BYTE December 1990 on page 172

Reviews Sony NeWS and MIPS Magnum: A Double Shot of RISC

Tom Yager

    With such a crowd of Unix workstations in the low-end market, how can you tell them apart? In a word, software. Consider, for example, the Sony NeWS 3710 and the MIPS Magnum 3000. Both machines are based on the MIPS R3000 RISC CPU chip set. Both have floating-point acceleration and fast color graphics.

    Physically, these machines have much in common. They are compact, the Magnum 3000 slightly more so (see the photos). They come equipped with quarter-inch cartridge tape drives. At the rear, the machines have connections for the keyboard, serial devices, a thick-wire Ethernet port, and external SCSI devices. While both workstations use the same CPU and floating-point chips, the NeWS 3710 runs at 20 MHz, while the Magnum 3000 runs at 25 MHz.

    From there, the hardware differences are almost insignificant, with a couple of exceptions. The NeWS 3710 holds a front-facing, high-density 3 1/2-inch floppy disk drive next to the tape drive. It's a bit more expandable than the Magnum 3000, holding two 25-pin serial ports and three internal expansion slots. On the review system, two of the three slots were available; one was occupied by the color display controller. The NeWS 3710 also boasts digital stereo audio and the ability to power itself down.

    The Magnum 3000 has one Industry Standard Architecture-compatible internal slot, but the color display adapter fills it (leaving it free only on the monochrome system). The machine also has two serial ports, but one of them is devoted to the mouse through an odd cable arrangement. For convenience, the mouse plugs into the keyboard (as with the Sony), but the Magnum 3000's keyboard cable splits to connect to both the keyboard and serial port number 1 sockets. A round ``don't touch me'' sticker bound one edge of the case, indicating that the unit is not field-expandable.

    How It Feels If you sit in front of a workstation all day, as I do, how well the system interacts with you is important. In the case of these two machines, the display is no problem--both use the gorgeous Sony Trinitron monitor. Sony shipped a 19-inch display; MIPS sent a 16-inch monitor. The colors are true, and the pixels are small and sharply defined, making the display easy on your eyes.

    The Magnum 3000's keyboard is springy, and it looks very Mac-like. It sports a network activity light (which, incidentally, never came on). The key placements are just where you'd expect them to be. The feel was a little stiffer than I like. The Magnum 3000 uses the likable, old-style Logitech Mouse (the boxy one). You can rest your entire hand on it, and the buttons have a short travel and a positive click that lets you know that you've pressed them.

    On the other hand, the NeWS 3710's keyboard and mouse were so unpleasant to use that they might as well have been wrapped in barbed wire. Special keys, such as a Vertical Line key, are placed so that a touch-typist has to stop dead and hunt for them. The Delete key is next to the Return key, inviting disaster from unsuspecting operators who terminate their programs when they try to get to the next line. The right-hand Shift key is adjacent to a dead key (it doesn't travel--I call it a ``finger breaker''), and the Alt key appears on only one side of the keyboard. The mouse is also awkward to use. It's hard to wrap your hand around it, and the button travel is too long. My mouse squeaked, appropriately, when I pressed the buttons.

    One redeeming feature of the NeWS 3710's interface is its software-operated power switch. I first encountered such a switch on the AT&T 3B2 and thought it was a great idea. If you're working at home and a nasty thunderstorm starts moving in, you can dial up your Sony workstation at your office and tell it to shut itself off. A special argument to the shutdown command, -x, does an orderly shutdown and dumps power.

    The front-mounted power switch will not power down the machine (it only works to power it up), which is good, since the placement makes it a prime target for accidental contact. Remote power-down capability also adds extra teeth to any power-monitoring scheme you might set up. When your uninterruptible power supply kicks in, you can have the system automatically power off. This is such a simple, worthwhile idea and is so easy to implement that I can't understand why it isn't standard on every computer. Software: The Real Difference Don't let anyone fool you--the most important piece of equipment in a workstation is the software. In this regard, the systems are as different as they can be and yet still be similar; let me explain.

    The NeWS 3710 that I received was running the same operating system as other Sony workstations: BSD 4.3. The Magnum 3000 runs its own RISC/OS, which is a mix of System V and BSD. The operating-system question may be moot by the time you read this; Sony is switching over to System V release 4. Much of what that operating system promises is already in RISC/OS. MIPS stacked the BSD file system, libraries, and commands atop a System V kernel. The folks at MIPS insist that the Magnum 3000 can compile and run any BSD or System V application without modification. Add to that job control, TCP/IP networking, line-printer handling, and other BSD-isms, and you have an operating system that should please even the staunchest BSD fanatic. I prefer System V as an application environment: It's easier to maintain and use, and all the benefits of System V are apparent in RISC/OS. Soon, Sony will have them, too.

    Both systems provide X Window System services, as well. Sony's X server includes the Shape (for handling nonrectangular objects) and Bezier (representing complex curves with few data points) extensions. These provide fertile ground for involved graphical applications.

    The xdpyinfo program, which reports information about the configuration of the X server, told me that both displays measured 1280 by 1024 pixels, with a depth of 8 bits (256 colors). Sony's port of X Window is apparently the more complete, as it supports all the available X color models.

    Managing colors in a portable way is probably the most difficult aspect of writing X applications. It's also the thing most programmers mess up. An X server that supports multiple color models helps smooth over these differences.

    MIPS's X server, while fully functional, is less robust; it supports only one color model (PseudoColor) and lacks the Shape and Bezier extensions included in Sony's server.

    In simple tests, X performance was almost identical, with the Magnum 3000 showing a negligible edge. Both machines do common text and window operations in a snap.

    The NeWS 3710's differentiating feature is an unusual one: sound. The machine includes the circuitry and software for digitizing high-resolution stereo audio and playing it back directly from disk. A small transistor-radio-size box handles sound I/O; it holds a monophonic microphone and a tinny speaker. If you are going to experiment with the NeWS 3710's sound, don't waste time with the built-in mike and speaker. I hooked up a compact disc player and a pair of amplified speakers. The quality and clarity of the sound are excellent even at lower resolutions. At the top 37.5-kHz resolution, the NeWS 3710 had no trouble playing back crystal-clear stereo audio captured from a CD. There was no discernible noise or hum from having the machine's workstation guts churning so nearby.

Is this fluff?

    Today, it probably is. Someday, however, quality audio will likely become standard fare on all systems. Macintosh users have long been aware of the value of having a variety of expressive sounds under program control. Sony's X-based sound editor is primitive and has a demo feel to it, but there's great potential there.

    Complex programs could benefit from vocal prompts and varied audio warnings whose tones indicate the severity of the condition. Aids for the handicapped suggest themselves, as do educational applications. It will take some time before audio capabilities like those in the NeWS 3710 are exploited to their full potential, but getting the hardware in there is a good start. Pedal-to-the-Metal Performance All this fancy hardware and operating-system software would be for naught if they didn't perform. Both systems do well, running more than twice as fast as the Everex Step 386/33 baseline system. This is worth considering if you're trying to choose among platforms. Something else worth considering is that not all implementations of the same hardware yield the same results. As the benchmark results show, the Magnum 3000 takes an early lead in integer performance and holds onto it right through the floating-point benchmark, outgunning both the NeWS 3710 and the MIPS R3000-based DECstation 5000/200CX. MIPS writes its own compilers, and the performance figures prove that the company knows RISC. The company uses this knowledge to full advantage, and it knows its audience, as well.

    Network and X performance are respectable, and I had no trouble hooking either system into BYTE's Unix Lab network. Either machine would make an excellent X Window client server (a machine that runs X programs faster than you can and displays them at your workstation/X terminal).

    As is typical of systems for which SCSI is integrated onto the motherboard, disk performance is marvelous on both machines, with the NeWS 3710 coming out slightly ahead. There is enough juice there to hang a bevy of external SCSI drives off either of these machines and leave them on-line as compute and Network File System file servers. Shutdown I liked both systems, but I'm afraid that there isn't much to recommend the NeWS 3710 as a general-purpose workstation. It doesn't measure up to the Magnum 3000 in performance or multi-environment compatibility. I've been told to expect more ``Sonyisms,'' of which the digital audio is the first, and Sony may well be able to make a name for itself in multimedia and other niches.

    I'm loath to call any system perfect, but the Magnum 3000 seems to have all the bases covered: price, performance, and software. I would have traded the squat case for more internal expansion, but that's a minor gripe. The MIPS machine is an excellent value--evidence that sometimes it's worth going straight to the source.

The Facts

MIPS Magnum 3000 MIPS Computer Systems, Inc. 950 De Guigne Sunnyvale, CA 94086 (408) 720-1700 Components (as reviewed)

Processor: 25-MHz MIPS R3000; R3010 math coprocessor; 32K-byte instruction cache; 32K-byte data cache
Memory: 16 MB of RAM
Mass storage: Two 200-MB internal SCSI hard disk drives; 150-MB cartridge tape drive
Display: 16-inch Sony Trinitron color monitor; 1280- by 1024-pixel 256-color display
I/O interfaces: Two serial ports; thick-wire Ethernet interface; SCSI port
Price $17,990

Sony NeWS 3710 Sony Microsystems Co. 645 River Oaks Pkwy. San Jose, CA 65134 (408) 434-6644 Components (as reviewed)

Processor: 20-MHz MIPS R3000 Memory: 8 MB of RAM; 64K-byte instruction cache; 64K-byte data cache
Mass storage: 3 1/2-inch 1.44-MB floppy disk drive; 640-MB hard disk drive
Display: 19-inch Sony Trinitron color monitor; 1280- by 1024-pixel 256-color display
I/O interfaces: Two serial ports; thick-wire Ethernet interface; SCSI port; three Sony expansion slots
Price $18,200 With 16-inch monitor; $16,900

Unix Benchmarks

 * Cumulative index is formed by summing the indexed performance results for C Compiler, DC Arithmetic, Tower of Hanoi, System Loading (with 8 concurrent background processes), Dhrystone 2, and Floating Point tests.

(1) System loading was performed using Bourne shell scripts and Unix utilities.

Note: All times are in seconds unless otherwise specified. Figures were generated using the BYTE Unix benchmarks version 2.6. Indexes show relative performance; for all indexes, an Everex Step 386/33 running Xenix 2.3.1 = 1.

N/A = Not applicable.

    For a description of all the benchmarks, see ``The BYTE Unix Benchmarks,'' March BYTE.

    Photograph: The Sony NeWS 3710. The floppy disk and tape drives are concealed behind a door on the right front of the case.

    Photograph: The MIPS Magnum 3000 has a smaller case than the Sony NeWS 3710 and performs noticeably better.

Tom Yager is a technical editor for the BYTE Lab. You can reach him on BIX as ``tyager.'