Ever increasing its price-performance value in the 64-bit technical computing market, Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) today announced performance enhancements to the Sun Blade 150(TM) workstation and a price cut to the Sun Blade 2000 workstation. The Sun Blade 150 workstation will feature double the memory and disk capacity as well as a DVD-ROM with no price increase. The higher-end Sun Blade 2000 workstation will be available for $3,000 less than the base configuration -- a price reduction of 30 percent. "We know that today's technical computing customers need high-quality, high-performance systems at an affordable price," says Fred Kohout, product line director, Workstations Product Group and Scalable Systems Group, Sun Microsystems. "Today's move underscores Sun's commitment to producing the most advanced, powerful and affordable workstations available. Sun is the number one manufacturer of technical computing 64-bit UNIX(R) workstations in the world, and we plan to stay number one through continually refreshing the features and pricing of our workstation product portfolio." The refreshed Sun Blade 150 workstation will now offer up to two internal 80 gigabytes (GB) of 7200-RPM EIDE hard drives to provide high internal storage capacity. The base memory will double to 256 megabytes (MB) of RAM for the small configuration and 512 MB for the medium configuration. Additionally, the new Sun Blade 150 workstation will come standard with a DVD-ROM and optional 48x CD read/write option. These performance enhancements offer 83 percent better price/SPECint performance and 81 percent better price/SPECfp performance than IBM's RS/6000 44P model 170. The Sun Blade 2000 workstation price has been slashed by $3,000, dropping from $9,995 to $6,995 U.S. list price for the base configuration. Targeted at the high-end technical computing market, the Sun Blade 2000 workstation sports up to two 1.2 GHz UltraSPARC(R) III processors, eight MB of Level 2 cache per CPU and a maximum of eight GB of RAM. With this latest price cut, the Sun Blade 2000 workstation now offers 67 percent better price/SPECint performance and 73 percent better price/SPECfp performance than the comparable IBM pSeries 630 model 6E4. Additionally, the Sun Blade 2000 workstation supports the Sun(TM) XVR-100, Sun XVR-500, Sun XVR-1000 and Sun XVR-1200 graphics accelerators, allowing many combinations of powerful graphics solutions such as dual displays for graphics-intensive use or quad displays for vertical markets. As with all Sun workstations, the Sun Blade 150 and the Sun Blade 2000 workstations run the powerful 64-bit Solaris(TM) Operating System and are 100 percent binary compatible across the Sun portfolio. The performance enhanced Sun Blade 150 workstation will be available to customers on November 20, 2003. The newly priced Sun Blade 2000 is available now.