Sun Blade 2000
Gallery
Image taken from product brochure - ©Sun
Technical Specifications
| Model: | Sun Blade 2000 |
|---|---|
| Codename: Platform: |
A29 sun4u |
| Processor: Math Copro: |
2x UltraSPARC III Cu (in CPU) |
| Clock Speed: | 900, 1015, 1050, 1200MHz |
| RAM: | |
| Graphics: | |
| Operating System: | |
| Introduced: | |
| Dealer price (net): |
The Sun Blade 2000: Powering the Peak of SPARC Workstations
Sun Microsystems introduced the Sun Blade 2000 workstation in 2002 as the successor to the Sun Blade 1000. It retained the chassis and internal layout of the earlier model while updating its internal architecture.
The system was powered by one or two UltraSPARC III Cu (Copper) processors, offering higher performance than the preceding UltraSPARC II line. Graphics options included Sun's XVR-1000 and XVR-4000 framebuffers as well as third-party cards from NVIDIA and ATI (now AMD), which handled 3D rendering, scientific simulation, and design tasks. An updated memory subsystem provided higher throughput and larger capacity, while multiple PCI-X slots supported add-in accelerator cards, network adapters, and storage interfaces.
The workstation ran Solaris. Organizations deployed it across several technical fields:
- Scientific research, including computational fluid dynamics and molecular modeling
- Engineering, computer-aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM), and finite element analysis
- Animation rendering, digital compositing, and visual effects
- Software development and testing for the SPARC and Solaris platforms
- Financial analytics and modeling
The Blade 2000 was among Sun's final high-end SPARC desktop systems before the workstation market shifted toward x86 hardware.