Leo and others,
I have been following this thread with great fascination over the last few days. I'm a hardware guy, not a financial analyst. My company manufactures Sun-Compatible workstations and servers, and we OEM quite a bit of Ross products as part of our line.
RTEC seems a real value compared to book value, and yet they have a core competence that must have some meaningful value. Am seriously considering picking up a bunch of RTEC. What does it look like to you?
As to why RTEC keeps tumbling, in addition to Sun pulling their warrants, a percentage of revenue shipments rumored to be consignments instead, Sun de-emphasizing their 32-bit SPARC20 line in favor of the UltraSPARC (and therefore lowering their forecasts for Ross purchases), I offer the following as partial explanation for this phenomenon...Ross' business proposition to the market at large:
Products:
------------
CPU int/fp* Disk Mem. Gphx Monitor $List -------- ------- ---- ----- ---- ------ -----
Ross 32-bit 125/256 131/153 1GB 32 TGX 17" $7,750
HyperStation 20
Sun 64-bit U140 215/303 2GB 64 TGX 17" $7,995
Ultra1
*=SPECint and SPECfp...Industry standard for measuring integer and floating point speeds of various computer systems. Higher the numbers the better.
This low-end Sun Ultra140 is basically twice as fast as the Ross 125, has twice the amount of disk and memory, and lists for only $245 more. We anticipate that with the advent of the 250MHz UltraSPARC announcement in Q1, the 140 will come down even further in price, or will be eliminated entirely with the even faster 170 taking over the 140's price point. 170's int/fp numbers are 269/386.
Note that Ross' new HperStation30, with a 60MHz 32-bit MBus, increases the system's speed (bus speed=400MB/Sec), AT PEAK, by only 16% (464MB/Sec). Not nearly enough against the UltraSPARC's 1.3GB/Sec...
Would like to hear your reactions/responses to this...
John Knecht |
