Sun server to get lower price, new chip

Sun Microsystems on Tuesday will cut prices as much as 25 percent for its eight-processor V880 server and update it with a faster processor.

The systems, top sellers for the company, currently come with a 900MHz UltraSparc III processor but now will be available with a 1.05GHz model as well, Sun plans to announce.

The deepest price cuts will occur on a four-processor model with 8GB of memory; the old price with the 900MHz chip is $60,000, but the new model with the 1.05GHz chip will be $45,000.

Sun also will cut the price of its four-processor V480 server as much as 21 percent.

The cuts come two weeks after the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company reduced the price of its 12-processor V1280 server.

The highly competitive Unix server market, where leader Sun is fending off Hewlett-Packard and IBM, is itself under fire with increasingly powerful Intel-based systems running Windows or Linux and being sold by Dell Computer and others. Hewlett-Packard and IBM cut Unix server prices in April.