Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!rice!uw-beaver!milton!milton.acs.washington.edu!dennis From: dennis@yang.cpac.washington.edu (Dennis Gentry) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: Will the Next sell? (max memory size) Message-ID: Date: 30 Nov 89 11:01:53 GMT References: <4283@helios.ee.lbl.gov> <21301@uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU> <21736@brunix.UUCP> <21795@brunix.UUCP> Sender: news@milton.acs.washington.edu Distribution: na Organization: Center for Process Analytical Chemistry, U of Wash, Seattle Lines: 30 In-reply-to: twl@brunix's message of 29 Nov 89 17:27:46 GMT In article <21736@brunix.UUCP> rca@cslab9g.UUCP (Ronald C.F. Antony) writes: >By the way, these ppl who need that much memory must be VERY few or >bad programmers. Here at Brown, most of the advanced research is done >on SPARCstations with only 12MB of RAM! > Unfortunately, this is not quite true. All of the machines being used for AI research have 16MB of memory, and more would be nice. People in my own group (object-oriented database) would like 16-32MB of real memory to use for data buffers or things like that. It's not just code that takes up space! The experimental ML compiler that I'm hacking on right now has a virtual memory image of at last 4-5MB, so after you take out 1-2 MB of RAM for UNIX and 3 MB for X/NeWS and another 2-5 MB for windows and GNU Emacs, 12MB can be a tight squeeze! I'd be all for a 25+MIP machine with >32MB of physical memory..... Just to make sure that we're all clear on this point: You *can install 64Mb of RAM in a NeXT today* using 4Mb DRAMs, which are either available from NeXT or which will soon be available from NeXT. You can also find them in the back of MacWeek. It's not clear that 64Mb is really a reasonable amount of RAM for a 68030. Even though 64Mb costs twice as much as 32Mb, the performance gain you'll achieve by going from 32Mb to 64Mb will almost certainly be less impressive than the performance gain from 16 to 32Mb. Dennis Gentry (speaking strictly for myself)