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From: rca@cs.brown.edu (Ronald C.F. Antony)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: What NeXT *should* do next.
Message-ID: <33947@brunix.UUCP>
Date: 24 Mar 90 23:43:39 GMT
References: <1378@shelby.Stanford.EDU>
Sender: news@brunix.UUCP
Reply-To: rca@cs.brown.edu (Ronald C.F. Antony)
Organization: Brown University Department of Computer Science
Lines: 43

I don't think all this RISC hype is worth to go through. RISC is not
bad, as it opened the eyes of the architecture people for some
important points. The advantage of RISC architectures is declining,
they had a big advantage when it was not possible to implement a CIS
in hardware but had to use microcode for it. Today this is no longer a
big problem and an avg. instruction takes only 1.3 cycles on a 68040.
However the 68040 has support for thightly coupled multiprocessing
which I could not find in the description of the IBM-RISC System/6000
Technology book IBM handed out at the latest demonstration here at
Brown. Then also a CI is likely to have more power than an avg. RI.
so MIPS alone tell a bad story.
I rather have 4 68040's than only one fast RISC in my system (just
think of MACH)...

NeXT's prices still are very competitive, just look at what a Mac
costs or what you get with your IBM systems i.e.nothing. Need
Mathematica? well, pay around 2500$! Need a db-server? 2000$ at least
in 1 user configuration etc....

Of course this does not mean that NeXT should stand still, and you can
be sure they are not... 

What we need is a 68040 (i.e. 20MIPS @ 25MHz if you have to know)
a 9600x
a 512MB/20ms optical (of course it has to handle the 256MB disks
too..)
a nice color card with hardware speed ups
16 MB RAM
if you like scsi-2, with a cache option if possible
no floppies (256MB are for a NeXT like 256KB for a PC), with floppies
as standard media you cripple the development of this machine

I'm also quite confident that this is waht we can expect from NeXT.
e.g. ever seen the pointers to the 96000 series in the documentation?
guess why they are there... ever heared all the comments about the
68040? ever heared about pixar? well then you know what is coming.
Even Canon is supposed to have the new drives ready.

Ronald
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists
in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the
unreasonable man."  Bernhard Shaw | rca@cs.brown.edu or antony@browncog.bitnet