pclark@SRC.Honeywell.COM (Peter Clark) (10/11/90)
I've been blessed with the opportunity to play with a demo NeXTStation for the past two days, and felt I owed it to the net to summarize my experiences. This will be somewhat stream-of-consciousness, so bear with me. In a word- Outstanding! If this is the 'future of NeXT', NeXT should be pretty well off. The '040 slab seems to be around 4 times as fast as the '030 cube for cpu-intensive work (it can count to 1^7 4 times as fast)- the '040 manages to stay ahead of the DSP in Mandelbrot for quite a while, and finishes way ahead of the '030. The 2.0 software is also nice. The Workspace manager is now the 'file viewer', and it has a 'shelf' to put commonly-used directories and files. Clicking on the shelf will jump you to the location of the file/directory in the file system. It also lets you run things like copying & removing as background processes- the workspace manager isn't tied up until the copy is finished. All programs launch *much* faster. The 3.5 IBM-Compatible drive really is. It shows up just like a directory in your home directory, and you can open text files with Edit, & read & edit them. The MS-DOS file system mounts flawlessly into the Unix file system. Most 1.0 binaries work- NX_VOID and FrameMaker 2.0 work fine, but Scott Hess' TimeMon program doesn't work. I don't know why. Terminal & Shell have been replaced with a re-worked version of Stuart. Congrats, Scott! The Admin tools have been reworked, and they all seem to be better. The Librarian is a *hell* of a lot faster, but it doesn't work with old index files- be prepared to re-index all your non-standard stuff. It's worth it. You can print to a fax-modem as well as the printer. It shows up in the print panel, almost like a printer. WriteNow does indeed now do underlining. The Preferences app has a panel for choosing monitors. Evidently, you can indeed have a multiply-headed cube. There are a few new toys in the NextDeveloper/Demos directory- a Datebook, a couple of fractal programs, the Gourmet calculator (mentioned in the NeXT on campus magazine), a spiffy PendulumLab program (which does very smooth animation), and a program called ShowAndTell, which records all the things you do with the computer & can play them back (great for developing training scripts). The ScorePlayer program now has two types of score files- one which is 'compiled' or 'optimized' for playback, and the old text format. It seems to be a lot better at playing without skipping or slowing down with the system is loaded. Improv is neat, but I haven't had enough time to get a feel for it. It looks a lot better then Excel (the only spreadsheet I've used a lot). PowerStep and WorkPerfect are there, and they work. I haven't played with them much either, but they seem to work as advertised. The 'Request' Menu has been renamed to Services, and it extensible. Various applications can install menus in here- Mail shows up (i.e., mail the selection), and there's been some others as well. The IB has some new palettes, and a better Text object. It's supposedly easier to add custom palettes now, but I haven't tried it. The C compiler now supports both Objective-C and C++. All the libraries are still in Obj-C. Emacs is ver. 18.55. These are all the things that I can think of right now- I'm going to be sad when I have to give it back to NeXT tomorrow, but I'm looking forward to having my very own soon! Feel free to e-mail any questions that I might be able to answer. Pete Clark p.s. I have no affiliation with NeXT, other than as a satisfied and impressed customer.
neil@ms.uky.edu (Neil Greene) (11/21/90)
Have the nextstations already been shipped? Just curious, I have sen one and used it for awhile, very impressed with it all the same, but wondering has anyone got one?
blumoose@mrfreeze.MIT.EDU (David W Gotthold) (12/19/90)
Well, my station is finally here and installed. Now I need to get serious about purchasing a large hard drive. If anyone has a list with sizes, prices, etc. I would appreciate if you could email it (or post it). Also any other lists of things a new NeXT owner should know. Thanks in advance. blumoose@athena.mit.edu
holmer@ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU (Bruce K. Holmer) (01/18/91)
[] I copied a number crunching application of mine from an '030 Next cube to my new '040 Nextstation, and was shocked with the relatively poor performance. After some experimentation, I've found the cause---the '040 floating point does not support in hardware the entire 68882 instruction set, so the unimplemented instructions must be done by software. That's fine with me, since Motorola assured us (IEEE Micro, February 1990, p. 77) that: A software emulator of all unimplemented instruction si available from Motorola.... Execution time of the software emulation for elementary functions including all trap overhead (running on a 25 MHz 68040) is 13 to 130 percent faster than the equivalent instructions on the 68882 running at 25 MHz. However, whatever turned up in the Nextstation is certainly not what Motorola was promising (whether the blame is Motorola's or Next's I don't know). For your amusement here is a small assembly language program: %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% tmp.s %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% #NO_APP gcc_compiled.: .text LC0: .even .globl _main _main: link a6,#0 clrl d1 L61: fmovex #0r0.5,fp0 fQQQx fp0,fp0 addql #1,d1 cmpl #999999,d1 jle L61 unlk a6 rts %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Here are the timings (using /bin/time) for different QQQ's: Next cube (25 MHz '030) ----------------------- QQQ user (sec.) sys (sec.) <none> 1.8 0.0 (instruction removed) sqrt 4.5 0.1 (square root) cos 13.9 0.4 (cosine) etox 19.8 0.7 (e to the x power) int 2.8 0.0 (integer part) intrz 2.8 0.1 (integer part/round to zero) Nextstation (25 MHz '040) ------------------------- QQQ user (sec.) sys (sec.) <none> 0.4 0.0 (instruction removed) sqrt 4.4 0.0 (square root) cos 0.8 27.6 (cosine) etox 0.9 27.0 (e to the x power) int 0.9 82.9 (integer part) intrz 1.0 81.9 (integer part/round to zero) Note that sqrt is implemented in hardware on the '040 (I threw it in for a reality check). Also, I ran each once, so I didn't average out the variations in the timing. However, the numbers do make the point that the emulation is done at great expense on the Nextstation. The real shock is the integer to float conversion (2000 cycles!). That's the one that hurt my application. I do not know if the Nextstep 2.0 C compiler still uses fetoxx, fintrzx, etc. (it may use subroutine calls to faster emulation software), but my alarm is still valid for programs that are copied over as binaries or Sun executables that are converted using atom. Can someone clarify this situation? Will it be fixed soon? --Bruce Holmer holmer@ucbarpa.berkeley.edu
melling@cs.psu.edu (Michael D Mellinger) (01/19/91)
In article <1693@marlin.NOSC.MIL> aburto@marlin.NOSC.MIL (Alfred A. Aburto) writes:
Could you please run the following program on the 040. It is a very
simple program but numerous folks over in 'comp.benchmarks' have run
it on their systems and it would be interesting to see where the
NEXT 040 fits.
Perhaps NeXt did not use the Motorola math function library ? The math
function library from Motorola I am assured is faster than a 33 MHz
68882. The FP operations like +,-,*,/ are many times faster than the
68882 (I understand but I am not sure).
handel> cc -O bench.c
handel> time a.out
r = 16.695311
RunTime = 26.133333
26.137u 0.171s 0:26.78 98% 0+0k 0+0io 0pf+0w
-Mikedatran2 (01/20/91)
In article <1693@marlin.NOSC.MIL> aburto@marlin.nosc.mil.UUCP (Alfred A. Aburto) writes: > >Could you please run the following program on the 040. It is a very >simple program but numerous folks over in 'comp.benchmarks' have run >it on their systems and it would be interesting to see where the >NEXT 040 fits. I compiled and ran it on a relatively quiet 68040 NeXT. datran2% cc bench1.c datran2% a.out r = 16.695311 RunTime = 29.116667 I haven't been following comp.benchmarks, so I don't know how this fits in. Would you enlighten me. Steve. -- #====#====#====#====#====#====#====#====#====#====#====#====#====#====#====# # Steve Boker # "Badgers, we don't have no stinking badgers" # # datran2!smb@csn.org # -from Treasure of the Sierra Madre Zoo # #====#====#====#====#====#====#====#====#====#====#====#====#====#====#====#
masaru@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Masaru Sugai) (02/10/91)
This might be one of FAQs, but I'm so curious about NeXTstation I just got yesterday after waiting nearly over 4 months. - How can I get Mathematica ? I took it granted for customers through higher educatinal resellers, or they branded me as an incapable guy ? :) I read RSVP but I couldn't find any words on Mathematica. And several demos assume the installation of it. - NeXTstep snapped and restarted all of sudden while I opened up several demos including Webster, Librarian, SoundPlayer, and so on. I don't remember the exact situation, so I cannot redo the same sequence again, but it happended twice in a few hours. One of the problems seems to have something to do with SoundPlayer, as I experienced unusual slow responce when I clicked on its buttons. I am satisfied with NeXTstation due to quick responce and rich documentation. Any tips are appreciated. Thanks in advance. -- Masaru Sugai