rehrauer@apollo.hp.com (Steve Rehrauer) (06/27/91)
In article <1991Jun27.025556.6986@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> tagreen@lothario.ucs.indiana.edu (Todd Green) writes: >>This is not meant as a flame, but why do you care? Anything Apple does >>with any RISC (I personally doubt very much whether the RS/6000 architecture >>will ever fly in an Apple box) is going to be far, far up the price scale >>from C= products. Ditto '040 boxes from Apple. > >Well the tower is supposed to list for ~7,500. It will have two >separate scsi ports, built in ethernet, DMA, subsystems, 1meg rom, and >built in accelerated 24-bit graphics (up to a 16" monitor for 24-bit, >21" monitor for 8bit), plus a whole slew of other stuff that I'm sure >your don't care to hear about. The point is that I would not call >that much hardware for 7.5K far far up from the Amiga line. More >expensive perhaps but not way out of line. Note that the desktop 040 >version will probably be considerably less. Disclaimer: Figures are >taken from MacLeak and my memory. (Which has known to fail) You may not consider $3,000+ more "out of line", but MY budget does, and I suspect that of most personal computer buyers would also. The point isn't that it isn't a WunderBox for $7.5, but that I can't justify the $3-4k list for an A3000 as it is. And anyway, we're talking about a CISC box, yes? I still stand by my statement that Apple would have to shove a RISC box to the high end of their price scale, to avoid cannabalizing sales of their bread & butter Mac II products. Or simply abandon the 68k Macs, and with their installed base size they'd be idiots to abruptly do that. Idiots they aren't. -- "Did you check the car to see if it's okay for | Steve Rehrauer a long trip, Sam?" "Well, the wheels are still | rehrauer@apollo.hp.com on... and here's the key... Yep, everything | Hewlett-Packard checks out!" -- Freelance Police | MA Languages Lab
daveh@cbmvax.commodore.com (Dave Haynie) (06/28/91)
>In article <1991Jun27.025556.6986@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> tagreen@lothario.ucs.indiana.edu (Todd Green) writes: >>>This is not meant as a flame, but why do you care? Anything Apple does >>>with any RISC (I personally doubt very much whether the RS/6000 architecture >>>will ever fly in an Apple box) is going to be far, far up the price scale >>>from C= products. Ditto '040 boxes from Apple. >And anyway, we're talking about a CISC box, yes? I still stand by my >statement that Apple would have to shove a RISC box to the high end of >their price scale, to avoid cannabalizing sales of their bread & butter >Mac II products. That's certainly true. Plus, given that a RISC processor (well, one other than the five chip IBM America set anyway) isn't inherently THAT much more expensive than a high end CISC, Apple might get back some of those fat margins they've had to cut away in trying to be more price competitive in the low end business. An interesting point on Apple's approach to IBM occured to me recently. Ever since these Apple/IBM rumors started flying, everyone's wondering about Apple's motivation. Certainly Microsoft got really, really, rich building the OS for IBM's PC, but only because of the clones. So that can't be the whole story. I figure it's a round-about way for Apple to protect its OS environment. Everyone has seen how antsy Apple gets about other companies running anything that looks like Mac OS, or even cloning Macs. The legal restrictions have proved to be nebulous at best, and there's nothing like the Amiga's LSI chips in a Mac to prevent cloning or hostile ports to other 680x0 machines. However, should Apple build systems based on this America chipset, rather than going to a freely available CPU like an MC88110 or R4000, no one's going to be able to clone this new machine, except IBM of course. And I'm sure Apple figures on being able to handle that. All in all, it seems to make more sense when taken in this light, though of course, they don't likely have a signed deal yet. I think there may be a bit too much emphasis on the RISC vs. CISC war anyway. Sure, if you're running stuff that needs a few extra MFLOPS, you might like a shiny new RISC box on your desk. But how many of you run mainly-integer stuff? How about mainly-character, like compilers and text processors? Our UNIX wiz Rico has a UNIX text-editing benchmark, which produces numbers in units of "mollies" (one molly is about 2/3 MIPS). Molly was a Sun 2, and does, strangely enough, one molly. A PC/XT did 0.27 mollies, while a PC/AT did 1.1. A Sun 3/160 did 3.9, an Amiga 3000 did 7.3, with the original NeXT at 7.4. More interesting, Mac IIfx did 9.2, while a 32MHz GVP/A2000 did 9.6. The DECStation 3100 did 16, the SparcStation 1 did 20, and the SparcStation 1+ did 23. To top it off, cbmvax (DEC/MIPS R3000) did 27, the RS/6000 did 28, the '040 based NeXT did 30, and the DECStation 5000 did 35. Amiga '040 numbers will be forthcoming... -- Dave Haynie Commodore-Amiga (Amiga 3000) "The Crew That Never Rests" {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!daveh PLINK: hazy BIX: hazy "This is my mistake. Let me make it good." -R.E.M.