The MicroSPARC IIep was selected because of its high level of integration, good performance, low cost, and availability.

It also included an ATI video encoder for TV-out (removed in the Sun Ray 1), a Philips Semiconductor SAA7114 video decoder/scaler, Crystal Semiconductor audio CODEC, Sun Microelectronics Ethernet controller, PCI USB host interface with 4 port hub, and I²C smart card interface.

The motherboard and daughtercard were housed in an off-the-shelf commercial small form-factor PC case with internal +12/+5VDC auto ranging power supply.

the client ran a real-time operating system called "exec", which was originally developed in Sun Labs as part of an Ethernet-based security camera project codenamed NetCam.

Less than 60 NeWTs were ever built and very few survived; one is in the collection of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

[3] In July 2013, reports circulated that Oracle was ending the development of the Sun Ray and related products.

In a generic session, the user will see the Solaris or Linux login screen of the operating system that is running SRS.

Sun's OEM partners produced Wi-Fi notebook versions of Sun Ray: The Sun Ray 1 clients initially used a 100 MHz MicroSPARC IIep processor, followed by a custom SoC version codenamed Copernicus (US 6,993,617 B2),[10] which was based on the MicroSPARC IIep core, but added 4 MiB of on-chip DRAM, USB, and a smart card interface in addition to the memory controller and PCI interface already on the MicroSPARC IIep.

This setup is flexible and works well in many environments because the intermediate Sun Ray Server layer is transparent to the Windows desktop.

If location dependent information needs to be added it is possible to extend the functionality of the Sun Ray software with additional custom scripts.