smithw@hamblin.math.byu.edu (William V. Smith) (09/20/90)
For those of you who didn't make it to the big show, I thought I'd post some info for you. . . First, Jobs said the creation of the new machines began in January of this year. However, he later admitted that the big color machine was in the works for much longer than that. Anyway, there are essentially four configurations of NeXT's now. They are 1. NeXTcube + NeXTdimension This is a two board machine housed in the present cube design. The first board is the main system board. This has the Moto 68040 running at 25 MHz + the 56001 DSP 9 DMA channels, 40 MB/sec bandwidth Main Memory is 8 MB expandable to 64 MB using 4 MB simms (I saw some machines with 4 MB simms- they were the Toshiba's I have already posted about) Optional parity checking (to appease the gov folks and others) DSP static memory 24 KB expandable to 576 KB using SRAM module The second board is the NeXTdimension board. It has an Intel i860 33 MHz RISC chip Custom VLSI chips for image compression and other stuff. Real-time compression and decompression to hard disk with user selectable compression rate. Claim is 30,000 polygon/sec, 30 ms full-screen clear 130 MB/sec blit rate. Main memory on this board is 8 MB expandable to 32 MB. Display memory is 4 MB VRAM 32 bits/pixed color (including 8 bits/pixel alpha) Also supports double-buffered 16 bits/pixel windows. Display resolution is 1120 X 832 pixels Display output 13W3 triple-coaxial Display is 16-inch, 68 Hz refresh, 92 dpi Includes Sound Box with integrated mono speaker and mic plus headphone and RCA stereo output jacks + keyboard and mouse. B&W display (abt. 7 pounds lighter than present) may be plugged into main board and two screens used with overlapping windows, etc. Multiple NeXTdimension boards will be supported. There is also a 3rd party board available with two i860's on it claiming 160 Mflops. The color machine is very fast, doing color screen operations as fast as the B&W only machine. Mass Storage options from NeXT: 3.5 in. 2.88 MB floppy drive, IMB compatible (reads 1.44 and 720 disks) 105 MB 3.5 in half-height drive- release 2.0 prebuilt on the disk. 340 MB 3.5 in half-height drive- " " " " " 660 MB 5.25 in full-height drives " " " " 1.4 GB 5.25 in " " " " " " (you can put two full-height devices in the cube just as now) 256 MB Optical disk drive (92 ms seek time- same as present version) CD-ROM 550 MB ISO 9660 standard format. The NeXT cube board comes with thin wire and twisted pair ethernet two RS-423 ports SCSI-2 - 4.8 MB/sec transfer rate. DSP port MegaPixel port. Powersupply gives 20W each slot. 300W, 5A max. FCC Class A 2. NeXTcube monochrome. This is as above minus the the color display and NeXTdimension board plus the MegaPixel display. This is the version you get when you upgrade your present machine to the 68040 board w/o NeXTdimension. I did a few mathematica computes on this one and it is very fast. Faster by about 2 times than our MIPS RS2030 on simple computes. 3. NeXTstation color machine This is a 16 bit color machine. (4 bit alpha) 68040 does video chores. DSP chip included. 8 DMA channels Main memory is 12 MB to 32 MB parity checking is optional. Display memory 1.5 MB VRAM Disk storage up to the 340 MB version, 105 MB is standard Floppy drive included. Comes with MegaPixel Color Display and Sound Box(see above) This is a 16 in monitor as for the cube. Ports on back as above. Geometry is pizza-box with monitor placed on top usually. FCC Class A. 4. NeXTstation monochrome essentially same as 3 but w/o VRAM for color. Comes with the same B&W dislplay as the cube. Lives in the pizza box with 105 MB drive + floppy. CPU box weighs in at 12 lbs. I also used the color NeXTstation and found it was definitely slower than the B&W model, but it wasn't annoying to me at least. This was done on an expermental 20 MHz system though so it may not be fair to compare with the *real* version which I didn't try. Color Mathematica graphics came up fairly quick, and manipulation speed was good. Straight computes in mathematica were about 2 to 4 times as fast as the Sparc 1+ machines the engineers have here. Scroll speed is much better on "long" windows. The 68040 is shipping to NeXT now in some quantity which they have promised to double every week until full production October 25-31. Early upgrade orders can expect to get a board within 30 days I was told. However, I make no warranty about that. Personally, I will start hoping to see it around Thanksgiving. The color on the cube version is very good and as fast as the 2 processor Silicon Graphics machine we looked at here last spring. Integration of graphics into text was excellent and extremely fast. Software bundles now come in two versions: Regular and Extended. Regular has Workspace man. (wow) NeXTmail WriteNow Digital Web Dig. Lib. EDIT Mathematica for higher ed customers DataVIZ/Bridge (mac<->NeXT file transfer) Installer ??? FaxReader Preferences Preview PrintManager VT00 Terminal Builddisk InstallTablet ??? Mail Manager NetinfoManager NetManager PrinterTester UserManager Extended version is all that plus Quotations Shakespeare TeX Interface Builder Objective -C compiler C++ compiler Obj-C Class definitions 56001 Tools Emacs GNU debugger Bug-56 Malloc debugger Applnspector PostScript Tools App Kit Music Kit Sound Kit On-line docs No NeXT color printer was mentioned, but color postscript printers are compatible. The B&W printer is same as before. Prices? The prices are pretty competitive, but as before, actual educational prices vary with the campus vendor. When I find out what the going rates are here, I'll let you know. Sorry this was so long. -Bill-
sfrank@orion.oac.uci.edu (Steven Frank) (09/20/90)
In article <SMITHW.90Sep19221915@hamblin.hamblin.math.byu.edu> smithw@hamblin.math.byu.edu (William V. Smith) writes: >For those of you who didn't make it to the big show, I thought I'd post >some info for you. . . > >There is also a 3rd party >board available with two i860's on it claiming 160 Mflops. Can the i860's be accessed as numerical coprocessors? If so, then a board with two i860's would make the NeXT one of the fastest RISC machines around for simulations. To be useful, there would have to be a C (some obj type C) compiler for the i860. > >Software bundles now come in two versions: >Regular and Extended. > >Extended version is all that plus >TeX >Interface Builder >Objective -C compiler >C++ compiler >Obj-C Class definitions > and others... Do upgrades from 1.0 automatically include extended software? Many of us using 1.0 rely on TeX and the development tools. steve
leech@homer.cs.unc.edu (Jonathan Leech) (09/21/90)
In article <26F8F06E.10749@orion.oac.uci.edu> sfrank@orion.oac.uci.edu (Steven Frank) writes: >In article <SMITHW.90Sep19221915@hamblin.hamblin.math.byu.edu> smithw@hamblin.math.byu.edu (William V. Smith) writes: >>There is also a 3rd party >>board available with two i860's on it claiming 160 Mflops. >Can the i860's be accessed as numerical coprocessors? If so, then a >board with two i860's would make the NeXT one of the fastest RISC >machines around for simulations. To be useful, there would have to >be a C (some obj type C) compiler for the i860. Nowhere near the 80 MFLOPS peak performance is obtainable in real applications. Between external memory bandwidth constraints and the poor code generated by current C compilers, expect maybe 1/20 this performance (based on our experiences with the 860 boards built here for the Pixel-Planes graphics machine). -- Jon Leech (leech@cs.unc.edu) __@/ ``God is more interested in your future and your relationships than you are.'' - Billy Graham
SLVQC@CUNYVM (Salvatore Saieva) (09/22/90)
BTW, any word on that missing bus chip we're all `supposed' to be getting on our OLD 030 systems? Sal. ---------- Salvatore Saieva Internet: slvqc@cunyvm.cuny.edu Queens College, Academic Computer Center BITNET: slvqc@cunyvm.bitnet 65-30 Kissena Blvd, Flushing, N.Y. 11367 DeskNet: (718) 520-7662
clp@wjh12.harvard.edu (Charles L. Perkins) (09/24/90)
Arial sells a board with 2-4 (!!) i860 co-processors on it and you can have up to three of them for 12 i860s total. This is in the new 3rd party catalog and the Intro announcements... Charles
rca@cs.brown.edu (Ronald C.F. Antony) (09/25/90)
Does anyone know if the new monochrome Megapixel Display has a microphone-jack in addition to the built-in microphone? I hope it does... otherwise getting in sounds from a tape or so becomes pretty difficult if you dont want to buy stuff like digital ears/microphone... Ronald ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." Bernhard Shaw | rca@cs.brown.edu or antony@browncog.bitnet
scott@NIC.GAC.EDU (09/25/90)
rca@cs.brown.edu (Ronald C.F. Antony) writes: >Does anyone know if the new monochrome Megapixel Display has a >microphone-jack in addition to the built-in microphone? I hope it >does... otherwise getting in sounds from a tape or so becomes pretty >difficult if you dont want to buy stuff like digital >ears/microphone... You can use an external microphone, also. There will be a jack on back just like currently. Same with the sound box (for color), I'd assume. scott hess scott@gac.edu Independant NeXT Developer (Stuart) NeXT Campus Consultant (Not much, really) GAC Undergrad (Horrid. Simply Horrid. I mean the work!)
clp@wjh12.harvard.edu (Charles L. Perkins) (09/26/90)
Yes, it does have a microphone jack on the back which hard-disables the built-in one....I checked since thet specs did not say it had one. I looked and then also asked about the auto-disable. Charles