Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: Garyed40 on April 07, 2005, 04:35:36 AM
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Personally I wish they could've stayed Independent What do you guys think?
Gary
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Commodore was surely better than Atari buying them out. I think Commodore was good for Amiga for many years even though in the end it was it's downfall.
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Druid: "The Roman invasion was the worst thing that happened to England."
Its all ancient history.
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Apparently you realise that that was not possible. Had they stayed independent there would have been no Amiga.
Even if they had the money to do so, you really cannot know who and how would be running things.
Neeeext.
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Make that: "The Commodore Management..."
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Make that: "The Commodore Management..."
Bingo! :-D
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I thought there was nothing wrong with Commodore... right upto the point they started marketing the CDTV not as a computer, but as some sort of general appliance like a toaster or a radio.
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Commodore did great until around 1991 when Irving Gould got there and AAA was cancelled
The A1200 would have kicked ass as an 030 based 8Meg AAA machine for £399
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The core of 68K PC market was flawed i.e. Motorola was unable to keep pace with the other CPU vendors in the desktop market. Screwing (cut&paste) up the ISA standards are one of the main factors why the customers don’t stick with a particular platform. Motorola use to have PC vendors such as HP, DEC and SUN building 68K based workstations.
Around 1992 time period, Motorola should have made 030/881 like 486DX like CPU to compete with Intel's bottom end 486DX i.e. making the solution cheaper with one chip packaging instead of two chip packaging. Secondly, one shouldn’t underestimate FPU’s contribution and influence on 1992 era 3D games.
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HopperJF wrote:
Commodore did great until around 1991 when Irving Gould got there and AAA was cancelled
The A1200 would have kicked ass as an 030 based 8Meg AAA machine for £399
This only delays the dying 68k core....
I rather see higher clocked EC020/881/effective chucky gfx/some fastram combination for early 3D textured games target.
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Had the AIM alliance decided to put 68k compatibility mode into the PPC, in the same way intel kept the pentium compatible with the x86... I believe the PPC would have had an equal share of the desktop market by now.
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bloodline wrote:
Had the AIM alliance decided to put 68k compatibility mode into the PPC, in the same way intel kept the pentium compatible with the x86... I believe the PPC would have had an equal share of the desktop market by now.
Me too, but I'd reword it slightly.
"Had the AIM alliance decided to put 68k compatibility mode into the PPC, in the same way AMD made the Athlon compatible with the x86... I believe the PPC would have had an equal share of the desktop market by now."
I think we've both said on here before, that an Athlon-ized 68k would have been a run away success.
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I think thats what the 68040 was supposed to be, a 68K equivalent of the 486DX, if only they had implemented the full 68882 into it's FPU rather than a subset.
srg
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mdma wrote:
bloodline wrote:
Had the AIM alliance decided to put 68k compatibility mode into the PPC, in the same way intel kept the pentium compatible with the x86... I believe the PPC would have had an equal share of the desktop market by now.
Me too, but I'd reword it slightly.
"Had the AIM alliance decided to put 68k compatibility mode into the PPC, in the same way AMD made the Athlon compatible with the x86... I believe the PPC would have had an equal share of the desktop market by now."
I think we've both said on here before, that an Athlon-ized 68k would have been a run away success.
Unfortuately, the key work here is "would".
It honestly can't see why no one thought the back investment of 68k software wasn't worth a few extra transistors (wouldn't have even needed much more than a simple microcode based emulator IHMO) in the PPC core... if you look at how much space was given over to the FPU... which is certain to be depreciated now with emphisis on alitvec... the mind boggles...
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Had the AIM alliance decided to put 68k compatibility mode into the PPC, in the same way intel kept the pentium compatible with the x86... I believe the PPC would have had an equal share of the desktop market by now.
The PowerPC was invented for Apple, they got 68K compatibility by doing it in software. Doing it in hardware would of probably have proven as successful as Intel's attempt to do x86 compatibility in the Itanium (which they have removed because it's faster to do it in software) or the PPC 615.
The core of 68K PC market was flawed i.e. Motorola was unable to keep pace with the other CPU vendors in the desktop market. Screwing (cut&paste) up the ISA standards are one of the main factors why the customers don’t stick with a particular platform. Motorola use to have PC vendors such as HP, DEC and SUN building 68K based workstations.
No, they did their own in house RISC designs and the 68K couldn't keep up.
Motorola did do their own RISC design (the 88K series) but it never sold in sufficient numbers and died off. Parts were reused in the PowerPC series though (the original PowerPC bus was straight ou of an 88K).
Intel also did a RISC design (the i860) but it never took off either.
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Remember that the Amiga was never about high CPU speeds, everything intensive was done by the chip-set, had they of survived that strategy most likely would have continued.
Commodore's failure though was all interal. Had they of got the AAA + DSP machine out in the early 90's it would have been an absolute killer - and Hombre would have later killed it. If they had buit an Amiga with that technology things could have turned out very different.
Read this interview (http://www.techsupportforum.com/articles.php?action=viewarticle&artid=48), it appears to be from 1997, interesting stuff...
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Where are they now: "Irving Gould and Medhi Ali"
anyone know?
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didn't one of them die????
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cecilia wrote:
didn't one of them die????
Just wishful thinking.
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HopperJF wrote:
The A1200 would have kicked ass as an 030 based 8Meg AAA machine for £399
All that for £400 in the early 1990`s ??
Maybe £600-700 is a more realistic RRP for that spec at that time.
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The bitter aspect is that Commodore was the best ever happened to the Amiga. Or can you name just one different holder/company that brought the Amiga into any better position than Commodore? No, you can't.
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Sprocki wrote:
The bitter aspect is that Commodore was the best ever happened to the Amiga. Or can you name just one different holder/company that brought the Amiga into any better position than Commodore? No, you can't.
Microsoft
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Sure, without Commodore no one would have ever heard of the Amiga, it would have remained one of those numerous promising projects that fail due to lack of funding. Commodore had the factories and the money to design, produce and market millions of Amiga computers, what do you want more?
Commodore, come back!
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If it weren't for Commodore, the machine would have become the Atari ST and it would not have had a multi-tasking OS and it would be relegated to game system status..
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MDMA - I'm pretty sure Microsoft did little to benefit the Amiga ... apart from MS Basic. Maybe you should have read the post a little more carefully ;-)
You can play what-if all day long, it's all long gone now. I like many non-Amiga Commodore products, and occationally wish things had turned out differently, but thats as far as I like going :-)
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@ mdma
Why not http://www.rot-weiss-essen.de or http://www.coke.com/ ? They have at least _something_ to do with the Amiga even though it's only the colors.
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MrZammler wrote:
Make that: "The Commodore Management..."
Yup. Remember the revolving door that was always open for presidents? I had friends at Amiga dealerships. A president would come in, start a sensible marketing plan like going after Apple's niche in the public schools, and then, just as things were beginning to click, there'd be a new president and the rug would be pulled out from under them. And usually it was the customers who got the worst of it. The same sort of cheesy business practices were applied to the WordPerfect people and, evidently, to NewTek. Commodore management never understood what they had. What they wanted was another C64 that would sell itself and channel them to Fort Knox overnight. They never understood that they had to build their market one brick at a time. They had the attention span of children and the company was always like a rat in a maze, bumping into walls, backtracking, running down passages where it had been before, then trying something else without ever getting an airborne view and establishing a road map that would lead to the great outdoors.
HB
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Microsoft wouldn't have done anything good for the Amiga at all, they would have either made their own x86 systems running Windows under the name "Amiga" or done nothing at all.
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HopperJF wrote:
Commodore did great until around 1991 when Irving Gould got there and AAA was cancelled
you mean Mehdi Ali, right?
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I've wondered what happened to them myself. Does anyone know the true
answer?
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Darth_X wrote:
HopperJF wrote:
Commodore did great until around 1991 when Irving Gould got there and AAA was cancelled
you mean Mehdi Ali, right?
Most likely :-D
But IIRC Irving Gould did something quite silly as well, I just can't remember what? :-?
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Mehdi Ali was the guy who cancelled the projects which would have kept the company ahead.
Gould on the other hand was the guy who funded the company's way into computers in the first place.
http://www.commodore.ca/history/people/irving_gould.htm (http://www.commodore.ca/history/people/irving_gould.htm)
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I think thats what the 68040 was supposed to be, a 68K equivalent of the 486DX, if only they had implemented the full 68882 into it's FPU rather than a subset.
Not in price during the late 1992/1993 hence my proposed integrated 020/881 with relatively high clock speeds. 040 was late and relatively expensive.
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The PowerPC was invented for Apple, they got 68K compatibility by doing it in software
It doesn’t make PC platform vendor’s job easy i.e. the OS porting issues is now on PC platform vendor not from the CPU platform vendor. Look at post-68K dead body count from such a migration move.
Secondly, Apple's 68k compatibility development remains only with Apple wouldn't be shared with the other PC platform vendors. This is a time waster due to 68k compatibility development duplications.
But if we move it up the chain (i.e. from Motorola’s POV), then Motorola’s 68k customers can benefit from easy mass core migration.
Thirdly, software emulators moves the front-end decoder from the CPU side to the memory side. Refer to Transmeta’s flawed compatibility solution.
Intel also did a RISC design (the i860) but it never took off either.
This RISC core experience leads to "Pentium Pro"’s development i.e. Intel corrected their mistake**.
Secondly, i860's success wasn’t pivotal for Intel at that time i.e. it was basically an experiment. Intel is known to parallel their R&D i.e. refer to "only the paranoid survives" doctrine.
Btw, Intel i860 (N10) was used by many as a graphics accelerator.
No, they did their own in house RISC designs and the 68K couldn't keep up.
IF a particular RISC core suck then use another one.
As DEC's Alpha experience illustrates (e.g. "Why The Fastest Chip Didn't Win," BusinessWeek, April 28, 1997), it doesn’t needs to be the number 1 preforming CPU. It only needs to sufficiently increase the performance with legacy software being used for gluing it's customers to the existing software solutions.
Remember that the Amiga was never about high CPU speeds,
It’s a short term fix for boosting math performance for early 3D textured mapped games.
Note that the 68882/68881 *is* a “co-processor” with specific job i.e. math related. 68882/68881 is not much different to Amiga’s custom co-processors since it takes over some of general processor’s jobs.
everything intensive was done by the chip-set, had they of survived that strategy most likely would have continued.
Well, CBM haven’t solidified their 3D centric solution at that time.
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Doing it in hardware would of probably have proven as successful as Intel's attempt to do x86 compatibility in the Itanium
Remember, Intel botched the front-end of Pentium Pro (first member of P6 family) e.g. 200Mhz Pentium Pro runs like 133Mhz Pentium Classic in X86-16 software. Intel again botched it's X86 front end with Itanium (EPIC).
OOO features in Itanium was relatively crap compared to Pentium M/Pentium IV. Itanium’s focus was in-order execution while rest of OOO front end jobs was moved to software (in the memory domain).
AMD (J. Sanders III) was quoted to be saying that Intel’s Itanium was a good idea but poorly executed. Refer to AMD 29050, K5 and it’s similarity with the Itanium design. Note that, early X86 decoders with RISC cores actually preformed poorly compared to Pentium Classic. The X86 CPU vendors persisted with the design and fixed the problems.
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..oh my god, you`re making me a little bit more melancholic and pesimistic than I usually am.. ;-(((
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Hammer wrote:
Btw, Intel i860 (N10) was used by many as a graphics accelerator.
And LOTS of laserwriters.
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@DonnyEMU
If it weren't for Commodore, the machine would have become the Atari ST and it would not have had a multi-tasking OS and it would be relegated to game system status..
Rumor has it that the 1850XLD (http://amiga.emugaming.com/1850xld.html) was intended to have a "Unix-like GUI kernel." This could have been either Unix itself or possibly be CAOS-based. However, this was all pre-Tramiel, so they probably would have done something different. It's a moot point, though, because Jay had no intention of working with Jack and the boys, which is why the back-room, last-minute deal with Commodore occurred in the first place.
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BTW saying "Commodore was the worst thing that happend to the Amiga" is just as stupid as "Piracy killed the Amiga".
Very poor quality, expensive PCs thats what killed Commodore , oh and weirdo managment.
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Sprocki wrote:
@ mdma
Why not http://www.rot-weiss-essen.de or http://www.coke.com/ ? They have at least _something_ to do with the Amiga even though it's only the colors.
Ok, then.
How 'bout Viscorp? ;-)
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Hey guys
The way I mean 'Worst' is
1. Quality control problems
A. I’ve heard many times about people going through 3 to 4 Machines before getting one that worked.
B. The 1084 Monitor shipped with defective transformers known to be defective by Commdore
2. Questionable decisions about which machines to produce
A. A500+ What the heck was the idea here? Useless release of an already old design
B. A600 Same as above an old ECS design with surface mounted chips.. Bad idea
C. 4000 released instead of the much better 3000+ Scandoubler on 3000 but removed on 4000 Why?
3. Commodore undercutting dealers
4. No advertising for the Amiga… What responsible company tries to sell their product only by word of mouth?
Indeed Commodore saved the Amiga from likely vanishing early but only to turn around and kill it later
Gary