Is the Amiga architecture still relevant today?

[blakespot]

The PC philosophy is pretty much the anthesis of the Amiga.  Driven by Intel it has steadily driven everything onto the central CPU.  A standard PC these days has very little dedicated hardware, only the GPU remains.

I disagree.

The standard PC today (and Mac, I mention as I am a Mac user primarily) has the CPU, also an extremely powerful (often) GPU, a SATA controller that can transfer data with basically no CPU usage, and (often but less often than the powerful GPU) a sound chip that can play with little CPU usage.  Also an extremely fast bus.

One could say this follows the Amiga model.  Or it just follows what makes sense.  Not sure on that one.

Very Amiga-like, I'd say.





blakespot

[blakespot]

Leander,

Apple did not have multitasking in 1984.




blakespot

[blakespot]

Look, I just spent $900 or so on a SAMiga and OS 4.1.  I do not intend to replace my main machine (Mac Pro) with it.  In truth, I believe the Mac does basically everything better than this new rig.  But this is what got me - from Ars.

Whatever the ultimate fate of AmigaOS, it has been a privilege and a joy to use it. I still use my AmigaOne on a daily basis, and consider it my "fun computer." Whenever Windows or OS X annoys me, it's right there, fast and friendly and accessible. It feels like a personal computer in ways that computers haven't felt like in over a decade.

I want something that feels like a (modern, capable) home computer.  So - is that enough reason for it to be relevant?



blakespot

[blakespot]

SATA uses no CPU time?  In theory and spec sheets maybe.  In practice, i call BS.  The number of times I get "program x is not responding" when there is a SATA drive access is testament to that.  And look at any CPU monitor and watch the spike in CPU usage as you load stuff off your drive.  What's that about then?

So what if the busses are faster?  its all negated by the size of the files that need to be processed.  i can play a 250 k game of puyo puyo on an A500.  Its a 3.5 mb download, archived, for Windows or Linux.  Breakout is 450k on Amiga, 6 mb on Win.  And the amiga version is smoother..

I love Amiga. But I'll bet the 6MB ver loads faster on it than the 450K ver does on a powerful Amiga...



blakespot

[blakespot]

Au contraire mon ami...



OS9 onwards had Preemptive multitasking.

Now, if you'd said Amiga was the first to have preemptive multitasking, you'd have been correct.

I'm afraid you're incorrect again.  MultiFinder, released in 1988, allowed cooperative multitasking.  Also, no version of Apple's "classic" OS (all Mac OS's prior to OS X) allowed preemptive multitasking.  A sloppy threading capability was tacked onto, I think it was, Mac OS 8 - but it was not an ideal model.

Although, and most are unaware of this, the operating system of the Apple Lisa (which predated the Macintosh) offered cooperative multitasking and protected memory.  It was based on a 5MHz 68000 -- all before the Mac existed on the market.




blakespot

[blakespot]

There were plans in the early 1990's for hardware and software that would have extended Commodore's technological advantage and made your P100 CPU with 16 meg running Win 95 every bit the boat anchor that it was.  No amount of bug-fixes for that set up would have turned it from the horse-drawn carriage that it was, to the modern motor car that the Amiga still was.  But some illegal business practices from MS, stupidity from IBM to let the x86  patent lapse,  plus total business incompetence from Commodore, along with some smart business practices like selling cheap to the business world and subsidizing workers home computer if they ran MS crap, results in inferior technology eventually winning out.  Apple was on its knees for the same reason, and was saved by a portable music player.

Not to lay down a tangent to the discussion, but Apple was saved by the iMac and Jobs' return.  A portable music player turned the company into a massive force, though.  The local retail stores helped significantly, as well.



blakespot

[blakespot]

I've had a 486 with 16Mb RAM running Win95 (!) and a 68030/40Mhz A1200 with 8Mb Fast + 2Mb chip with 3.0 ROMs.  Concentrating on stuff that's vaguely hardware related, I'd say that the A1200 won out on:

• Displaying digital photos on a lovely HAM-8 screen rather than 256 colours

...I had a 486 66 with 16MB RAM running '95 -- that was decent back then -- and a few vidcards in that box over time.  It had no problem displaying truecolor 24-bit images uner 3.1.  What vidcard did you use..?




blakespot