The Ultra 80 is a fairly large (445 mm high, 255 mm wide and 602 mm deep) and heavy (29.5 kg) computer workstation in a tower enclosure from Sun Microsystems. The Ultra 80 was launched in November 1999 and shipped with Solaris 2.5.1. The Ultra 80 was available in a variety of different specifications 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. The Ultra 80 may be rack-mounted using an optional rack-mount kit (X9627A or 560-2548) although they are generally not rack-mounted, since the Ultra 80 was designed as a workstation rather than a server. Details can be found in the Sun Ultra 80 Rack Mount Installation Guide. The Enterprise 420R contains an Ultra 80 motherboard in a specialized rackmount case with custom power supplies and other parts.
The Ultra 80 is no longer sold new and was replaced by the Ultra 45, although the Ultra 45 can only take two CPUs, rather than the four of the Ultra 80. 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.
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Although it shipped with Solaris 2.5.1, the Ultra 80 will run all later versions of Solaris, as well as Linux and various other UNIX operating systems. The Ultra 80 can not 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.
Full specifications can be found on the Sun web site, but these are an abbreviated specification, along with some extra notes that are likely to be useful are given below.
Although only sold with either 1, 2 or 4 CPUs, the use of 3 CPUs is a supported configuration. 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.
The Ultra 80 uses 144-pin 5V 60-ns DIMM memory modules of either 64 or 256 MB which should be installed in sets of four identical DIMMs. There are 16 DIMM sockets, so it is possible to fit up to 4 GB with 16 256-MB modules for a total of 4 GB. 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/s. Performance is improved if 2-way interleaving is used (giving 512 MB or 2 GB) 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.
The 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 internal disks must be mounted in a carrier or spud-bracket (Sun part number 540-3024). The SCSI IDs of the internal disks are 0 and 3. These are set by the SCA backplane and can not be changed.
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 32X-speed, Photo CD compatible CD-ROM drive or an optional 10X DVD-ROM could be specified as well. Many Ultra 80s in current use will be fitted with a rewritable CD-ROM drive.
The Ultra 80 has four full-size slots compliant with PCI specification version 2.1:
Some systems might be inoperable if a PCI 2.2 card is installed.
There are two UPA graphics slots running at 112 MHz supporting one or two Elite3D m3 and/or Elite3D m6 graphics options. The popular Creator3D framebuffer is not supported, but will usually (but not always) work. Some Ultra 80s were sold with the PGX32 framebuffer, which does not perform very well as a workstation although would be fine for use as in a server configuration. Although they were not sold with them, the later XVR series framebuffers also work, as do the Expert3D series.
The Sun Ultra 80 is fitted with a dual channel Ultra-3 SCSI controller. The speed is 40 MB/s. One controller (c0) is used for the internal disk(s) and CD-ROM, DVD-ROM and tape. The second channel (c1) is used for the external 68-pin Ultra wide SCSI connector on the rear of the Ultra 80.
The Sun Ultra 80 has
1 Gbit/s Ethernet can be used with the optional Sun X1141A Ethernet card. USB is not officially supported, but various USB boards for PCs have been known to work with Linux and Solaris.
According to the hardware specifications on the Sun web site, the maximum power consumption is 380 W. The components list lists the power supply (Sun part number 300-1357) as a Sony 670 W 12A power supply.
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 problems of overheating like Sun's previous quad processor machine, the SPARCstation 20.
The Ultra 80 is no longer sold new, but it is Sun's policy to support hardware for 5 years from the date of last shipment, so the Ultra 80 was officially supported until 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.
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.
| Model 1450 (one CPU) | Model 2450 (two CPUs) | Model 4450 (four CPUs) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| SPECint 95 | 19.7 | 19.7 | 19.7 |
| SPECfp 95 | 27.9 | 36.1 | 44.6 |
A number of results for the less well used SPECfp_rate95 and SPECfp_rate_base95 benchmarks can be found on the SPEC web site and are given below.
| Model 1450 (one CPU) | Model 2450 (two CPUs) | Model 4450 (four CPUs) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| SPECfp_rate95 | 233 | 455 | 799 |
| SPECfp_rate_base95 | 211 | 401 | 690 |
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