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Have SPARC, Will Travel-For a Price.
On the outside, Tadpole-RDI's UltraBookIIi portable workstation looks almost like any portable you might see in an airport, hotel or around the conference table. But you can't judge a book by its cover, and it's what's inside the UltraBook that makes it so different. Built around a Sun Microsystems Inc. UltraSPARC processor, this laptop is meant to run Solaris, and that it does very well.
Tadpole-RDI was formed back in 1988 when Tadpole Technology plc acquired RDI Computer Corp., effectively reducing the field of SPARC-based laptop vendors to one. Besides SPARC-based laptops, Tadpole-RDI makes SPARC-based portable servers (reviewed in the February 1999 issue of Server/ Workstation Expert, see http:// swexpert.com/R/SE.F2.FEB. 99.pdf), a Hewlett-Packard Co. PA-RISC-based laptop, and the J-Slate handheld Java pen computer. I spent several weeks traveling with the UItraBookIIi and putting it through its paces.
Hardware
The UltraBookIIi is a laptop form factor measuring 13 inches wide by 11 inches deep and 2.3 inches high. The case is made of non-slip scratch-resistent material and is black in color. The Tadpole-RDI literature states the UItraBookIIi's weight at 7.5 pounds without the battery-our review unit with battery and two hard disk drives was about 9.5 pounds.
The UltraBookIIi motherboard is based on the Sun Ultra AX reference design, providing an UltraSPARC-IIi processor complex, UPA system bus, EIDE controller and a PCI I/O bus. The UltraBook uses the Sun/LSI (Logic Corp., Milpitas, CA) chipset, so any Sun-compatible hardware or peripheral may be used. Our review unit was configured with a 400 MHz processor, 2 MB external cache, 1 GB main memory and two Toshiba MK-1214 12 GB 2.5inch Super Slimline removable hard drives (25 GB drives available).
The MK-1214 disk drive has an average seek time of 13 ms, an ATA-4 interface with 1,024 KB buffer and 300,000 hours MTTF My only complaint about these drives is their spin-up time of about four seconds. When the UltraBook is configured to spin-down the disks frequently in order to save power (see below), the four second spin-up delay is noticeable. However, Tadpole-RDI tells me they are looking at the IBM Travelstar 12GN disk to replace the MK1214, which has a spin-up time of 2.8 seconds.
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