Order your A1 motherboard

[KennyR]

And what are you comparing it to, Wayne? A mass-produced PC motherboard, no doubt. You don't want to pay that, fine. But Eyetech are not delusional. They want to be able to profit by selling this, which is generally what most sales expect.

Let's not forget that CyberPPC and BlizzardPPC boards were up to £750 when first sold - over a thousand dollars. Many bought them and still use them today. In fact, its the dominant model of Amiga accelerator board in use today, excepting emulations.

I've said this once, and I'll say it again: Amiga is now a niche market, and an expensive hobby. The only alternative to this cost it is another operating system, or an emulator. I'll have neither, thanks.

[KennyR]

You're telling me that you think "1000" motherboards is not "mass produced"?

Yes! 1000 is practically a custom job. 100,000 I would consider to be mass production. Below that, economies of scale account for most of the price.

Gouge and destroy the market is more accurate.

What market? Have you forgotten Amiga's market died some years ago? How can they destroy something that doesn't exist?

Technology gets CHEAPER, not more expensive as time goes along.

Completely wrong. It gets cheaper because its demand becomes higher, the production runs become larger, and competition sets in. Age DOES NOT make technology cheaper. Demand does. This is a simple fact of economics.

The choice of OS/whatever is your choice, but I can buy one hell of a G4 Mac with OSX for the price of an Amiga 4000 tower running at 50 Megahertz.

And you would have a Mac, not an Amiga.

on a dead-end machine (PPC).

...which assumes that any other CPU chip but the x86 is destined to fail, which is corporate spawned propaganda, and false, too. Its another matter of use. If suddenly everbody started using PPC its prices would tumble and its MHz would skyrocket. Even as we speak, a 600MHz is a good competitor for mid-range Pentium4s (1000-1200Mhz).

This x86 crap really starts to annoy. To quote an emulamer who came to my IRC channel once: "But my Workbench does more FPS than yours." Uh...yeah... I really expected a more balanced view from you, Wayne.

I don't see Motorola pulling the plug on PPC any time soon, despite some wild rumours.

Rant over for today. (Maybe)

[KennyR]

A 600mhz G3 equals a 1ghz Pentium ? Dream on

I said competes with, not equals. And by the way, the difference isn't that great, either. Assuming a 850 AMD K3/4 equals the performance of a 1GHz Pentium4, and that a 700-800 MHz G3 can match the performance of the AMD, I'd say it was closer than you might think. And in a real world test - RC5 - Pentiums do very badly while PPCs excel.

Oh and 1-1.2ghz is mid-range ? Are we talking used computers or what ?

Well, it was 4 months ago ;-) It just shows how fast PC's move on. All the more reason to think that x86 fanatics have so much MHz in their heads they don't have room for anything else.

Pentium boards are cheap, but so are Ford Escorts. I'd still like a cadellac. :-)

[KennyR]

Assumption is the mother of all fsckups.

I can only assume. As you say, there were no CPUs of the type I mentioned clocked at those speeds. Simple sums are somewhat accurate, and anyway, it was a moot point.

Stop defending a bad idea. The Pentium 4 is not the be all, end all of chips, but it's a damned site better than a piddly little laughably outdated, 3 generation behind, G3/600.

There's no real choice. The Amiga could not compete on the x86 platform. There is simply no room. The company(ies) that run the Amiga now rely on hardware for their present income. There is no economically viable way of selling PCs - because the big companies are already doing it. So if its not x86, where then? PPC is the closest "rival", so its a natural choice. Without these Amiga companies, the AmigaOS would become a migrant - no stable base, and no future - and there is no money in selling emulators or OS's, since this is software and most people expect them to be free.

The point of this whole venture is that Amiga will become a name again, not just to supply present users with better machines, despite what many now think. The way to do that is custom hardware. It's 2-3 years behind current technology. It doesn't have to stay that way. But it does have to start that way. How many years is my current Amiga setup behind now? Five, six years? More? I could buy a fully up to date Amithlon PC but it would cost me probably as much as an A1 and I'd be forever trapped in OS3.9 and no WarpOS/Warp3D.

Hardware independence. Anything else is just a red herring.

There's no such thing. It's unworkable. Even if there were, PPC would be logical first step to establish a solid base to build into those areas later. x86 is not a solid base - ask BeOS.

[KennyR]

So I should pay 200% for 50% of the machine simply because Amiga dealers can't figure out how to gouge the price of an x86 machine?

No-one's forcing you to buy the A1. And small companies competing against big corporations have no chance. That much is inarguable. Comparing the price of the A1 to a PC m/b is both unfair, and to be brutally honest, stupid.

would give you an EXACT benchmark of what each CPU is capable of

There's no such thing! CPUs all differ in abilities and specialities. Some might be better at number crunching for Lightwave5. You simply cannot compare different families of CPU in a specific test like that.

And as Kay said, benchmarks suck. You can get them to say whatever you want. There are other benchmarks - such as RC5 - that show just as "conclusively" that the PPC range smash the x86 into oblivion.

or those of you who bought G3 accelerators earlier, stick with them.

Er, none of us did. Looks like you deserve that doll more than I do. Dear dear, yet another non-amiga user who thinks he can dictate or even judge what happens in a community he isn't part of.

For those of you teetering on the line, you'd be better off and have a hell of a lot more support just buying a good (and cheap) PC and running BeOS.

BeOS is dead. Deader than Amiga.