Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!cbmvax!daveh From: daveh@cbmvax.commodore.com (Dave Haynie) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Commodore at FCC Message-ID: <14568@cbmvax.commodore.com> Date: 20 Sep 90 19:22:01 GMT References: <22107@grebyn.com> Reply-To: daveh@cbmvax.commodore.com (Dave Haynie) Organization: Commodore, West Chester, PA Lines: 78 In article <22107@grebyn.com> ckp@grebyn.UUCP (Checkpoint Technologies) writes: >NeXT was there too. They had a bevy of cubes sitting around for >demos. They also had a new box: the NeXTstation. I picked up a >brochure. >The shockers: It sports a 25MHz 68040, yes, an Oh Forty. And the list >price is $4995. Not a bad price. Not really that amazing, either. >If I speculate the price of an A3000 plus 68040 plus 8 meg RAM plus >Viking 1 monitor plus Unix, I seem to get a number higher than that. OK, so the Viking 1 (eg, Moniterm) monitor is, by comparison, overpriced. I don't see any 68040 systems shipping just yet, either from Next or as an upgrade to the 3000. I would guess a basic 68040 board for the 3000 would go for $750-$1000, with a chunk of external cache it might hit $1500. >I don't mean to be a doom-sayer, but I don't see much reason to buy an >A3000 to run Unix when the NeXTstation looks the way it does. You might also ask why would someone buy a NeXT when the A3000 looks the way it does. If you think a NeXT will offer that much more, you're confused. >And it's got the DSP, the sound The NeXT sound capabilities aren't anything special. The DSP is a nice built-in, but it's a rather weak DSP. It's good for sound processing, but it's 24 bit fixed point math isn't going to do your imaging any favors. If you want some real DSP, talk to Eric Lavitsky about his "Bonsai" board for the Zorro II bus; this puppy has two high speed AT&T DSPs that support floating point. It's an extra thousand or so, but my feeling is that most of the NeXT customers have no immediate use for sound processing. If the 56001 was that much of a success, NeXT would be supplying its new machines with the 96002. As it stands, a NeXT requires a 56001, just in case, and at this point they're dirt cheap. >and it runs Lotus - the brochure talks almost as much about Lotus Improv(tm) >as it does about the rest of the machine. While it can do something with Lotus 1-2-3 file, they're claiming that Lotus Improv is NOT really Lotus 1-2-3 compatible. Most spreadsheets these days read Lotus 1-2-3 files, so it would sound like the Lotus name is about all you get with Improv. >While Commodore was pushing their low-end architecture up into the >high end, the high end architectures have come down to meet them. One of the thing that folks seem to get confused about is what constitutes a high end vs. low end architecture. For example, the NeXT has always been a low end, or more properly, a PC-Class architecture. The new machines still are. They just packaged it as a workstation and ran UNIX on it. But it's a far cry from the Workstation class 68030 machines that used to be made by Sun and are still made by HP and Sony. It's also quite similar to the Amiga 3000, performance-wise. >I don't want to be a doomsayer, but I don't think the A3000 will compete >on their terms. I don't know what Commodore could do to compete. Well, if you start to show me that Suns or HPs are dropping down on the head of the A3000, maybe I'll get nervous. But NeXT has been and still is a PC technology machine. There are some cool ideas in the NeXTStep software. But there's not all that much NeXTStep software. The largest market for UNIX + GUI software today is SunOS (reference: Personal Workstation), which is merging with AT&T UNIX, X, OpenLook, etc. Which is exactly what the A3000 UNIX runs. Which means, thanks to ABI, that UNIX SV.4 based SunOS will be binary compatible with A3000s and quite a few other 680x0 family machines out there. NeXT will be on its own. NeXT has done suprisingly well on their own, but I don't believe they can compete with the combined volume of several system vendors. >First comes the logo: C H E C K P O I N T T E C H N O L O G I E S / / -- Dave Haynie Commodore-Amiga (Amiga 3000) "The Crew That Never Rests" {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!daveh PLINK: hazy BIX: hazy Standing on the shoulders of giants leaves me cold -REM