OSfOM

The Sun Ultra 45: The Last of a Line

Released in 2006, the Sun Ultra 45 holds a significant, albeit somewhat poignant, place in Sun Microsystems' history. Alongside its single-processor sibling, the Ultra 25, it was one of the very last workstations produced by Sun based on their own SPARC architecture, marking the end of an era for Sun's in-house designed desktop systems. 

The Ultra 45 was powered by one or two 1.6 GHz UltraSPARC IIIi processors. While the UltraSPARC IIIi was a capable processor, by 2006, the performance landscape had shifted significantly, with x86 processors from Intel and AMD offering strong competition. The Ultra 45 aimed for a balance of performance, expandability, and a focus on the Solaris operating environment that its users relied upon. 

Housed in a relatively large and sturdy tower case, the Ultra 45 offered good internal expansion, including support for multiple SATA or SAS hard drives and a generous amount of RAM (up to 16GB). Notably, it incorporated PCI Express slots, a modern bus at the time, alongside PCI-X slots, providing flexibility for various expansion cards, including graphics accelerators like the XVR-300. 

The Ultra 45 ran Solaris 10 and was targeted at traditional Sun customers in technical computing, software development, and enterprise environments who valued the stability and features of Solaris and the SPARC platform. However, the increasing capabilities and market dominance of x86-based systems running Linux and Windows presented a significant challenge. 

The Sun Ultra 45 was discontinued in 2008, just a couple of years before Oracle's acquisition of Sun. It stands as the final chapter in the story of Sun's self-designed SPARC workstations. While not as widely known as some of its earlier, more iconic predecessors, the Ultra 45 represents the culmination of Sun's desktop SPARC development and the changing tides of the workstation market in the mid-2000s.