Re: 100 Mips Intel NeXT.

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#4537

From: Blake Stone
Date: Sun, 20 Dec 1992 19:51

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> Why lose the DSP?  Why bog down the CPU with all those other
> functions?  Have chips for sound, compression,
> graphics/PostScript, etc.

As a NeXT employee once pointed out, given the choice of adding
cost by:

1) Adding special purpose hardware dedicated to a given task or
2) Throwing in a few more processors on a multiprocessing system

Which would you choose?  Have you tried using the Hayes ISDN
connector while running ScorePlayer?  Special purpose hardware is
always a stopgap measure until the CPU can catch up and subsume
the tasks.

> Take a look at the Amiga.  By not loading down the CPU, it's
> able to make a 68000 look as fast as a 68040 when doing it's
> fancy graphics/sound demos...

Unfortunately the Amiga graphics and sound hardware is looking a
little long in the tooth these days.  It certainly reaped an
advantage for a while, but it VERY difficult to keep special
purpose hardware up to spec with the latest and greatest general
purpose.  I'd rather see NeXT put in sockets for a few more CPUs
and let ME decide what they'll be doing!

Blake Stone
bstone@acs.ucalgary.ca

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References: <1992Dec16.150405.613@pencom.com> <92352.110046NLF102@psuvm.psu.edu> <1992Dec17.193504.24815@blaze.cs.jhu.edu>

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From: bstone@acs.ucalgary.ca (Blake Stone)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.misc
Subject: Re: 100 Mips Intel NeXT.
Message-ID: <92Dec20.195122.18827@acs.ucalgary.ca>
Date: 20 Dec 92 19:51:22 GMT
References: <1992Dec16.150405.613@pencom.com> <92352.110046NLF102@psuvm.psu.edu> <1992Dec17.193504.24815@blaze.cs.jhu.edu>
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