The Sun Blade series is a computer workstation line based on the UltraSPARC microprocessor family, developed and sold by Sun Microsystems from 2000 to 2006. The range replaced the earlier Sun Ultra workstation series. The Sun Blade 1000, introduced in October 2000, was the first system to use Fireplane as the interconnect between its single or dual processors and the I/O subsystem, a few months ahead of its use in the new Sun Fire server product line. The Sun Blade series was supplanted by the Sun Java Workstation line in 2004.