Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!psuvax1!news From: melling@psuvax1.cs.psu.edu (Michael D Mellinger) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: Next computer (Re: CISC Silent Spring) Message-ID: Date: 12 Feb 90 08:12:34 GMT References: <15108@cs.yale.edu> <430@adiron.UUCP> Sender: news@cs.psu.edu (Usenet) Organization: Penn State University Computer Science Lines: 21 In-Reply-To: richf@adiron.UUCP's message of 12 Feb 90 03:10:17 GMT In article <430@adiron.UUCP> richf@adiron.UUCP (Rick Fanta) writes: Second, the next NeXT is likely to use the MC68040 instead of a RISC. Although it may make you nauseous, think like a marketing person. If he switches to a RISC, compatibility with the small but promising software base that's already out there is toast! This pisses off users and software developers too; not good for a small company trying to build a user base. Besides, if NeXT was going to build a machine around the MC88000, they could have done so already. The fact that they scheduled the announcement of the new machine for sometime in the first quarter (me thinks) of this year coincides strangely with the recent (expected) announcement of the new MC68040. How much work would it be for software companies to support a RISC version of their NeXT software? I would think that most of their software is written in C, or another high level language, and would need nothing more than a recompile. How much assembly level optimization is done in most commmercial software? -Mike