Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!snorkelwacker!usc!ucsd!ucbvax!hplabs!hpda!hpcuhc!edwardm
From: edwardm@hpcuhc.HP.COM (Edward McClanahan)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Next rumours from MacWeek
Message-ID: <680032@hpcuhc.HP.COM>
Date: 3 Jul 90 22:05:45 GMT
References: <1990Jun28.184153.27766@midway.uchicago.edu>
Organization: Hewlett Packard, Cupertino
Lines: 30

Bruce Henderson writes:

> > A couple of Next rumours from MacWeek's "Mac the Knife" page:
> 
> > 50 MhZ 68040 machine which will be in a Sun-like pizza box.  It will have no
> > OD, but a 2.8 MB floppy instead.  Code name is "Warp 9".
> 
> Come on people!  Get a grip on yourselves! What is wrong with this picture...

> Not the part about NeXT and a new CPU.... That's not so far fetched..  
> But a 50Mhz '040?  People, Motorola is having problems with the XC versions
> (the final test silicon, i think..) running at 25 MHz.  It will take YEARS
> for them to be able to approach that speed. 

I agree that the 50MHz '040 won't be out for some time, but I question the
term "YEARS" - that is, I'm assuming they fix their problems with the 25MHz
version soon.

If I'm not mistaken, it didn't take that long to go from 25 to 50 MHz on the
'030.  And to compare apples to oranges, Intel seemed to take little time
going from 25 to 33 MHz on their 486.  Note in both cases that the manufacturer
had produced this speed up on the previous chip (making a similar speedup on
their latest chip easier?).  (I refer to Motorola's '030 and Intel's 386.)

Still, the '040 (at 25MHz) appears to be VERY LATE...

Question:  I understand that the Nubus in the NeXT runs at 25MHz itself (a
           substantial speedup over the Mac II's 10MHz Nubus).  Though the
           memory resides on the same card as the CPU, what should we expect
           in "overall" performance speedup when just the CPU is improved?