🚀 go-pugleaf

songer@lexmark.com (Christopher Songer) writes:

>Still, Intel drives volumes high enough that while their chips may not be
>the fastest per transistor, they are often the fastest per dollar. Economy
>of Scale is very important here. (Hence the reason NeXT didn't go with the 
>88k.) Next is not in the super fast workstation market -- they are in the 
>desktop market. They need a processor base that has a reasonable tradeoff 
>between speed and price. Motorola cannot not even keep up with Intel in terms 
>of chip speeds and Intel lags the Riscs by about a year.

I may be going out a limb here, but :-) ....

I seem to remeber reading in comp.arch a price comparision in which the 
r4000 was cheaper than the 486! (cpu's only). How much do you think intel
is going to gouge for a P5? Whats availability going to be like? How
long after the release until they get the bugs out?

These other chips are available now! If its really going to take until 3rd
quarter 93 to get NS486 out, why not do another port, but to a real chip?
Then NeXT could announce NS486 as the low end machine, and one with some
real speed as the base NeXT hardware!

>Next could adopt a "low volume" high performance Risc architecture, but they
>would have to abandon the low end of the market. The Pentium will sell well and
>run far faster than the current 68040 based machines. It will be out probably
>a year before the 68060 and Next has already done a significant amount of
>porting work to the family. The 80486 is already out and running at higher 
>speeds than the 68040. The silicon is probably cheaper.

I agree, Moto has blown it. No way should NeXT stay with the 68xxx line.
Too bad, because the 68xxx is *WAY* better than the x86. Moto, what happened?

>The 80x86 dominates the applications markets. It will have a huge market for 
>the next decade at least. There is too much development invested in it for it
>to go away overnight. If Next stays with Moto's 68K they will perform like a dog 
>for the next year and a half. If they go to a Risc like the R4000 or the 88K 
>they are commiting to paying premium prices for their processors and doing a port to
>an architecture that does not have an installed base to insure its survival. 
>Their choices seem quite limited and the Intel line seems the best. It is ready 
>soon, the work for a "complete" port has been going on for some time, it is
>going to be cheap and there will be a "next chip" in the family.

Yes, I agree that the x86 has a huge market. It has too much invested to just
dry up. 

But huge market has never been what NeXT was all about! Yes, there is
stability in the x86, but it is old news, old technology. Where is the
future? Not with the x86. NeXT has always led the way, with innovative
software and hardware. Where has the dream of new horizions gone? Anybody
can follow the leader. Why wont NeXT lead anymore?


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ovrskeek@matt.ksu.ksu.edu