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The Amiga's whole architecture -- custom chips multiplexing bus access to the RAM, a common architecture for those kinds of machines in the 80s -- made no sense
by cmrdporcupine 3y ago
The Amiga's whole architecture -- custom chips multiplexing bus access to the RAM, a common architecture for those kinds of machines in the 80s -- made no sense by the late 80s. CPUs got faster, RAM not nearly as much, and CPUs were more and more waiting on RAM and starting to build out complicated caching architectures, and none of that is friendly to the approach that Jay Miner took (with both the Amiga and the Atari 8-bits). Already by the mid-80s, Shiraz Shivji (designer of the Atari ST, and one of the designers on the C64) was pushing the timing limits of DRAM chips past their specs in order to do this sort of thing.
I sometimes wonder what would have happened in Commodore had simply directed their late 80s efforts into making ISA video cards instead. The Amiga brand might have had some cachet there, though I doubt by that point they had the engineering talent to be competitive.
Both Atari and Amiga made a push into cheaper 68k "workstation"-ish Unix machines in the early 90s -- running variants of AT&T Sys V R4 on the 68k-- with little success. In some ways they were just maybe 5-10 years too early on that type of thing, because desktop consumer-level Linux machines were a thing just a few years later and of course by the turn of the century Apple was selling a BSD-based Unix home computer to the masses. It's fun to imagine what would have happened if Commodore or Atari had just dropped their own operating systems and gone with a BSD.
Looking back it's clear to me that Tramiel exiting Commodore and starting Atari Corp in 84 was a disaster not just for Commodore but for the industry. Not because Tramiel was any kind of tech visionary, but because here was no room in the market for two platforms competing in (somewhat) the same space at that point. In North America the Atari machines weren't much of a factor, but in Europe they definitely were, and they did better in productivity and studio music sectors than the Amiga, overall. If all the software development and retailing effort had gone into just one 68k "home computer", I think things would have been just overall better. And Tramiel would have been more aggressive on Amiga pricing.
- zozbot234 3y agoThe Amiga had both chip and fast RAM, the latter was only accessed by the CPU. Not too different from GPU coprocessors today sharing unified access to some fraction of system memory. "Complicated caching architectures" use coherence protocols to ensure that things are kept consistent when required. *nix-like systems would have come with a lot of overhead back then. Perhaps you could've had MMU-based sandboxing and virtual memory as an optional feature, so that old applications and games could still rely on bare-metal hardware access.
- simne 3y ago> making ISA video cards instead Sorry, I'll disappoint you. I've experience with these times PCs, with integrated video and with discrete, and must say, this was killer difference - just same card on ISA bus was magnitudes slower than integrated. I've remembered benchmark numbers - on ISA VGA usually considered good about 16000 symbols per second, but integrated gives up to 500k. What all these means - on integrated VGA was possible to play software video on 486 PC. Only after PCI appeared, in very short time appeared affordable PCI SVGA cards with speeds comparable to integrated and started era of computer home video. And yes, ALL serious PC brands made their own clones of integrated VGA, beginning from 386SX (386 with 286 16-bit bus), but mostly not for speed, but because at that time it was already cheaper than discrete card at scale.
- rasz 3y agoThere was a short window between 1992-1994 where some highly integrated companies like IBM/PackardBell/HP/DELL shipped computers with local bus capable VGA, but offered only ISA slots for expandability. There were custom pre VLB implementations like OPTi Local bus, Gigabyte had its own, ECS another, etc https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=460575#p460575 https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=460575#p460575 There was also this one off 1991, pre VESA VLB standardization, Intel/Dell joined experiment called JAWS. Dell PowerLine 450DE/2 DGX Graphics Workstation. Instead of using proper VGA chip it incorporated dumb Inmos G332 framebuffer straight on CPU bus. - Andy Grove himself (Intel CEO!) together with DELL VP Charlie Sauer demonstrating at Comdex '91 (October) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwvOeKqXv18&t=292s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwvOeKqXv18&t=292s how 486DX/50 CPU video rendering is faster than any contemporary accelerator. - Computer Chronicles "486 PC's" episode Feb 1992 https://archive.org/details/intel486 https://archive.org/details/intel486 This one has a shot of actual motherboard. - PC Mag Jul 1992 announcement https://books.google.pl/books?id=X4152M1DLygC&pg=PA59&lpg=PA59&dq=Dell+PowerLine+450DE/2+DGX+Graphics+Workstation https://books.google.pl/books?id=X4152M1DLygC&pg=PA59&lpg=PA... $5500! - BYTE Oct 1992 https://archive.org/details/eu_BYTE-1992-10_OCR/page/n269/mode/2up?q=jaws https://archive.org/details/eu_BYTE-1992-10_OCR/page/n269/mo... $4400, did it really went down $1000 in 4 months? :) - NeXTWORLD September 1993 announcement http://blackholeinc.com/Library/93%20Sept.html http://blackholeinc.com/Library/93%20Sept.html - NeXT price list http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Articles/NeXTWORLD/Tables/93.5.Sept.Feature2.html http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Articles/NeXTWORLD/Ta... $7500! - Czech wikipedia of all places :o https://cs-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Dell_PowerLine_450DE/2_DGX?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://cs-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Dell_PowerLin... - mention in the comments on https://virtuallyfun.com/2012/03/20/dell-unix-lives-again/ https://virtuallyfun.com/2012/03/20/dell-unix-lives-again/ - blog of Charlie Sauer, aforementioned DELL VP (of Advanced Development. May 1989 - October 1993) who showed this computer at Comdex 91 with Intel CEO https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2019/07/01/koko-prolonging-jaws/ https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2019/07/01/koko-prolon... https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2019/07/01/koko-exploring-nextstep-486/ https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2019/07/01/koko-explor... https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2019/07/01/koko-exploring-nextstep-486/ https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2019/07/01/koko-explor... https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2019/07/01/koko-sustaining-dell-unix/ https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2019/07/01/koko-sustai... https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2021/01/19/koko-dell-unix-sustainable/ https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2021/01/19/koko-dell-u...