herndon@sctc.com (William R. Herndon) (11/12/90)
I hope that I can generate a little discussion on this topic. ( And
BTW when I use the term upgrade, I am referring to the 040 upgrade,
not the upgrade to NeXTStep 2.0. I have decided to do the software
upgrade anyway. )
I have recently received my 030 cube, purchased during the Businessland
fire sale. Now I am considering my options for speeding the puppy up.
It seems to me that the most obvious thing, and perhaps the first
priority, is to put in a honking big hard drive, which I am prepared to
do. A large fast hard drive has many advantages in addition to speeding
the machine up overall, as I am sure most people are aware. But I have
a question, how much of the slowness of program "launching" is due to
the slowness of the OD, and how much is due to NeXTStep 1.0? Will
doing the upgrade to NeXTStep 2.0 help significantly, and assuming
that installing a hard drive as the primary system device and upgrading
to 2.0 speed the system up, how much more speedup and I likely to realize
from upgrading to the 040 board?
I am prepared to buy the 040 board if necessary. However, if I don't or
can put it off, I can purchase some software that I'd like to have.
Some final, general, questions:
1. NeXTStep 2.0 will work on an 030 cube, will it not?
2. Other than sheer blinding speed, what are some other advantages to
having the 040 upgrade? ( Please discount getting Lotus Improve.
I'm already weighting that as factor. ).
3. How long will 040 upgrades be offered? Indefinately?
Any and all help is greatly appreciated.
- Max
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
William R. Herndon
Secure Computing Technology Corp. The opinions expressed are
mine, ALL MINE! HEH, HEH,
herndon@sctc.com HEH, HEH!!!
(612) 482-7431 declan@remus.rutgers.edu (Declan McCullagh/LZ) (11/12/90)
In article <1990Nov11.212910.2084@sctc.com>, herndon@sctc.com (William R. Herndon) writes: > Some final, general, questions: > > 1. NeXTStep 2.0 will work on an 030 cube, will it not? NeXTstep 2.0 will work on the original NeXT computer. You'll notice a great improvement when launching applications, and more subtle ones elsewhere in the system. > 2. Other than sheer blinding speed, what are some other advantages to > having the 040 upgrade? ( Please discount getting Lotus Improve. > I'm already weighting that as factor. ). How about a 10Base-T Ethernet connector, SCSI-II connector, hardware flow control on serial ports (!). And, of course, sheer blinding speed. $-) Actually, as you probably know, UNIX is inherently disk-based, and not everything will be improved by adding a faster CPU. Now, NeXTstep, on the other hand, is a memory hog [*], and an 8 MB NeXT is somewhat less than adequate if you want superior performance. So, in terms of user interface perofrmance, MIPS is only one-third the solution. For the best possible performance, you'll have to confront those other two limiting factors (memory & drive speed). > 3. How long will 040 upgrades be offered? Indefinately? To the best of my knowledge, NeXT has not set a cutoff date. -Declan --- [*] NeXTstep *is* a memory hog. Here are some excerpts from a process listing on my 16 MB system with just Terminal and Edit loaded: USER PID %CPU %MEM VSIZE RSIZE TT STAT TIME COMMAND declan 140 11.0 23.5 5.71M 3.77M ? S 35:38 - console (WindowServer) declan 142 0.0 17.1 4.70M 2.74M ? S 4:47 /usr/lib/NextStep/Workspace root 141 0.0 6.1 2.65M 1000K ? SW 0:02 - console (loginwindow) root 113 0.0 1.5 1.26M 248K ? S 0:00 /usr/etc/autonfsmount -tm root 106 0.0 2.3 3.15M 384K ? SW 0:00 /usr/lib/NextPrinter/npd declan 143 0.0 0.8 1.23M 136K p0 S 0:00 Console Daemon That's 8 MB of RAM used just by the user interface (actually, the numbers indicated in the RSIZE field are misleading, but for the purposes of comparison, they're useful). Then, if you take into account the few MB used for the UNIX end of things, you can probably imagine that there's going to be a lot of swapping going on. Then again, isn't it all worth it? $-) -------------------------------------------------------------------- Declan McCullagh / NeXT Campus Consultant \ declan@remus.rutgers.edu --------------------------------------------------------------------
lane@SUMEX-AIM.STANFORD.EDU (Christopher Lane) (11/13/90)
In <Nov.11.20.00.06.1990.15548@remus.rutgers.edu>, declan@remus.rutgers.edu writes: >In article <1990Nov11.212910.2084@sctc.com>, herndon@sctc.com (William R. Herndon) writes: > >> 2. Other than sheer blinding speed, what are some other advantages to >> having the 040 upgrade? ( Please discount getting Lotus Improve. >> I'm already weighting that as factor. ). > >How about a 10Base-T Ethernet connector, SCSI-II connector, hardware flow >control on serial ports (!). And, of course, sheer blinding speed. $-) Declan, since you've chosen to tout SCSI-II as one of the new NeXT's advantages, perhaps you could summerize for the net the differences a 'typical' NeXT user would see having SCSI-II instead of just SCSI (besides not being able to swipe a SCSI cable from the nearest Macintosh anymore ;-). And can you relate these differences to the disks that NeXT and others are currently selling? Thanks, - Christopher -------