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It's hard trying to answer this briefly. Hope it doesn't come out meaningless! It's comparable with current CPU+GPU but on a vastly simpler scale. The copper
by anexprogrammer 10y ago
It's hard trying to answer this briefly. Hope it doesn't come out meaningless!
It's comparable with current CPU+GPU but on a vastly simpler scale. The copper only had 3 instructions! Blitter, well most things, were DMA controlled but the whole chispet had a ton of special registers that both CPU and copper could get at. You could set what got priority. Coders had to learn to wait on blits as anything else - OS as you moved a window, another app or screen could have got it first. Hence why many games just hit the hardware - keep it simple, and single threaded, and to hell with the OS. :)
About chip memory. Amigas had two types of memory Chip RAM and Fast RAM. Chip could be accessed by CPU and any of the chips, Fast RAM just the processor for programs and data. Modern CPU+GPU has two separate pools of RAM linked via the PCIe. If there were a similar architecture to the Amiga, but with modern complex silicon and design, I'm sure games coders would have dreamed up a few extra effects and tricks. Or maybe it wouldn't matter any more with the vast speeds we now reach, I don't know.
Incidentally that tight linking, display coprocessing, along with the DMA channels, and readily available genlock, is why it ended up a niche success in broadcast. Nothing else apart from £10,000+ dedicated things like a Quantel Paintbox (who bizarrely still exist) could touch it, especially after the Video Toaster came along.
The chipset needn't have been the achilles heel if Commodore had not been run by an asset stripping moron at the time. Designs were being done for follow on sets, but never made it, and we got AGA (a fraction of AAA) years late. I think they started on AAA in 87, and cancelled it or put it on hold probably a dozen times. The 3000+ was an astonishing prototype machine that only existed on Dave Haynie's desk, for ages. Commodore gave us the lousy cost cutting 4000 with IDE not SCSI as follow up.