Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cbmvax!bagate!dsinc!ub!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!src.honeywell.com!msi.umn.edu!cs.umn.edu!uc!noc.MR.NET!gacvx2.gac.edu!scott From: scott@next-5.gac.edu (Scott Hess) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Sorry Guys, There is NO WAY! Message-ID: Date: 11 Dec 90 01:59:39 GMT References: <9012032130.AA114840@vttcf.cc.vt.edu> <21968@well.sf.ca.us> Organization: Gustavus Adolphus College Lines: 160 Nntp-Posting-Host: next-5.gac.edu Follow-up-to: alt.religion.computersLines: 160 In the interests of saving those kill files, scott uses a standardized Subject: line. As another (hopefull) saving feature, he replies to a lot of stuff all at the same time. I've been hearing about c.s.a problems on c.s.n. It is getting annoying. Now, before you come down on me for being in the same boat as Mr. Young: In article <21968@well.sf.ca.us> yoo@well.sf.ca.us (Young-Kyu Yoo) writes: > You say that the 3000ux will "crank out 5 mips", then say the 040 NeXT >will "crank out 15-20". Figures courtesy of Motorola, you say. I have no >reason to doubt you, so I won't say anything about that, except for being >interested in how such an answer was arrived at. Don't ask me. I let the big boys do the benchmarks. At any rate, those are Motorola figures. And several Unix experts have done their own benchmarks (check out the NeXT newsgroup for details) and they confirm that the 040 is three to four times faster than the 030. You trust Moto? Show me Specmarks. Not trivial barf done by the CPU vendor themselves. > I do, however, take exception to the assertions concerning the >MFLOPS of both machines. "nearly 3" and "will be lucky to approach 1" isn't >precise enough for this arguement. They suggest that you don't know for sure, >you're just pulling out some numbers which sound nice. Don't post something >you can't quote with better references, especially if you're knocking a >computer in its' home newsgroup. You're going to get flamed. Now, if you'd >post real numbers along with their sources, that wouldn't be quite so bad.... I didn't want to bore you with the details. Then please stop. Motorola claims 2.8 MFLOPs for their FPU (which is built into the main processor). Home-grown benchmarks done by several in the NeXT newsgroup get numbers from 2.5 to 3.3 MFLOPS. Again, those are homegrown, and probably have nothing to do with anything. The posts themselves stated as much. My question: Why attack my numbers without numbers of your own? He was justified. If I were to say "10,000 cattle stampeded through my bedroom this morning", you need not come up with numbers to label me wrong. Run OpenLook on a 030 Amiga, and then tell me that it is faster than NeXTStep on an 030 NeXT. At any rate, anything concerning the 040 Amigas is pure conjecture. The 040 NeXTs are real. The 040 Amigas are pre-vaporware. NextStations are only psuedo-real. They are becoming more solid every day, but still . . . OpenLook on an Amiga will more than likely outperform NextStep where it counts. Raw X will do really quite well. Remember that Amigas are graphics gods . . . The 105 MB hard drive for the NeXT does indeed come with nearly 40 MB of bundled software (not including the operating system). The 340 MB hard disk does indeed come with nearly 200 MB of bundled software. True, Mathematic is not free to every NeXT buyer, but it IS free to all educational buyers, and I assume you and most of Usenet would be among these (of course, there are some who are not). This is like saying that your new car comes with four bundled tires. Calling the operating system itself bundled software is sort of unfair. If it _weren't_ bundled, the basic machine would be _entirely_ unusable. As for matching NeXT's price/features, the Amiga has a very long way to go. Where's that Amiga DSP? Those Amiga DMA channels? That Amiga Mach with parallel processing capabilities? That 2.88 MB floppy drive compatible with both 720K and 1.44 MB MS-DOS formats? Yes, note the large amount of programs out there using the DSP. The NeXT does not use DMA to good advantage. In many instances, it was faster to do DSP stuff on the '030, because there isn't DMA to the DSP - there's a channel for it, it's not used. This is fixed in the future. The NeXT does not have parallel processing capabilities. The NeXT Unix kernel is built on Mach, which in the future will have parallel processing capabilities, but does not at this time. The NeXT version of Mach is not equal to the CMU version (they lag aways, and also have added some stuff of their own). The NeXT hardware certainly does not support parallel processing capabilities, even if a new Mach _were_ to come out. The 2.88 drives will be consumer market items soon. This is a non-issue. Besides, you show me yours, and I'll show you mine. garnett@cs.utexas.edu (John William Garnett) writes: Not necessarily. Users who have the new NeXT 2.0 operating system installed on 030 NeXT's claim almost twice the perceived performance ^^^^^^^^^ [I haven't seen any benchmarks to confirm this]. This just goes to show that the operating system plays a non-trivial role in the performance of a machine. Out of curiousity have there been any This is just certain parts of the OS. Apps created under 2.0 will load faster, and some apps have been rewritten to offload processing. But, if you take your general 1.0 app, and copy it onto your disk, it will not run any faster. Perceived performance!=real performance. An Amiga running AmigaDos will _heavily_ outperform a NeXT on the same processor platform. It's because they aren't designed for the same things, for the most part (this is mostly concerned with the display code, though Unix will also throw in quite a bit of overhead). OK, now for some disclaimers. As some of you know, I'm a NeXT developer, who's developed quite a number of programs. I've been on the machine for a year and a half, nearly fulltime the entire time. I know a fair amount about the machine, and I can honestly state that the NeXT has warts. Whoa! Amazing! But, I've never seen a computer without warts. The Amiga is a very nice machine. I spent most of the time between the announcement of the a1000 and the point at which I got sucked into Unix drooling over Amigas. I never could afford them, though (not because they were expensive, I just had no money). Now, I've got the money, and am leapfrogging to NeXTs. Which brings up a good point - I can imagine selling Amigas as a consumer item ( :-] ). I cannot imagine selling NeXTs as a consumer item. Having worked with my NeXT at home for quite some time, I can safely state that non-Unix weenies need not apply. Sure, you _can_ work it without knowing Unix, but it is not a Mac nor an Amiga. Don't get me wrong - you don't need to know how to run crypt(3) in your head, but you do need some small amount of experience, or a friend to spend a couple hours helping you out. NeXT are not Amigas, not do NeXTs compete with Amigas. NeXTs compete with Suns and DECs (and that whatsamacallit, that IBM thingymajig). Fairly well, too, at the low end. But, when you start talking SparcStation 2s and DECStation 3100s, you've lost the NeXT. Amigas, meanwhile, compete with the PC and the Mac, and very admirably at that. What is really needed is for Amigans and NeXTans (yuck, sounds slimey, I'll go with it, though) to "Band together, and drive the Evil, and the Ugly, Awwaaayy!". Oops. I mean, I think that the Amiga is a natural for home use, but wouldn't want to be using it on a network, where Unix is King. Then again, I can use a NeXT at home, but neither of my roomates could justify that expense. (Being a developer, I can). Lastly, I invite Mr. Young over to comp.sys.next. Your time could be better spent defending the NeXT against Sun than assulting people who made a Right Choice which doesn't match yours. And, off I goooooo . . . -- scott hess scott@gac.edu Independent NeXT Developer GAC Undergrad "Tried anarchy, once. Found it had too many constraints . . ." "Buy `Sweat 'n wit '2 Live Crew'`, a new weight loss program by Richard Simmons . . ."