6 ms·

Some of it is in the article. Like Atari with the ST, Commodore basically failed to capitalize on the original amiga and by the early 90s PCs have mostly caugh

by ido 12y ago

Some of it is in the article. Like Atari with the ST, Commodore basically failed to capitalize on the original amiga and by the early 90s PCs have mostly caught up. While the amiga 1000 was revolutionary in 1985, AGA[1] was not that special in 1992 (especially as it wasn't particularly beneficial to 3d games like doom, which were becoming the new hotstuff). The amiga of the 90s was the 3dfx voodoo. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Advanced_Graphics_Architecture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Advanced_Graphics_Archite...

Gracana 12y ago
If anyone is interested, Stuart Brown's "Doomed: The Embers of Amiga FPS" is a nice little documentary of the history mentioned above. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv6aJRGpz_A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv6aJRGpz_A
cmrdporcupine 12y ago
And frankly by the late 80s the 680000 architecture itself had hit a dead end performance wise. Maybe Motorola could have pulled off what Intel did with Pentium, paper over the aging CISC with RISC internals, but instead we got PowerPC. I'm not sure if you ever used a PowerPC Mac when they were a mix of emulated 68k and PowerPC, but they were notoriously unstable. The mix of a lack of memory protection and emulated CPU instructions would have been the same for the Amiga and Atari ST whose OSs also lacked memory protection and safety features of more modern operating systems. I have an Atari Falcon 030, Atari's last and best machine. It is a really really nice machine. But it was hobbled by poor software support -- it's only now that hackers are discovering what they can do with the combination of the 68030 and the Motorola 56k DSP in it (Example: Quake 3 has been ported/rewritten recently for it, using the 56k for 3d acceleration.) I used to wonder what the world would have been like if the 68000 systems won out. But now we're seeing a world where the ARM belatedly wins out, which is kind of neat, tho ARM is arguably now as "evil" as Intel :-) What is an interesting mental exercise is imagining what would have happened if the 6502 or 6809 architectures had expanded and done well. Those architectures had insanely fast interrupt processing and very fast (single CPU cycle) memory access. Some really neat machines could have been made if they'd continued to advance them, gotten past the 64k memory address limit and into high clock rates. Western Design stopped at the 65c816, a 16-bit variant of the 6502. Something faster and funner than the Amiga could have been built with a 32-bit 6502 descendant and chipsets similar to what was in the Amiga. That would have been really neat.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- userbinator 12y ago
  Maybe Motorola could have pulled off what Intel did with Pentium, paper over the aging CISC with RISC internals, but instead we got PowerPC. I think one of the factors could be that 68k is a bit harder to decode than x86 - while the instruction set is more orthogonal, the encoding has less structure; compare http://goldencrystal.free.fr/M68kOpcodes.pdf http://goldencrystal.free.fr/M68kOpcodes.pdf (68k) with http://i.stack.imgur.com/07zKL.png http://i.stack.imgur.com/07zKL.png (x86). very fast (single CPU cycle) memory access That was possible only because at the time, memory was faster than the core and could keep up. Modern CPUs run the core at several times memory speeds, and there is latency involved due to physical constraints.
  - digi_owl 12y ago
    Yep. The one thing Intel frets over these days is cache misses. Hyperthreading is all about keeping that pipeline busy even if the original thread encounter a cache miss.
  - ghostberry 12y ago
    One difference between Motorola and Intel, is Motorola was less concerned with breaking backwards compatibility. If the 68k family had continued to evolve past the 1994s 68060, I'm sure they could have just dropped backwards compatibility to some of the more complex addressing modes, or just devoted less silicon to them, and making what remains faster. Kinda like happened with the ColdFire version of the 68k family.
    - rbanffy 12y ago
      The not-implemented instruction trapping in the 68K could be easily evolved to cover less frequently used instructions to make room for more optimized implementations of the frequently used ones. What really killed the 68000 was the move to RISC, in particular Apple's move to PowerPC. That took away any hope of future evolution (they even managed to release the 68060 after that, but that was it) and collapsed the high-end 68K business.
indymike 12y ago
It's really hard to give people from this generation a sense of how fast things advanced and how big the leaps were in the 80s and early 90s. We went from 8 bit to multimedia 32 bit in less than 10 years. For devs it was a new box every year or two. Sometimes two new computers in a year. My first 386 dev box was purchased in 1987. Within a year of that, I was using a Compaq portable 386 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Portable_386 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Portable_386). 386 was a big deal because it finally got us Intel devs a flat address space... so no more trying to fit data into tiny pages (64k). 386 killed the chief advantage of 68k architecture, and for whatever reason Motorola just couldn't get the clock speed up fast enough. There were two things that were interesting about the Amiga in 87: video toaster for doing cheap video effects (think intro sequence to Better Call Saul, not awesome demos) and gaming. But gaming on the PC made a huge leap in 1987 when IBM shipped ALL of their new PS/2 computers with a 256 color video adapter called the VGA (seem to remember the lowest end models only doing 256 colors in 320x260 mode... but that was good enough)... Eventually TrueVision and even ATI had video cards that could do the same sorts of things (or better) than an Amiga. So many great computer ideas died in the 80s and early 90s... but it was really evolution... most of them died because a generalized solution (i.e. VGA with video out + software) eclipsed a specialized solution (i.e. Amiga with video toaster).
- yuhong 12y ago
  AFAIK the lowest end was called MCGA.

by ido 12y ago

Gracana 12y ago

If anyone is interested, Stuart Brown's "Doomed: The Embers of Amiga FPS" is a nice little documentary of the history mentioned above. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv6aJRGpz_A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv6aJRGpz_A

cmrdporcupine 12y ago

And frankly by the late 80s the 680000 architecture itself had hit a dead end performance wise. Maybe Motorola could have pulled off what Intel did with Pentium, paper over the aging CISC with RISC internals, but instead we got PowerPC. I'm not sure if you ever used a PowerPC Mac when they were a mix of emulated 68k and PowerPC, but they were notoriously unstable. The mix of a lack of memory protection and emulated CPU instructions would have been the same for the Amiga and Atari ST whose OSs also lacked memory protection and safety features of more modern operating systems. I have an Atari Falcon 030, Atari's last and best machine. It is a really really nice machine. But it was hobbled by poor software support -- it's only now that hackers are discovering what they can do with the combination of the 68030 and the Motorola 56k DSP in it (Example: Quake 3 has been ported/rewritten recently for it, using the 56k for 3d acceleration.) I used to wonder what the world would have been like if the 68000 systems won out. But now we're seeing a world where the ARM belatedly wins out, which is kind of neat, tho ARM is arguably now as "evil" as Intel :-) What is an interesting mental exercise is imagining what would have happened if the 6502 or 6809 architectures had expanded and done well. Those architectures had insanely fast interrupt processing and very fast (single CPU cycle) memory access. Some really neat machines could have been made if they'd continued to advance them, gotten past the 64k memory address limit and into high clock rates. Western Design stopped at the 65c816, a 16-bit variant of the 6502. Something faster and funner than the Amiga could have been built with a 32-bit 6502 descendant and chipsets similar to what was in the Amiga. That would have been really neat.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
userbinator 12y ago
Maybe Motorola could have pulled off what Intel did with Pentium, paper over the aging CISC with RISC internals, but instead we got PowerPC. I think one of the factors could be that 68k is a bit harder to decode than x86 - while the instruction set is more orthogonal, the encoding has less structure; compare http://goldencrystal.free.fr/M68kOpcodes.pdf http://goldencrystal.free.fr/M68kOpcodes.pdf (68k) with http://i.stack.imgur.com/07zKL.png http://i.stack.imgur.com/07zKL.png (x86). very fast (single CPU cycle) memory access That was possible only because at the time, memory was faster than the core and could keep up. Modern CPUs run the core at several times memory speeds, and there is latency involved due to physical constraints.
- digi_owl 12y ago
  Yep. The one thing Intel frets over these days is cache misses. Hyperthreading is all about keeping that pipeline busy even if the original thread encounter a cache miss.
- ghostberry 12y ago
  One difference between Motorola and Intel, is Motorola was less concerned with breaking backwards compatibility. If the 68k family had continued to evolve past the 1994s 68060, I'm sure they could have just dropped backwards compatibility to some of the more complex addressing modes, or just devoted less silicon to them, and making what remains faster. Kinda like happened with the ColdFire version of the 68k family.
  - rbanffy 12y ago
    The not-implemented instruction trapping in the 68K could be easily evolved to cover less frequently used instructions to make room for more optimized implementations of the frequently used ones. What really killed the 68000 was the move to RISC, in particular Apple's move to PowerPC. That took away any hope of future evolution (they even managed to release the 68060 after that, but that was it) and collapsed the high-end 68K business.

indymike 12y ago

It's really hard to give people from this generation a sense of how fast things advanced and how big the leaps were in the 80s and early 90s. We went from 8 bit to multimedia 32 bit in less than 10 years. For devs it was a new box every year or two. Sometimes two new computers in a year. My first 386 dev box was purchased in 1987. Within a year of that, I was using a Compaq portable 386 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Portable_386 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Portable_386). 386 was a big deal because it finally got us Intel devs a flat address space... so no more trying to fit data into tiny pages (64k). 386 killed the chief advantage of 68k architecture, and for whatever reason Motorola just couldn't get the clock speed up fast enough. There were two things that were interesting about the Amiga in 87: video toaster for doing cheap video effects (think intro sequence to Better Call Saul, not awesome demos) and gaming. But gaming on the PC made a huge leap in 1987 when IBM shipped ALL of their new PS/2 computers with a 256 color video adapter called the VGA (seem to remember the lowest end models only doing 256 colors in 320x260 mode... but that was good enough)... Eventually TrueVision and even ATI had video cards that could do the same sorts of things (or better) than an Amiga. So many great computer ideas died in the 80s and early 90s... but it was really evolution... most of them died because a generalized solution (i.e. VGA with video out + software) eclipsed a specialized solution (i.e. Amiga with video toaster).

yuhong 12y ago
AFAIK the lowest end was called MCGA.