For its part, Sun is betting on what it calls its "uniform strategy." This revolves around a long-term transition from today's strong-selling Ultra workstation family, based on Sun's UltraSparc II chip, to the company's upcoming third-generation processor.

That chip, the UltraSparc III, is designed to operate at a minimum of 600 MHz and will probably ship in much higher speed grades. "Sun's microelectronics division is projecting being able to power-on the chips around the end of the year," said Ken Okin, general manager of workstation products group for Sun. "Typical shipment is about a year later, so my assessment is that we're making real good progress."

The newest entrant into the processor fray is IBM Corp.'s Power 3 processor. The upscale superscalar architecture, which boasts eight instruction units, is making its debut in IBM's RS/6000 43P Unix workstation.

Waiting in the wings is the powerful PA 8500 processor from Hewlett-Packard. Although HP's long-term strategy is to move to Merced, the company will for the next several years continue to invest in its homegrown PA-RISC architecture. The PA 8500, fabbed in 0.25-micron technology, was announced earlier this month at the Microprocessor Forum in San Jose, Calif.

According to HP, the PA-8500 will be offered at two speeds: 440 MHz for servers and 360 MHz for systems such as HP's C-Class Unix workstations. A board upgrade using the PA-8500 operating at 360 MHz for the C-Class models is slated to ship in January.

HP's current workstation lineup is a mix of its fast-selling, Intel-based Kayak line and the separate Unix product family. Indeed, HP has been quite successful with that dual-pronged strategy, taking the No. 1 spot in number of systems shipped, according to recent rankings released by analysts at Dataquest Inc. (San Jose, Calif.).

Moreover, HP doesn't buy the notion that the coming crop of new chips will put a crimp in sales. "I definitely do not expect customers to slow down their purchases in anticipation of [Intel's] Merced," said Dave DuPont, marketing manager for HP's Kayak line.

No processor will provide a more potent competitor for Merced than the upcoming Alpha 21364 from Compaq. The architecture, which was disclosed at the Microprocessor Forum, is pitted directly against Intel's IA-64 designs. The 21364 boasts an integrated L2 cache, memory controller and network interface. More important, it is intended to enable scalable, multiprocessor systems.

However, the 21364 won't be out until the end of 1999. In the meantime, Compaq is gearing up its 21264, which is set to ship late this year at a debut speed of 500 MHz. Speeds will quickly rise to 600 MHz and will ultimately top out at 800 MHz.

Like some other workstation players, Compaq faces a challenge getting its multiplatform message across to its potential customers. On the one hand, Compaq is heavily committed to Intel-based platforms. Indeed, it got off to a running start some 18 months ago when it introduced its first Intel-based workstation.

Earlier this month, Compaq introduced that latest incarnation of its Intel family, the Professional Workstation SP700, built around Intel's Xeon and Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. Initial offerings include single- or dual-processor configurations with either 400-MHz or 450-MHz Xeon CPUs.

Compaq's workstation mix has also been affected by its acquisition of Digital Equipment Corp. earlier this year. In that deal, Compaq took control of Digital's Alpha-based workstations, products respected for top-flight performance but not perceived as particularly hot sellers. Indeed, market watchers wondered for months how Compaq would take the machines into its fold.

Now it appears that the Houston-based computer giant has highly aggressive plans to promulgate Alpha systems. Along with the future Alpha processors discussed at the Microprocessor Forum, Compaq made a major public show of support for Alpha at the Siggraph '98 conference in Orlando, Fla., in July.

"We have just inherited a large number of very well-trained 64-bit systems engineers [from Digital]," said David Parsons, director of workstation marketing at Compaq. "We have a very rich heritage now in that whole architecture."

While the next-generation processor battle looms on the horizon, workstation vendors are focusing on subsystems engineering as a more immediate way of differentiating their current products from one another.

For Compaq, this has meant emphasizing the second-generation implementation of its Highly Parallel System Architecture (HPSA), which makes its first appearance in the new SP700 models. HPSA is essentially an I/O architecture designed to boost throughput to memory and peripherals.

Moving forward, however, HP's DuPont doesn't see any letup in the intense battle for one-upmanship. "We increasingly share a highly competitive space," he said. "People in our business are used to rapidly improving products. I don't see a dramatic change in that approach while the industry is waiting for Merced."