New faster and low-cost workstations unveiled by Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard late last year could pose a serious threat to NeXT, which has not introduced fundamentally new or improved workstations in more than two years.
"This really puts the hurt on them in terms of performance comparison," said Terry Bennett, director of technical systems research for InfoCorp. "You have less expensive boxes with much higher performance."
Sun's SPARCclassic has a nondiscountable list price of $4295 for a color system with 16MB of RAM and a 207MB hard disk. In addition, an equivalent NeXTstation Turbo Color costs $8995 and offers less than half the performance, although some NeXT customers have been able to secure substantial discounts when purchasing systems.
The Sun and HP workstations are aimed at different markets, said Bennett. "The Sun desktop is for the absolute, most cost-sensitive market that still needs a genuine windowing environment with a robust operating system Ð people who need beyond what Windows 3.1 does."
The HP workstation, on the other hand, is designed for users who need the ability to scale up to machines that offer high performance and the ability to support demanding 3-D graphics applications. HP's new 735 model lists at $37,395 and has twice the integer performance and five times the floating-point performance of the entry-level $7395 model 715/33.
Both Sun and HP workstations are based upon each company's RISC microprocessor. NeXT's announced hardware, on the other hand, is tied to the Motorola's 68040 CISC microprocessor. Substantial performance increases are not expected in the 68000 architecture until Motorola releases the superscalar 68060, which observers do not expect for at least two years.
NeXT enthusiasts maintain that while fast hardware is important for number crunching, it is less important for people writing their own applications Ð in which the key issue is development time rather than run time.
"These are great machines hardware-wise, but they miss all of the software features that make NeXT a great machine," said Keith Martin, president of B-Cubed, a NeXT authorized reseller in New Jersey. "Anybody can make faster hardware. . . . [But] people who are interested in NeXT are interested in NeXT for more than just the hardware."
Analysts say, though, that NeXT's lead in object-oriented software will shrink as other vendors bring to market software based upon the Object Management Group's emerging CORBA standard. "A lot of [NeXT's] object-oriented environment is going to be replicated there, but in a fairly broadly supported standard," Bennett said.
NeXTstation Hewlett-Packard Sun Microsystems
Turbo Color Model 715/33 SPARCclassic
Price $8995 $7395 $4295
Monitor 17-inch 15-inch 15-inch
RAM 16MB 16MB 16MB
Disk 250MB 525MB 207MB
Processor 33MHz Motorola 33MHz HP PA 50MHz Super
68040 7100 SPARC
SPECint92 16 45 26.4