Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!zds-ux!gerry
From: gerry@zds-ux.UUCP (Gerry Gleason)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Next computer (Re: CISC Silent Spring)
Message-ID: <160@zds-ux.UUCP>
Date: 7 Feb 90 15:08:20 GMT
References: <8905@portia.Stanford.EDU>
Reply-To: gerry@zds-ux.UUCP (Gerry Gleason)
Organization: Zenith Data Systems
Lines: 75

In article <8905@portia.Stanford.EDU> underdog@portia.Stanford.EDU (Dwight Joe) writes:
>In article <7341@pdn.paradyne.com> alan@oz.paradyne.com (Alan Lovejoy) writes:
>|<NEXT can only be saved if Steve Jobs replaces the 680X0
>|<with RISC processor like the Sparc chip.  In all compute
>|<intensive applications, the Sparcstation I beats the NEXT
>|<timewise.  Worse, NEXT costs MORE than a Sparstation I.

>|Well, he has lots of choices here.

>Agreed.  But Sparc now has a huge software base that could
>easily be modified to fit the I/O of the NEXT, which BADLY
>needs software, if NEXT were to incorporate the SPARC chipset.

Huh?  SPARC has a larger software base than 680x0?  Where have you
been?  If your talking about stuff for SunOS, sure, but NEXT was
never intended to leverage from that software base, or they could
be doing it now.  IMHO, software is NEXT's main problem.  Job's
decided to invend yet another wizzy system interface, and at a time
when the whole industry wants system software standards.  When the
MAC first came out there wasn't anything comparable, now there is,
so it is unlikely that the NEXT environment will have sufficient
software written for it.

>So, Jobs was squeezed out of the higher education market.  The
>one thing that Jobs didn't count on back in mid 1980 was the
>rise of the RISC machines.  What hurt him was the very long
>product development time of NEXT.  He expected that back in mid-1980
>(when he conceived of NEXT) there would be nothing like RISC.

And this really long product development is probably due to
his choice to reinvent the wheel in terms of software, but since
this is comp.arch, maybe we could discuss whether RISC was predictable
in mid-1980 (do you mean mid 1980's, 1980 seems much to early for
the inception of the NEXT concept).  By the mid 1980's it was very
clear than RISC would be an important technology.  In addition to
being a big selling point, a RISC processor would have lessened the
impact of the machines departure from software standards.

Another case in point, I had the opportunity to work on a project
using AT&T's CRISP processor, and was very surprised to find out that
a proposal to build this chip had been around since before they
built the first of the 32100 family.  By the time they put up the
resources to build the CRISP, the 32100 was well established and
Sun was nearly ready to market their SPARC strategy, so the project
fizzled.  Had the 32100 been built from the CRISP proposal, the
rest would be history, it would have been the first commercial
RISC based processor, and it would have become the porting base
for UNIX in the early 80's.  Of course who can really predict what
the market would have done, but such an early RISC processor would
have put the pressure on Intel and Motorola much earlier, perhaps
the 80386 would not have been built (or not been all that successful
since it would have been competing from day one with Intel RISC).

>|<I know.  Steve's going to upgrade the NEXT to a 68040.
>|<Even then, the Sparc chip set is faster.

>|How do you know that?  Have you benchmarked a 68040?

Has anyone seen a 68040?  I thought not.  You are comparing
a chip that won't ship until this summer with one that is in
a machine that has been in production for some time.  This
occurs over and over in the RISC/CISC debate, but that doesn't
seem to keep people from making these silly comparison's.

BTW, what are some current prices on RISC chips?  I have read that
80486's are ~950$ in thousand quantity, and someone posted 68040's
are expected to be ~750$.  I suppose you should include the MMU and
FPU in the RISC prices since they are on the chip for the comparable
CISC's, but since a large percentage of users don't need and FPU
including this unit probably distorts the comparison.  From day one
I expected RISC processors to get to commodity prices very quickly
(i.e. prices based almost completely on the cost to make to chip).
Has that happened yet?

Gerry Gleason