Tadpole lowers price of Unix notebooks

Hoping to seduce Unix developers into taking their projects on the road, Tadpole Computer Monday introduced a new SPARC (scalable processor architecture) notebook at a much lower price than the company’s previous 64-bit notebooks.

The “Sparcle” notebook has a starting price of $2,995, and is available through Tadpole’s Web site (http://www.tadoplecomputer.com) and certain resellers, it said in a release. It runs Sun Microsystems’ Solaris operating system, and comes with a Sun processor at speeds up to 650MHz, up to 2GB of memory, up to an 80GB hard drive, a 15-inch display, and integrated 802.11b wireless Internet connectivity.

The company is hoping that the lower price will convince Unix developers to opt for a mobile development platform, Tadpole CEO Mark Johnston said in an interview in March.

Tadpole’s current customers are largely U.S. government agencies and independent software vendors, who pay upwards of $20,000 for Tadpole’s older mobile Unix workstations.

But systems running either the Windows or Linux operating system are expected to take over the market for mobile workstations, said Pia Rieppo, an analyst with Gartner, in a recent interview. Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) recently released its 64-bit Opteron processor for servers and workstations, and Intel will release a low-power version of its 64-bit Itanium processor later this year. Both chips can run either Linux or a 64-bit version of Windows 2003 Server.

The number of workstations shipped based on RISC (reduced instruction set computing) chips was cut in half from 2000 to 2002, Rieppo said. Most developers are only staying with the platform if they are running legacy applications, or if they have a specific need for 64-bit Unix capability, she said.