Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: gizz72 on July 07, 2004, 01:32:27 PM
-
Greetings,
It just bugs me since the death of Commodore. I just got confused over the years when the Amiga has gone from different buyers.
Why was the Amiga Architecture was never designed around the INTEL architecture?
What are different reasons then(pre C=) and now(post C=)?
Why not go with the flow(standards) in the first place?
Maybe the reason it was not INTEL architecture cause will it change the face of the AmigaOS as a whole over PPC once?
IMHO, I think PPC is quite expensive than INTEL in some ways.
There was even an Article once that is should had been RISC, but that too was trashed and many more tall tales happened.
Please enlighten my banged up head :whack: , oh Amigan Gurus! :-?
My regards to all.
Gizz
-
Why was the Amiga Architecture was never designed around the INTEL architecture?
All High powered (Amiga, Mac, ST, many games consoles) machines in the 80's were designed around the 68000.
Why not go with the flow(standards) in the first place?
There wasn't really such a thing as standards in those days. Every company built it's own hardware and had it's own designs. Amiga was one of them. IBM PC was another, Mac was another... etc...
The IBM PC architecture got "cracked" by Compaq who made a compatible BIOS chip and opened up the whole market to anyone who wanted to build their own computer which could run IBM PC software.
Maybe the reason it was not INTEL architecture cause will it change the face of the AmigaOS as a whole over PPC once?
There is no "INTEL Architecture", What you are refering to was the IBM PC cone architecture, by the early 90's the "Open nature" of the architecture allowed small dynamic companies to invest large resources into developing speclist components which would interoperate with components from different manufactures.
What we have now is a "standard" platform, basicly built aroudn the PCI bus, and then you can choose what you plug into it.
As for the choice of CPU... that is an arbitary decision. If the Amiga designers were doing their thing now, I imagine they would probably be having long talks about which CPU to choose out of the Athlon64 or a MIPS core on a custom chip.
Athlon64; Cheap, Powerful, 64bit, Available in large quantities, Proven design, Plenty of existing software.
MIPS; Low power, clean design, small footprint
-
gizz72 wrote:
Maybe the reason it was not INTEL architecture cause will it change the face of the AmigaOS as a whole over PPC once?
Form a software and applications point of view, I doubt you would notice that the underlying CPU is an Intel and not a PPC, or vice versa. Only when you look at things like clock speed, processing power, embedded stuff and the like would you notice it. But in general, the face of the AmigaOS would not have changed. Take a look at AROS, for example.
-
Greetings,
Thanks for straighten things out for me. I appreciate it.
Regards,
Gizz