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From: asd@mace.cc.purdue.edu (Kareth)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: SPARCstation 2 --> workstation wars
Message-ID: <5817@mace.cc.purdue.edu>
Date: 19 Oct 90 20:51:49 GMT
References: <9010180146.AA09967@mcs-server.gac.edu> <28337@boulder.Colorado.EDU> <7669@dog.ee.lbl.gov> <165@cheltenham.cs.arizona.edu>
Organization: Purdue University
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Cc:

In <165@cheltenham.cs.arizona.edu> ric@cs.arizona.edu (Ric Anderson) writes:

>> 15MIPS 040, or is it that NeXT applications are so inefficient. What is the
>> deal?  I am going to require psychotherapy if the new NeXTs are comparable
>> to an SE.
>> Dav

>I also have a IIci, and a 16MB NeXT (68030 cube) with the NeXT
>300MB hard drive.  For getting things started, the Mac (with
>an internal Quantum ProDrive-80S) really does blow the NeXT
>away.  Most of this seems to be the relative disk performance,
>rather than the CPU, per se.

Well, from what I learned at our Interface Builder course, this is not
the case.  Due to the object oriented nature of NeXTstep programming,
a LOT of setup is left for run time.  The NeXT dude was saying that
was why the NeXT was/is a dog at loading programs was because much of
initialization and things were left to runtime.

Of course there is 2.0.  I've seen/worked on a NeXT with beta versions
of 2.0, on an 030 Cube.  Response time, as far as starting programs,
looked to me to be twice as fast if not better.

>Application software to do your job should always be considered
>ahead of raw speed.   If you are going to write applications to 
>do something special for yourself, then disk access, and overall
>performance, are much more important than raw cpu speed, since
>compiles (which one does a lot of during the debugging phase)
>are more likely to be disk intensive than CPU bound.

The through-put factor.  Now if only NeXT would put a graphics
coprocessor on the main board to handle the tons of graphics info the
NeXT sloshes around.