The Sun Ultra series refers to two distinct generations of workstation and server computers developed and sold by Sun Microsystems.
The original Ultra workstations and the Ultra Enterprise (later, simply Enterprise) servers were UltraSPARC-based systems produced from 1995 to 2001, replacing the earlier SPARCstation and SPARCcenter/SPARCserver series respectively. This introduced the 64-bit UltraSPARC processor and in later versions, lower-cost PC-derived technology, such as the PCI and ATA buses (the initial Ultra 1 and 2 models retained the SBus of their predecessors). The original Ultra/Enterprise series itself was later replaced by the Sun Blade (workstations) and Sun Fire (servers) ranges.
The original Ultra range were sold during the dot com boom, and became one of the biggest selling series of computers ever developed by Sun Microsystems. Many companies and organisations (including Sun Microsystems) still rely on Sun Ultra products.
The Ultra brand was later revived in 2005 with the launch of the Ultra 20, Ultra 40 and Ultra 45 workstations and the Ultra 3 laptop. Confusingly, some of these "Ultra" workstations are not UltraSPARC-based systems, but are based on x86-64-architecture processors (where Sun uses the term "x64"). However, Sun discontinued the UltraSPARC-based systems on July 2008, effectively ending the production of workstations with an UltraSPARC processor.
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