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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: bloodline on June 03, 2003, 11:24:55 AM
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It's no secret that From a technical stand point IBM's choice of the 8086 for their "brand new" Personal Computer back in the early 80's was a shock to almost everyone.
All other manuafactures were looking at the 68K as the CPU of choice, simply because it was a better chip. IBM, contract with intel to supply 8086s very cheaply, apparently had a heavy bearing on the CPU choice.
But, I wonder what would have happened if IBM had chosen the 68k.... :-o
Just some thoughts to get the ball rolling:
Motorola would not have had the ruthlessness of Intel, and desire to improved the Chip. Right now we would all be using 100Mhz 68040s...
IBM would not have gained such a strangle hold on the market as there were plenty of other, better machines avaiable which, with a little poking, were quite compatible... :-D
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Motorola would not have had the ruthlessness of Intel, and desire to improved the Chip. Right now we would all be using 100Mhz 68040s...
Highly unlikely.
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DaveP wrote:
Motorola would not have had the ruthlessness of Intel, and desire to improved the Chip. Right now we would all be using 100Mhz 68040s...
Highly unlikely.
you're right... we'd be on 20Mhz 68000s.... :-D
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bloodline wrote:
But, I wonder what would have happened if IBM had chosen the 68k.... :-o
Just some thoughts to get the ball rolling:
Motorola would not have had the ruthlessness of Intel, and desire to improved the Chip. Right now we would all be using 100Mhz 68040s...
IBM would not have gained such a strangle hold on the market as there were plenty of other, better machines avaiable which, with a little poking, were quite compatible... :-D
It should interest you to know that IBM did, indeed, produce a 68k based workstation in the mid 80's.
I'd hope and pray that by now we wouldn't be limited to 100mhz anything in any "alternate history" event. Yeesh, what a nightmare!
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Much of the ruthless development of the x86 was down to competition.
The 680x0 line really didn't have much in the way of clones. If there had been, those manufacturers using 68K would have sourced the best 68K price/performance ratio and maybe we would have seen 68K chips with the same lofty clockspeeds as todays' x86
The days of comparing 68K to x86 are just long gone...*sniff*
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Yes of course, the only other chip manufacturer than Motorola is Intel.
:-o
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@DaveP
Eh? :-D
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DaveP wrote:
Yes of course, the only other chip manufacturer than Motorola is Intel.
:-o
AMD IBM etc etc etc /me scratches my head :-?
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The 680x0 line really didn't have much in the way of clones. If there had been, those manufacturers using 68K would have sourced the best 68K price/performance ratio and maybe we would have seen 68K chips with the same lofty clockspeeds as todays' x86
It appears Motorola were not fussy about who they gave licences to... so I don't expect there would have been the same sort of clone wars the Intel has had to face.
I mean, Intel has had always had to face other manufactures cloning their chips (from teh Z80 onwards), putting them in direct compretiton... Motorola on the other hand seen to have been happy to licence the technology, thus there would be more regulations on the technology, and less "push", I certainly don't think the PPC would have ssen the light of day... and the 8086 would have die without trace. The dominant chip now would be the Alpha...
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At the time there was zilog, ARM was starting up etc.
Point being, intel would have been in the Motorola position and Motorola in the Intel position with everyone cursing Motorola for their evil market dominance.
I don't buy the "if it was 68k people would have chosen better alternatives" the main sell ( apart from the brand IBM ) was its ability to run CP/M stuff which got the developers on board and then the rest of the market followed.
Other 68k items would have had a better chance of being compatible and selling in bigger volumes but thats about it. We would have all been using Intel chips in our Amagos and moaning about silly big endian architectures.
Plus people here seem to forget that it was IBMs input that gave birth to the 386.
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Microsoft Windows primarily for PPC, Apple lagging behind on the aging, lack of development x86 platform, no other operating systems available... what's the point in this thread? :-)
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Well the reason computers like Amiga and MAc were using the 68k is because it was a better processor in many respects to the x86. If the situations had been reversed and IBM were using the 68k in their PC clones, I don't think this would have affected the decisions of other companies and the x86 would surley have had a similar future to the Z80.
It would have been interesting to see how far the 68k would have been pushed, e.g. if the 040 = 486 and 060 - pentium, we would be on some sort of 3GHz 68090 by now.
PCC would have turned up much later as a server processor, like the intel itanium.
Its always funny to think how far people can push things. A not so great chip like the 8086 pushed to the P4s we have today, or making faster and faster F1 cars with all the restrictions that have been placed upon them.
A more interesting line of though though is what would the world be like if Commodore has made the Amiga architecture open. And rather than PC compatibles we had Amiga compatibles.
Microsoft would have no place in the OS market as the dominant os would be something like AmigaOSX.
All in all I think the world would be further ahead. If the amiga could do in 1992 with OS3 what XP still struggles with in some respects, imagine what it would be like now.
Of course there is also the possiblity that with some decent marketing Amiga could realistically be as or more popular than Mac just now.
But such is the way of things. :-(
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mikeymike wrote:
Microsoft Windows primarily for PPC, Apple lagging behind on the aging, lack of development x86 platform, no other operating systems available... what's the point in this thread? :-)
Well, Amiga would be using x86 - and in the same position as today :-D
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Imagine, how things could have been...
No. Let's not. It makes me want to cry. :cry:
But seriously, that deal probably would have made the 68k the mainstream chip. Therefore, it's logical to assume that the product line would have been expanded, and we'd probably have 68090s by now.
Amiga Format ran a news article once about theoretical speeds of an 060. They went into the 200MHz+ zone with refined manufacturing. There's a lot of technological potential left in 68k, just not financial.
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Matt_H wrote:
Imagine, how things could have been...
No. Let's not. It makes me want to cry. :cry:
But seriously, that deal probably would have made the 68k the mainstream chip. Therefore, it's logical to assume that the product line would have been expanded, and we'd probably have 68090s by now.
Amiga Format ran a news article once about theoretical speeds of an 060. They went into the 200MHz+ zone with refined manufacturing. There's a lot of technological potential left in 68k, just not financial.
Technologically the 68K and the 286 are from the era (with in reason!?!?), so one can safely assume that if the x86 can be pushed to the Athlon and the P4... there is no technical reason why the 68k can't be pushed in the same way.
I'm somewhat surpprised there has been less interest in 68K development.. History has shown that CISC/RISC hybrids (060,Pentium,Athlon) are generally more scalable, versitile and compatible than their RISC cousins (PPC,Itanic...)
Still it's a shame about the Alpha :-x
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just having a 68000 wouldnt necessarily make the machine as a whole equal to the mac/lisa/amiga/atariST/etc...
imagine if they did that - but had no custom chips - still used an MS-DOS type thing, and still had all the interupts and crap(quite possible), its still quite likely that the wouldnt have an automaticly configuring machine
the 640K limit would be gone! that would be good
it would of been interesting to see
but the amiga & mac(and many others) still had advantages over the ibm-pc other than the CPU
so perhaps in terms of sales and support and marketing and popularity - i dont really think it would of changed that much
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iamaboringperson wrote:
just having a 68000 wouldnt necessarily make the machine as a whole equal to the mac/lisa/amiga/atariST/etc...
imagine if they did that - but had no custom chips - still used an MS-DOS type thing, and still had all the interupts and crap(quite possible), its still quite likely that the wouldnt have an automaticly configuring machine
the 640K limit would be gone! that would be good
it would of been interesting to see
but the amiga & mac(and many others) still had advantages over the ibm-pc other than the CPU
so perhaps in terms of sales and support and marketing and popularity - i dont really think it would of changed that much
Indeed I agree, PC's may well have still dominated, but the CPU market would be totally different, and probably we wouldn't have such great CPU's now...(Nescesity being the Monther of invention)
One thought though... If the IBM PC had used the 68k, then the Amiga/Mac/ST, could all have run "PC" software in a Virtual machine "Dos Box"... that would have shaken up the market a great deal, I think.
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The odd thing about it all is it's the fact that 68k processors were the better processors that caused this mess in the first place. It was/is a price issue. x86 was/is cheap by comparison. It's why so few home pc owners use MIPS or even Alpha chips today.
Better means higher price. The best solution at the lowest cost will always win and makes the standard.
Amiga was a game machine when business machines ruled. Business machines became the standard for those that took work home. Amigas were the best graphics machines at the time, thus their popularity among gamers and video editors.
The reasons we love the machines are the reasons it faded out!
The day someone can produce a machine with the advantages the Amiga had at the time, at a cost comparable or less than PCs, will be the day the tide turns... Because NOW the home user dominates the market.
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One thought though... If the IBM PC had used the 68k, then the Amiga/Mac/ST, could all have run "PC" software in a Virtual machine "Dos Box"... that would have shaken up the market a great deal, I think.
hmm.. interesting thought. if they could all run each others software, they might of eventually 'merged' - with the only differences being the custom chips, keyboard, & OS, they would be less differentiated in the eyes of the customer perhaps
more interchangable
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bloodline wrote:
It's no secret that From a technical stand point IBM's choice of the 8086 for their "brand new" Personal Computer back in the early 80's was a shock to almost everyone.
All other manuafactures were looking at the 68K as the CPU of choice, simply because it was a better chip. IBM, contract with intel to supply 8086s very cheaply, apparently had a heavy bearing on the CPU choice.
But, I wonder what would have happened if IBM had chosen the 68k.... :-o
Just some thoughts to get the ball rolling:
Motorola would not have had the ruthlessness of Intel, and desire to improved the Chip. Right now we would all be using 100Mhz 68040s...
IBM would not have gained such a strangle hold on the market as there were plenty of other, better machines avaiable which, with a little poking, were quite compatible... :-D
IBM would require a second supplier built into the contract e.g.. AMD would be given this contract.
A 2.2 Ghz 68K compatible CPU would be very nice product. I don't think Motorola has the ticker to complete with AMD, let alone Intel Corp.
One to deal with the IBM/Microsoft factor e.g. MS-DOS/OS-2Warp/Windows9X/NT/2K/XP for 'super 68k platforms'.
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bloodline wrote:
It appears Motorola were not fussy about who they gave licences to... so I don't expect there would have been the same sort of clone wars the Intel has had to face.
(SNIP)
Motorola on the other hand seen to have been happy to licence the technology, thus there would be more regulations on the technology, and less "push", I certainly don't think the PPC would have ssen the light of day...
...
Note that, one has to factor in AMD co-founder's Jerry Sanders's drive to be number 1 CPU manufacture e.g. AMD would license 68K ISA from Motorola and rev up the Mhz (i.e. the first CPU manufacture to break the 1Ghz at volume production). They’ll probably throw in million of transistors to make this happen.
IBM is currently throwing million of transistors (~55 million) with their PPC 970, just like the real world X86.
Just look at AMD MIPS's Mhz speed, Intel StrongARM's Mhz speed and compared it to Motrola’s StrongARM's Mhz speed. AMD and Intel's aggressive corporate culture was also applied for these CPU families.
Note that Intel was not against obtaining a license for alternative ISAs e.g. Strong-Arm.
The dominant chip now would be the Alpha...
Not with Alpha's cost. The old DEC doesn't have the focus for the average citizen.
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Imagine how things would have been if IBM didnt add that perfect windows emulator to os/2.....
Then win3.x would have had none developers... and probably windows wouldnt have had this monopoly today.
This was indeed the most stupid act they made.. Caused both os/2 to die, and m$ to get this gigantic evil monopoly
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Imagine how things would have been if IBM didnt add that perfect windows emulator to os/2.....
It wasn’t a classic emulator btw...
Then win3.x would have had none developers...
It's the other way around since Windows 3.11 runs on top PC/MS-DOS. Running legacy software on early OS/2 is a hustle, unlike Windows 95.
and probably windows wouldnt have had this monopoly today.
You are forgetting MS’s aggressive corporate culture.
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IBM using 68K? WINe on Amiga baby! Yeah!
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Ok, now here's fanaticism for you.
How useful is ms-dos 6.22 (or win3.11) on a 3.06 GHz P4 vs. ADos1.3 on a 68060 3GHz with 256K data, 256 K instruction set cache, and MMU and the FULL FPU library in the CPU????
Is it even a contest?
Loud roaring maniacal laughter from me!! Hahahaha!!
AmigaOne! We WILL triumph!!
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Atheist, when you have to make comparisons like that, it's time to give up and go home :-)
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If it was possible to cool an 060 with something like liquid-nitrogen, what would be the theoretical maximum clock speed achieveable?
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mdma wrote:
If it was possible to cool an 060 with something like liquid-nitrogen, what would be the theoretical maximum clock speed achieveable?
About 80Mhz :-D
-EDIT- You'd probably need liquid Helium (Chemistry/Physics joke) to cool it down enough.
I think the 060 was at it's limit at 80Mhz though, as you then get cross talk, and delays between the gates which cause the whole thing to lock up. I would need longer pipelines, out of order scheduling, more advanced branch prediction, register renaming and a massive register set coupled with a nice big L1 cache (Basily all the tricks squeezed into the Athlon) to get it to go any faster...
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It would have been 68k vs ARM in the home pc arena, and Ahlpa would have beaten Sun Sparc in the server/workstation part of the market. In the offies it would of course been Microsoft Windows XP for Z80 :lol:
Or in a perfect world IBM would have choosen CP/M over MS-DOS as they were close to doing
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@bloodline
It makes me wonder what would happen if AMD replaced the x86 emulation with 68k emulation on the Athlon. I bet it'd use a hell of alot less transistors, allowing even faster speeds! :-o
@Dan
I bet there'd be a hell of alot less bloat if XP had to run on a Z80!
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mdma wrote:
If it was possible to cool an 060 with something like liquid-nitrogen,
Find a similar processor which has a similar die/masking processing technology as with 68060. LN2 has limits on how a CPU is over clocked. Other limits would be transistor-switching technologies.
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Talking about the limits in terms of the 68060's clockspeed.. has anyone tried raising the Vcc supplied to the 68060 to reach higher clockspeeds?
Normally when overclocking, if you are aiming at high clockspeeds you have to raise the Vcc supplied to the processor. In the 68060 User Manual (http://e-www.motorola.com/brdata/PDFDB/docs/MC68060UM.pdf) it says that the absolute maximum rating of the 68060's Vcc is 4.0V. It would be very interesting to see what kind of results a Vcc of maybe 3.8V would give... asssuming that the memory etc would cope with the higher clockspeed.
/Patrik
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patrik wrote:
Talking about the limits in terms of the 68060's clockspeed.. has anyone tried raising the Vcc supplied to the 68060 to reach higher clockspeeds?
Normally when overclocking, if you are aiming at high clockspeeds you have to raise the Vcc supplied to the processor. In the 68060 User Manual (http://e-www.motorola.com/brdata/PDFDB/docs/MC68060UM.pdf) it says that the absolute maximum rating of the 68060's Vcc is 4.0V. It would be very interesting to see what kind of results a Vcc of maybe 3.8V would give... asssuming that the memory etc would cope with the higher clockspeed.
/Patrik
I think you hit the nail on the head, the current 060 solutions will probably max out due to the Ram and supporting BUS logic before the 060 reaches it's upper limit.
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@Dan
I bet there'd be a hell of alot less bloat if XP had to run on a Z80!
But it would have been a 3GHz Z80, 8bit but Ghz.
Actually I think windows has come a long way instead of a nasty crash each hour(win3.1) it´s a freeze every other day(winXP), but it´s still just as slow of course.
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ive always wanted to set up a pentium 4 machine and run win3.11 on it :D
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iamaboringperson wrote:
ive always wanted to set up a pentium 4 machine and run win3.11 on it :D
I installed DOS6.22 and Windows 3.0 on a P100 with 32MB EDO RAM about 5 or 6 years ago for a laugh, it booted in about 3 seconds and was fast as f*ck! It'd fly on a P4, a bit like AROS does really! ;-)
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mdma wrote:
iamaboringperson wrote:
ive always wanted to set up a pentium 4 machine and run win3.11 on it :D
I installed DOS6.22 and Windows 3.0 on a P100 with 32MB EDO RAM about 5 or 6 years ago for a laugh, it booted in about 3 seconds and was fast as f*ck! It'd fly on a P4, a bit like AROS does really! ;-)
Yeah, the AROS Gfx demos give you a good idea of how much power is reving under AROS... The Gfx drivers are a total bottle neck at the moment, they have no acceleration what-so-ever. When the PCI drivers improve I think the gfx drivers will mature and you might even poop your pants at the speed :-D
The IDE drivers are really crappy too, PIO-0.. Can't wait to get DMA on those :-D
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bloodline wrote:
mdma wrote:
iamaboringperson wrote:
ive always wanted to set up a pentium 4 machine and run win3.11 on it :D
I installed DOS6.22 and Windows 3.0 on a P100 with 32MB EDO RAM about 5 or 6 years ago for a laugh, it booted in about 3 seconds and was fast as f*ck! It'd fly on a P4, a bit like AROS does really! ;-)
Yeah, the AROS Gfx demos give you a good idea of how much power is reving under AROS... The Gfx drivers are a total bottle neck at the moment, they have no acceleration what-so-ever. When the PCI drivers improve I think the gfx drivers will mature and you might even poop your pants at the speed :-D
The IDE drivers are really crappy too, PIO-0.. Can't wait to get DMA on those :-D
Still faster than Gayle though! :-D
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mdma wrote:
bloodline wrote:
mdma wrote:
iamaboringperson wrote:
ive always wanted to set up a pentium 4 machine and run win3.11 on it :D
I installed DOS6.22 and Windows 3.0 on a P100 with 32MB EDO RAM about 5 or 6 years ago for a laugh, it booted in about 3 seconds and was fast as f*ck! It'd fly on a P4, a bit like AROS does really! ;-)
Yeah, the AROS Gfx demos give you a good idea of how much power is reving under AROS... The Gfx drivers are a total bottle neck at the moment, they have no acceleration what-so-ever. When the PCI drivers improve I think the gfx drivers will mature and you might even poop your pants at the speed :-D
The IDE drivers are really crappy too, PIO-0.. Can't wait to get DMA on those :-D
Still faster than Gayle though! :-D
Yeah, but the Royal Mail is faster than Gayle :-)
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ive always wanted to set up a pentium 4 machine and run win3.11 on it :D
That would be intresting but hardware drivers would be a problem.
Start both Netscape and a VT100terminal and crash it in nanoseconds :lol:
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Motorola would not have had the ruthlessness of Intel, and desire to improved the Chip. Right now we would all be using 100Mhz 68040s...
That might have been true if the PC CPU market dictated all advances in technology. I'm sure some embedded or supercomputer hotshots would have plowed ahead, and the PC CPU market would just be forced to go with the flow. No market intentionally holds back without getting their butt kicked eventually.
Besides, if IBM had gone 68K, that's no guarentee the machine would be very good if we all had to run MS-DOS. Somebody would have made something better. Apple might have contracted another company to build a new CPU. Atari might have bought the Amiga. Commodore might have done very well making clock radioes. :-D
Whatever would have happened, I'm sure nobody would sit around wondering, "What if IBM had chosen the 8086? We'd be stuck with 8Mhz CPUs, and have to get all our entertainment from Coleco Vision 2!"
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things would be pretty sad... in my opinon motorola would have changed its way of thinking due to their situation and new management ideas... we would probably be paying 600+ dollars for chips with very little performance gain each year... I doubt we would be over 500mhz... although I think 100 is to low...Linux/3D animation/DTP/DVD's and everything like that wouldnt have emerged to such a degree... as computers would be costly...and first world nations rich would be the only ones with them to a large degree... much like the macintosh... I think IBM knew what they where doing when they chose X86....its proven to be scaleable... and because of the politics of it ... there has been massive competiton...since its not consolidated its given rise to many other markets...
on another note... I wonder how high you could theoretically clock an 060 if had a die shrink to .13 or lower micron and used copper interconnects and some of the new age technology without changing it very much or adding instructions?
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Atari might have bought the Amiga. Commodore might have done very well making clock radioes.
CBM= Commodore Business Machines
IBM=International Business Machines
It was typewriters and calculators. Why did they left the calculator market???
The texas instrument graphing calculators are real cool and programmable in Basic, C and assembler.
The even got 68000 10Mhz 256kb Ram and 768 kb flash ram. thats the ti-89 version
the Z80 based calcs sucks and is much harder to program.