fitted to allow the use of Windows.

Hardware Specifications and notes

Full specifications can be found on the Sun web site, but these are an abreviated specification, along with some extra notes that are likely to be useful are given below.

CPU

Although sold with either 1, 2 or 4 CPUs, the use of 3 CPUs is a supported configuration, but the Ultra 80 was not sold with 3 CPUs. The CPUs run at 450 MHz and have 16-KB data and 16-KB instruction cache on chip with a secondary 4-MB external cache. The X1195A is the part number of one of the CPUs. The CPUs have an integrated floating point processor.

Memory

The Ultra 80 uses 144-pin 5V 60-ns DIMM memory modules of either 64 or 256 MB which should be installed DIMMs in sets of four. There are 16 DIMM sockets, so it is possible to fit up to 4 GB with 16 256-MB modules. The memory bus is 576 bits wide; 512 bits are used for data and 64 bits for error correction. The specifications give the maximum throughput of 1.78-GB/sec. Performance is improved if 2-way interleaving is used (giving 512 MB or 2GB) and maximum performance is achieved with 4-way interleaving, in which case all 16 memory slots would be used so the machine would have 1 GB or 4 GB of RAM.

Half of the Ultra 80's memory must be fitted on the motherboard and the other half on a memory riser board. Care is needed in handling the memory riser board, as the connector is not designed for repeated use. It must be tightened using a torque wrench supplied with the Ultra 80, as detailed in the service manual.

Internal storage

Th Ultra 80 takes one or two 1" high SCA SCSI disk drives internally. It was sold with 18.2-GB or 36.4-GB disks, but can in practice use any SCA disk. (The author of this article has used a 147 GB disk, but larger disks should work too). An optional 1.44 MB 3.5" MS-DOS/IBM compatible floppy drive can be fitted. The Ultra 80 could be purchased new with an optional 12/24 GB (native/compressed) DDS-3 tape drive, but will work with a DDS-4 drive, and probably larger tape drives. An optional 644 MB SunCD[tm] 32X-speed, Photo CD compatible CD-ROM drive or an optional 10X DVD-ROM too could be specifed too. Many Ultra 80's in current use will be fitted with a CD re-writer.

PCI slots

The Ultra 80 has four full-size slots compliant with PCI specification version 2.1:

   * One slot operating at 33- or 66-MHz, 32- or 64-bit data bus width, 3.3 volt
   * Two slots operating at 33 MHz, 32- or 64-bit data bus width, 5 volt
   * One slot operating at 33 MHz, 32-bit data bus width, 5 volt.

Framebuffer

There are two UPA graphics slots supporting up to two Elite3D[tm] m3 and/or Elite3D m6 graphics options. The popular Creator3D framebuffer is not a supported framebuffer, but they will usually (but not always) work.

Construction quality

The Ultra 80 is a well built machine. It does not use cheap mass-produced commodity PC parts like some of Sun's Ultra workstations. It is very well cooled suffering none of the problems of overheating like Sun's previous quad processor machine, the SPARCstation 20

Benchmarks

A number of benchmarks can be found on the SPEC web site.

• model 1450 (single CPU)
• model 2450 (dual CPU).
• model 4450 (quad CPU).

External links

• Main documentation page on Sun's web site.
• Sun system handbook
• Full component list
• Hardware documentation (20 pages)
• Service manual (302 pages).
• CPU installation guide