🚀 go-pugleaf

In article 23553@tamsun.tamu.edu, curtis@accnxt1.tamu.edu (Curtis Johnson) writes:
>The Sparc 10 is a much more powerful machine, but the power/$cost ratio is  
>far too high.  For the most powerful Sparc 10, you could easily pay over  
>$120,000 (based on articles in unixworld).  Also sys admin time is also a  
>ratio that is too high.  If this poor misguided faculty person can deal  
>with an average speed machine, 25mips I believe, then I would go with the  
>$10,000 NeXT as opposed to the $100,000 Sparc 10.
>Just my $0.02.

I wasn't going to post on this thread, but we need to take a second for a
reality check.  The highest list price for a SPARCstation 10 is the
model 54 GX at $58,000 -- that's for a four CPU machine (58.1 SPECint
92, 71.4 SPECfp 92 per CPU) with 64 MB of memory, 1.0 GB internal disk
and a 19" color display.  (This machine is not due to ship until
sometime in '93, btw.)  Note that this is slightly off the performance
curve of most NeXT machines currently shipping.  Since you can put up
to 512 MB of memory and 41 GB of disk on any SPARC 10, it's no trick to
put together a system that costs well over $100K, but this isn't
exactly your average single-user configuration.

The currently shipping SPARCstation 10 model 30 GX with 32 MB of
memory, 424 MB internal disk, and 19" color display lists at $20,495.
Universities typically get significant discounts off of list.  The
SPECmarks for this system are 44.2 SPECint 92, 52.9 SPECFp 92.  (Note
that you should only compare SPEC 92 numbers to other SPEC 92 numbers,
and not SPEC 89 numbers; SPEC 92 is a newer, putatively more fair, suite
of benchmarks.)

I'm not up on the performance specs of the current NeXT line, so I'll
leave comparisons to those who are.  Ease of use issues are also
another topic; there are certainly pros and cons for both platforms (he
said diplomatically).

--
Larry Wake, Sun Microsystems San Diego field office
(larry.wake@west.sun.com)
Friend or foe, there's only us.