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From: dhinds@elaine18.Stanford.EDU (David Hinds)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Will NeXT survive?  Grow with the times?
Message-ID: <1991May10.155435.18866@leland.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 10 May 91 15:54:35 GMT
References: <1991Apr30.191117.4373@vax5.cit.cornell.edu> <576@appserv.Eng.Sun.COM>
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In article <576@appserv.Eng.Sun.COM> lm@slovax.Eng.Sun.COM (Larry McVoy) writes:
>umh@vax5.cit.cornell.edu writes:
>> A MIPS rep today told me to expect ACE machines (the compaq/microsoft etc
>> group) at $2K to $5K in Q2 92.Of course these will be no cache except the 8K+8K
>> on the R4000, and crippled in various other ways to be as cheap as possible,
>> but will presumably still be far above PC/Mac/Amiga performance.
>
>I don't normally get into this sort of thing and probably shouldn't now,
>but I find this statement a little hard to stomach.  Are R4000's even taped
>out yet?  Maybe I missed something, but I thought that the R4000 was a 
>future chip.

     Someone told me that yes, the R4000 is taped out.  And they have it
running on simulators, sort of.  There are timing problems, like the 1MHz
test mode doesn't work, but it does work at full speed.  I don't know
enough about the way chips are engineered to say how far from market this
should be.

 -David Hinds
  dhinds@cb-iris.stanford.edu