Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!ucla-cs!lanai.cs.ucla.edu!lange From: lange@lanai.cs.ucla.edu (Trent Lange) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc Subject: Re: The New Macs: Greedy Compromises? Message-ID: <1990Dec7.085447.19397@cs.ucla.edu> Date: 7 Dec 90 08:54:47 GMT References: <47110@apple.Apple.COM> <1990Dec5.072931.4079@cs.ucla.edu> <11447@goofy.Apple.COM> Sender: news@cs.ucla.edu (Mr. News) Organization: UCLA Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Lines: 63 Nntp-Posting-Host: lanai.cs.ucla.edu I don't feel so bad about continuing this thread given the three hundred postings on the "Energizer Bunny" here lately. :-) In article <11447@goofy.Apple.COM> daveo@apple.com (David M. O'Rourke) writes: >> Not to mention Unix, >> the fact that the NeXTCube itself is three times as fast as the >> IIfx, has a better development environment, comes with Unix, >> etc, etc. > >What benchmark are you using for that comparsion?? If you're using the >performance of Mathmatica then that's not adequite since Mathmatica has an >admitted bug on the Macintosh version that slow it down _SIGNIFICANTLY_. I was using that fact that it has a 25 MHz 68040, rather than the IIfx's 40 MHz 68030. All published reports are that the 68040 is approximately 3x faster than the 030 at the same clock speed, and 5-10x faster on floating point. A quick "average" of those (and considering the 40 MHz clockspeed of the IIfx's 030) makes the NeXTCube (and NeXTStation)'s raw processing power about three times the IIfx's. It's also nice that the NeXTs have DMA that they actually *use*. Now, if you want to bring real-world performance into this, then that's different. :-) Because the NeXT uses display postscript and an object-oriented windowing environment, I imagine that its actual graphics speed isn't going to be significantly faster than the IIfx's. However, on computationally-intensive programs like Mathematica, spreedsheets, and any programming the user might do, the NeXT can't help but be significantly faster than the IIfx. Of course, for dinky little things like word-processing, the speed of both will be perfectly adequate. And, since you mentioned Mathematica, the 68040 NeXT has been benchmarked to run it 50% faster than a Sparcstation 1+. So much for RISC architectures. :-) >As for the matter of coming with Unix, I think that's a debatible >advantage for the average user, etc, etc. The funny thing about NeXT >coming with Unix is that the real advantage is that you can >run software that doesn't take advantage of _ANY_ of NeXT's features. So >you got this great windowing box and you run text based software on it, >yeah that's a real advantage. As has been previously pointed out, the main advantage of coming with Unix is that the user automatically gets the advantages of its virtual memory, protected memory spaces, and threads, even while using the NeXT's normal "insanely great" applications. Of course, it is nice for semi-technical users to have Unix around free, too. >just my $0.02 worth > >daveo@apple.com Mine too. Hopefully, for everybody, Apple will feel enough pressure from the extremely competively-priced NeXTStations and Sparcstations, and give their high-end machines a semi-reasonable pricing structure. - Trent Lange -- ************************************************************************ * UCLA: 1990 NCAA Football Champions (yes, the other kind). * ************************************************************************