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From: hal@eecs.cs.pdx.edu (Aaron Harsh)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re: A3000UX - Born to run UNIX SVR4
Message-ID: <1519@pdxgate.UUCP>
Date: 9 Feb 91 05:35:09 GMT
References: <1991Feb7.151106.4795@cc.helsinki.fi> <32530@auc.UUCP> <1512@pdxgate.UUCP> <1991Feb9.032953.14709@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu>
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Reply-To: hal@eecs.UUCP (Aaron Harsh)
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In article <1991Feb9.032953.14709@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu> rjc@geech.ai.mit.edu (Ray Cromwell) writes:
>  What makes you think an 040 NeXT will be competitive with an 040 Amiga
>when the inferior NeXT with inferior color and expansion capabilities
>cost the same?

  The NeXTstation has no color and no expansion [slots] available.  But
looking through Amiga World (yeah so what if I read it, Amigas still suck :-)
all the expansion cards I see fall into three categories:
  1)  RAM/Hard drive cards
     Who cares about this?  The Station is expandable to 32 Megs, and has
     a SCSI connector on the back.
  2)  Video things (genlocks, Toaster, etc.)
     The Amiga is a much better multimedia machine than a NeXT.  If you're
     going to be using a lot of video, go with an Amiga.  If you're going to
     want to use a really fast machine and an incredible programmeing setup
     you should go with a NeXT.
  3)  IBM/Mac emulators
     SOFT-PC on the NeXT runs an AT window faster than a 12Mhz AT.  Uses
     all the NeXT serial ports, disk drives, etc.. too.  You can also run
     more than one on the screen at a time.  (Yeah, I know.  Why would you
     want to run more than one PC window at a time?  Well..  why would you
     even want to run one :-)
     
>  Reworded, it sounds the same. The slab is virtually useless. The $3200
>model is almost unusable. An A3000 with an 040 running AmigaDOS wil
>burn rubber for speed. The NeXT is bogged down with UNIX's overhead and
>Display Postscript. Even the A3000UX with an 040 will probably beat the
>040 NeXT because it doesn't waste so much CPU on the interface.

  As CPU speed increases and display overhead stays the same, amount of
time spent on display aproaches 0.
  Maybe an '040 3000UX will beat a NeXT, but I doubt it.  It will do better
at video, but not at number crunching.  Someone posted some benchmarks
comparing A3000 and NeXTCube (030 model) a while ago.(I think that was
in the pre-advocacy days).  The NeXT was a little faster than the Amiga.
  You probably haven't played with one of the new NeXTs.  They're speeded
up a lot.  You can even format disks while you're downloading a file :-)
I've had Mandelbrot, Digital Webster, and Writenow running at the same time
without slowing down the Writenow window.

>  Try doing Live video teleconferencing on the $3200 slab like CBM did
>on the A3000UX demonstration.

  Yep, the Amiga is better with video.
  Try doing raytracing in any reasonable amount of time on an Amiga.  Try
designing a functional graphical interface to one of your programs in a
half hour on an Amiga.

Aaron Harsh
hal@eecs.cs.pdx.edu