🚀 go-pugleaf

Followups to comp.sys.next

underdog@portia.Stanford.EDU (Dwight Joe) writes:

>My suspicions are confirmed.  The NEXT computer is in trouble.

>NEXT can only be saved if Steve Jobs replaces the 680X0
>with RISC processor like the Sparc chip.  In all compute
>intensive applications, the Sparcstation I beats the NEXT
>timewise.  Worse, NEXT costs MORE than a Sparstation I.

What store are you buying your computers from. You are incorrect.  A
NeXT with a 40MB winchester, a 256MB optical, 8mb of ram a 17-inch
monitor with a 25Mhz '030 and a DSP is ~$7000.00 The last time I
checked, (maybe it was about 2 mos. ago when we bought some
sparcstations) the sparcs with a 19-inch mono display, two 80MB SCSI
drives were over 10k. Sure you can crank through data at twice the
speed at that price but where are you going to put it all?

>Too, the extra gadetry (like the DSP chip) on the NEXT is
>unlikely to be used by engineers doing compute-intensive 
>applications.  The DSP might help out in making
>a realistic video game; otherwise, its deadweight.
>What difference does it make if you can play Beethoven's
>fifth on the NEXT?  

Tell that to people who need cheap and fast data acqusition or
the musicians who use it for sampling and sound processing. The
NeXT comes with standard music and array processing libraries.
The DSP is not just a fancy sound chip.

>I know.  Steve's going to upgrade the NEXT to a 68040.
>Even then, the Sparc chip set is faster.

What sparc machine do you think is going to beat an '040 at anything
if Motorola's specs are correct? We have one of the fastest
sparcstations that Sun makes in the department and it is only a 16 VAX
mips machine. One of the tests a professor here ran was an application
for his akcl LISP which takes 1800 seconds on his 6 MIPS '030 HP
machine and takes 600 seconds on the Sun4. If the '040 @ 25Mhz will do
20 MIPS then we can expect it to run in a little over 400 seconds.
Anyway, we can all do math.

-- 
Christopher M. Whatley
Research Systems Administrator - University of Texas Mathematics
Work: chari@math.utexas.edu (preferably not NeXT Mail) (512/471-7711)
Home: chari@nueces.cactus.org (NeXT Mail)	      (512/499-0475)