S4000 System
S4000 Motherboard (with SGA20 graphics)
S3000 with adjustable plasma display
S3000 was orange!
The desktop family was based on the Solbourne and Matsushita designed KAP SPARC microprocessor running at 33 MHz. Both systems shared the same motherboard with 4 Solbourned designed ASICs. The S4000 was designed by Solbourne and the S3000 designed by Matsushita for the smaller desks in Japan. The S3000 had a custom SBus monochrome graphics card that drove a 1152x900 pixel plasma display. It actually wasn't as bad to look at as you might think from my poor photo. The KAP microprocessor was a huge disappointment. In an effort to make the S4000 family more competitive a really smart engineer named Doug Dushatko figured out how to attach a L2 cache to KAP and we designed that onto a small board that would plug into the existing KAP socket. After a huge amount of arm wrestling/pleading we got Matsushita to qualify KAP at the blistering rate of 36 MHz (the original target was 40 MHz). The new product was called the S4000DX (or S4100). My roommate at the time lead the S4000 effort while I led the graphics effort. Competition between us for resources pretty much ended our friendship. I was young and had a lot to learn.