43 ms·
Hey, they finally built an Amiga-on-a-chip!
by transfire 13y ago
Hey, they finally built an Amiga-on-a-chip!
- vanderZwan 13y agoI never owned an Amiga, but I thought one of its key features was its modularity? Wouldn't Amiga-on-a-chip inherently be a contradiction then?
- exDM69 13y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_Amiga_chipset http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_Amiga_chipset The major difference between an Amiga and a PC (which was essentially "cpu only") was that the Amiga had a chipset with some units that were somewhat programmable.
- exDM69 13y agoI know that you're joking but as someone working in software in the semiconductor industry, building system on chips, I can't help but seeing parallels in modern SoCs and the Commodore Amiga with the "Original Chip Set". In Amiga, you had the choice between using the CPU, the Copper or the Blitter for certain tasks, e.g. a memset or a memcpy might have been faster to do using the facilities of the chip set, which had direct access to memory. Similarly, at work we are often making a choice which unit of the SoC (cpu, gpu, copy engine) should be used for a particular task, e.g. a big memset, an image blit or perhaps an alpha blend. Like the OCS chip set in the Amiga, all these various units on modern SoCs have direct access to physical memory. My educated guess is that most computers will be based on some kind of SoC architectures very soon. There are some experiments being done in putting the DRAM silicon in the same package as the SoC and it may be that in the future, 99% of your computer is just a single silicon chip and the motherboard is there only to connect to peripheral devices.