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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: gizz72 on September 03, 2004, 03:49:10 AM
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Greetings,
... but why there are no accelerator boards for the classic Miggies that uses X86/Intel, AMD or any non-Motorola CPU?
Are they not quite the same? or just really not designed for it?
Also, How far can a classic be expanded? I know it had limitations, but before the turn of the century, there was the plan it's possible to use PPC before, now it's a rare commodity, is it not?
Why are there no more NEW classic boards being built? Money no doubt or market... sigh.... :-P
I just hope there are such a things as classic computer rebuilders/manufacturers company exists today to re-manufacture classic computers like our Amigas or C=64,128 etc...
Or it's just me wondering what to do on a busy weekend... :-( :-) :-D :hammer:
Regards,
Gizz
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What I want to know is why Motorolla never took Phase5 seriously. I
mean, who else bought $300 68060s off them?
The '060 was never used in a Macintosh apart from in a Phase5
accelerator, same with Amiga.
So who exactly did Motorolla sell these luxury super chips to in 1996?
And why was the Coldfire range abandoned when it would have saved us
all this hassle of converting AmigaOS4 to native PPC. Okay so there
are still attempts to bring Coldfire to Amiga but that is well passed
being viable now.
Another thing, the biggest missed opportunity was no trapdoor GFX card
for the A1200, couldn't they have put a basic 4mb chipset onto the
Blizzard 1230-IV?
:-(
Would have been nice if Amiga Inc. had stuck with the Transmeta Crusoe
like in the MMC designs and not gone G3. Full X86 compatibility
there...
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Hyperspeed wrote:
What I want to know is why Motorolla never took Phase5 seriously. I
mean, who else bought $300 68060s off them?
The '060 was never used in a Macintosh apart from in a Phase5
accelerator, same with Amiga.
So who exactly did Motorolla sell these luxury super chips to in 1996?
Motorolas main buisness is and was in the embedded market, the Amiga scene, even at its hight was in income terms for Moto, a nice little bonus... Most went into industrial controllers for production lines, some into microwaves etc etc.
You've also got to factor in econnomies of scale, the reason Phase 5 were being charged $300 a pop was because they were only producing a couple of hundred boards per production run, whereas you'd be paying closer to $20 a chip for a 10,000 unit run.
And why was the Coldfire range abandoned when it would have saved us
all this hassle of converting AmigaOS4 to native PPC. Okay so there
are still attempts to bring Coldfire to Amiga but that is well passed
being viable now.
Because up until the very latest versions of the Coldfire series was it in no way a possibility for Amiga OS to be run on it in any way shape or form, the compatability simply wasn't there, and the speed of all but the fastest would not have been any greater then your commoner garden 68060, and a damned site more expensive to boot (In terms of having to rewrite the entire OS just to run it at *maybe* the same speed)! Coldfire V3, which was around shortly after the demise of C= and would only have offered the speed of an 030-25 on an off day.
Another thing, the biggest missed opportunity was no trapdoor GFX card
for the A1200, couldn't they have put a basic 4mb chipset onto the
Blizzard 1230-IV?
theres only so much power an A1200's motherboard can cope with, and having a new processor, and a graphics GPU capable of showing up the AGA chipset (With seperate memory for both) would have been far beyond the tracks could have coped with.
Then theres the whole thing regarding the bandwidth available through the trapdoor connector, Blizzard PPC's got around this by including a PPC - pci bridge chip and a mini pci card, afaik to this day there are no pci bridge chips for the 680x0 series of microprocessors.
:-(
Would have been nice if Amiga Inc. had stuck with the Transmeta Crusoe
like in the MMC designs and not gone G3. Full X86 compatibility
there...
As with the Coldfire, the first couple of rounds of chips produced by Transmeta were quite hidious as far as use in a desktop computer goes, efficeon may change this, but the Crusoe line gave a real world performance not unlike the Pentium 2...
PPC is the best way to go for a lot of reasons, not least of which is the fact the Amigas way of doing things lends itself better to the PPC archatecture. Yes its much more expensive, but you would recoup that in electricity costs when running the machine over the life of the machine (Pentium 4 uses, including supporting north southbridge, in the region of 150Watts of power at peek, and 130 idling. PPC runs at about 65Watts all in at full tilt, and 50watts idle)
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The A1200's trapdoor slot is just like a Zorro 2 isn't it? I can see
that you'd have to get an accelerator and GFX chipset onto one card
but isn't that how the Cyberstorm works?
Doesn't the CyberVision (/3D) plug into the Cyberstorm?
I can see how it would be unfeasable in the trapdoor slot but still,
if you wanted a GFX card for the A1200 at one point you had to tower,
then get a busboard, then an A4000 GFX card. This left the MAJORITY of
home users with AGA only.
No wonder things went pear shaped.
Back in 1996 when the Picasso IV was launched they were putting
extremely small GFX chipsets into games consoles such as the
Playstation and Saturn so why couldn't a decent one have been put into
the A1200! IBM would have been able to miniaturise something I'm sure.
With regards to the power limitations, I'm sure if a PowerPC 603e @
240Mhz, a 68060 @ 50Mhz, 256Mb RAM, fan and Permedia 2 with 8Mb could
fit in there... then VillageTronic could have made a Picasso-2 FOR
THE PEOPLE!
Not for the big-box elite.
You can after all fit a PowerPC + BVision into a desktop A1200. But
that came too expensive, too late.
I think an A1200 loses all it's character in a Power Tower and
suchlike. The whole design concept of an A1200 is what Apple are
trying with the new iMac today (where's the computer!?)
That's very interesting what you say about the Pentium 4... but the
Transmeta Crusoe beats them all hands down on power requirements.
That's why Sony picked it for the Vaio.
Originally the Amiga MMC was going to have a Crusoe and Radeon, it's
in Amiga Format. It looked suspiciously like what the
X-Box/Playstation2 look like today. We missed the boat there!
I'm sure there was something about the Crusoe where it could run it's
own code and emulate x86. Better than PC-Task right? Especially at
today's Crusoe speeds of 1Ghz+...
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Hyperspeed wrote:
We missed the boat there!
The Amiga has missed so many boats over the years, we'd have been better off swimming; somehow making our own way to the destination. At least we'd nearly be there by now... :-)
Probably the most distressing thing is looking back over the old announcements in the magazines - new machines, new chipsets, PPC processors, etc. Some of them generated massive amounts of interest and excitement; if even just one of them could have been pulled off, then the whole saga would probably have panned out completely differently...
*sigh*
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Hyperspeed wrote:
You can after all fit a PowerPC + BVision into a desktop A1200. But that came too expensive, too late.
*sniff* Hey, what's that funny burning smell? ;-)