Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!amdahl!pacbell!hoptoad!unisoft!mtxinu!sybase!kiwi!barry
From: barry@kiwi.UUCP (barry klawans)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.misc
Subject: Re: The NeXT machine has been announced! (short!)
Message-ID: <1522@sybase.sybase.com>
Date: 14 Oct 88 23:12:58 GMT
References: <360@elan.UUCP> <3292@pt.cs.cmu.edu>
Sender: news@sybase.sybase.com
Reply-To: barry@kiwi.UUCP (barry klawans)
Organization: Sybase, Inc.
Lines: 35

In article <3292@pt.cs.cmu.edu> ralphw@ius3.ius.cs.cmu.edu (Ralph Hyre) writes:
>In article <360@elan.UUCP> jlo@elan.UUCP (Jeff Lo) writes:
>>The machine is based on the Motorola 68030 with a 68882 floating point
>>chip as well as a 56001 DSP chip, all running at 25 MHz. 
>>The entire CPU board consists of 45 chips ...
>>ethernet, sound processors (I assume the DSP and A/D-D/A converters) and..
>>the NuBus. The NuBus is run at 25 MHz (Jobs compared it to a 10 MHz NuBus,
>
>Does this mean that all of the circuitry is on NuBUS cards, or did they
>put some stuff on the motherboard, leaving the CPU and DSP on the backplane?
>What is really on the CPU board (030, 882, and 1M memory?)
>How much memory is in the base configuration?

All the circuitry is on the NuBUS card.  The backplane is simply a set of
card holders.  NeXT is taking advantage of one of the features of NuBUS,
naimly that any card can become the bus master.  Their is not a tradition
motherboard that all the other boards plug into.

Jobs mentioned that they would sell their bus controller chip to third
party developers for something around $25.  With a 11" by 11" size board
to play with developers should be able to cram alot of stuff on one board.

Interestingly, while there is a high quality D/A converter there is not an
equivalent A/D converter.  The system has a microphone input connected to
CODEC chip using 12 bit data with a sampling rate of 8Kbytes/sec.  This
should give an audio signal with about the same quality as a telephone.

I attended the NeXT day conference on the 13th, and Steve Jobs hinted that
NeXT would add a 24 bit color board sometime next year.  The current monitor
is a 2 bit per pixel grayscale monitor that is 1120 X 832.  It is one of
the sharpest displays I've seen.
Barry Klawans
Any opinions given are mine, not my company's.  They don't want them.
UUCP: {mtxinu,sun,pyramid,pacbell}!sybase!barry
"All of my friends are traitors." - Manuel M. Costa