[what ifs]PA RISC performance

[WolfToTheMoon]

Are there any benchmarks of PA RISC CPUs? In the hypothetical case of C= surviving past 94', how would a PA RISC based Amiga fare against Pentium powered PCs and PPC Macs...

[Iggy]

There's a pretty wide variation depending on model.

http://www.openpa.net/bench.html

[WolfToTheMoon]

It seems that PA 7150 was quite faster than both Pentium and PPC chips of the era running on similar clock speed.

And to think that C= negotiated a pretty nice contract with HP enabling them to design their own PA RISC chips... seems like a very good deal and sucg a shame it never happend.

[kolla]

But it would hardly been running AmigaOS.

[WolfToTheMoon]

But it would hardly been running AmigaOS.

Probably not at first.

[psxphill]

Probably not at first.

If commodore had been successful enough with making a games machine using PA-RISC, then there would not be a big enough reason to risk the investment required to make it a viable computer.
 
All the major innovation at commodore stopped in 1987, everything after that was evolutionary and not revolutionary. They had clever people doing clever things, but nothing that was ultimately worth spending the R&D budget on.

[yakumo9275]

I had a HP 9000 C360, which used the PA8500.. it was a DOG. power hungry beast. a true unix desktop workstastion.. ugh

[NorthWay]

When I went to university (1990 - oh man, I'm getting ooold) we had HP workstations, the first batch of 50MHz(?) ones. Net boot and net swap - amazing what you could get done with only 16M ram: emacs, shells, compiler, debugger, Framemaker.

BTW, they had some fantastic keyboards (but they took some getting used to).