Is the Amiga architecture still relevant today?

[Hammer]

A new machine with a fixed gfx processor and fixed cpu would mean that coders would have to do their very best to get the most out of it, these days however a lot of pc coders prefer to wait for faster hardware in order to get their stuff working at decent speed, it's easier than to "get the most out of it" like most Amiga coders do ....

With HD games, Xbox 360 and PS3 forces programmers to be efficient.

My laptop(with Geforce 9500M GS, which is based on H2 2007 Geforce 8600M GT) can play console ported HD games** at 720p HD and high details.

**Most PS3 and Xbox 360 games runs at 1280x720p HD.

[Hammer]

I have been wondering about this question for a long time now. What I mean about this question is this; in todays world, the differences between the Amiga architecure and the x86 architure still make sense? In other words if a new machine based on the Amiga architecture gets out, then is it really needed? Or?

Regards,
Sim085

My laptop is equipped with two Intel X64 and one NVIDIA CUDA** processors.

**Includes 32 stream processors at 950Mhz.

[Hammer]

There is even more to Windows 7 than that..

DX COMPUTE

http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/partner/archive/2009/07/24/windows-7-one-step-closer.aspx

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-directx-compute-gpgpu-windows,8349.html

Quote:

"With the introduction of Windows 7, the GPU and CPU will exist in a co-processing environment where each can handle the computing task they are best suited for," wrote Chris Daniel, product manager for software at Nvidia. "The CPU is exceptionally good at performing sequential calculations, I/O, and program flow, whereas the GPU is perfectly suited for performing massive parallel calculations."

Microsoft is doing its part by putting DirectX Compute in Windows 7, so that developers can make better use of the GPU for tasks other than just graphics acceleration. Having the GPU pitch in where possible will help take the load off of the CPU so that it can focus on other tasks. The ideal end result of this is that the PC should be more responsive thanks to efficient use of processing power.

Daniel gives an example of how a GPGPU could speed up a task: "With new software designed to take advantage of this capability you would be able to copy and transcode (convert a video from one format to another – a very computationally intensive task) a movie to your MTP supported portable media device up to 5 times faster when using the GPU as a co-processor with DX Compute, as compared to only doing the processing on the CPU."

Microsoft also natively supports GPU acceleration with a new Windows Media Player and Windows Media Center for H.264 video content, most of which is encoded in high-definition formats and typically more taxing on the CPU.

"Parallel programming is the next big thing for the world of computing – it has started already," said Daniel. "DirectX Compute will accelerate this discontinuity by enabling massive parallelism to the masses. What we are talking about is co-processing— essentially using the right tool for the job."

DIRECTWRITE APIS- speeding up text rendering

http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windowsexperience/archive/2009/08/12/paint-net-v3-5-enhanced-for-windows-7.aspx

and much much more

http://www.geeks3d.com/20090416/directx11-allows-directx10-hardware-to-execute-compute-shader/
http://www.nvidia.com/object/directcompute.html


Directx11 allows directx 10 hardware to execute Compute Shader 4.

[Hammer]

(SNIP)

Sony copied the same technology of CD32 but wisely added in Playstation vector graphics and a first 3d engine...

Intel i860 (80860)** RISC/VLIW CPU+3D combo predates Sony's PS1 3D engine. Intel i860's 64bit SIMD design later influenced Pentium's 64bit MMX SIMD extensions.

**Intel i860 was used as geometry graphics accelerator for SGI's Onyx Reality Engine 2.
Intel i860 was first released in 1989. Intel will attempt to re-enter the discrete GPU market with Intel Larrabee(loosely based on Pentium I but with 512bit SIMD and many-core format).

[Hammer]

It's worth noting that the Xbox 360 design is rather similar to the non-fastram Amiga design of old. AFAIK that is.

(from an abstract point of view, it is naturally not exactly the same thing)

Xbox 360 includes a discrete 10MB smart eDRAM framebuffer.

[Hammer]

Usability and productivity is what mattered to me at the time, and i think thats the point that is being lost in the current discussion.  It seems to center around number crunching. PC had more mips, and more clours and bigger resolutions.  So you had more colors and more dots to look at as it incessantly swapped its memory in and out of the hard drive, whilst your menus jerkily opened and for no reason, you got a blue screen.

'94 was when I got my A4000 68060 with CV64 and cinema 4D.  Loved it.

BSOD occurs due to flaky hardware or flaky kernel space drivers.

[Hammer]

Usability and productivity is what mattered to me at the time, and i think thats the point that is being lost in the current discussion.  It seems to center around number crunching. PC had more mips, and more clours and bigger resolutions.  So you had more colors and more dots to look at as it incessantly swapped its memory in and out of the hard drive, whilst your menus jerkily opened and for no reason, you got a blue screen.

'94 was when I got my A4000 68060 with CV64 and cinema 4D.  Loved it.

CV64 includes a S3 Trio graphics accelerator i.e. a PC gfx accelerator.

[Hammer]

I had Amiga1200 and PC 486 DX2-66 MHz

Despite the fact it could render 3D images with enormous more speed than A1200, and it could handle 3D graphics better than Amiga1200 (Frontier game for example) it was too slow on bitmaps, and not only real 24 bit.

Also I had 8bit audio Soundblaster that rendered audio in Fm... It was pitiful compared to Amiga audio 8bit real DAC.

When using serious programs such as Ventura Publisher (in DOS with its own GUI interface) and other software in Windows, then it was totally not responsive to user... What a waste of power...

Once I tried a floppy version of QNX on my 486 PC... I was astonished! It flied....

Sure MS-DOS and Windows were the real snails that blocked the real power hidden in 486 Processor!

I recall doing the same thing with QNX X86...

[Hammer]

i never knew they planned to run windows, but it wouldn't surprise, as Commodore was stupid enough to build PC's instead.

In what way did the 486 run circles around your amiga?  What were your specs?  An A1200 with an 030 and 4-8 meg would have let you do anything a 486 could and Win 3.1 was laughable running on said 486.  You'd be a masochist to contemplate running Win95 on it.  So i don't see how the 486 was superior.

That's Windows NT btw.

[Hammer]

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.

The X86 CPU gained
1. SIMD co-processor unit.
2. Pre-fetch instructions and data units.

For DMA operations, modern X86 chipsets includes cache coherent hardware.

[Hammer]

Hmm, not entirely sure, although I think it had 1Mb of graphics memory and was an ISA card.  I can definitely remember seeing dithering you wouldn't get with 24-bit colour.

At any rate I'd still say that, when it was released, a stock A1200 could better display still pictures (via HAM) than a PC with a mediocre graphics card.  Not that that's an immense achievement really - if anything it shows how much the Amiga's advantages over the PC had diminished by the time AGA came around.

i486 based PC should have come with VLB (VESA Local Bus)....

[Hammer]

Ofcourse the PC did. But answer this: what hardware development occurred, other than a CD ROM from the owners of Amiga after Commodore's demise?  Before Commodore died, PPC was where they were headed, new busses and new chipsets were planned and none of it ofcourse materialised..  What do you expect when all we got was bolt-ons to 7-10 year old architectures from third-parties.  A 7-year old planar chipset wasn't as fast as a new PCI/AGP card with built-in 3D functions and chunky screen-modes. Amiga had nothing as good as Direct 3D? What do you expect when the parent company has no in-house hardware and software developers, and it even takes several years for a relatively minor OS update to be written.

Its funny, as one of many active user at the time when all this was happening, we all knew the differences between a 486 and A1200 with an '030.  And we knew what was better and why.  Now we have people looking at the PC with rose-colored glasses, and telling us the Amiga would have been doomed even if Commodore wasn't.  Apple was shit-scared of Amiga, MS refused to write for it for the same reason. I know PC dealers today, who were also Amiga dealers, and unanimously they all agree that Amiga at its height was the superior home computing platform.  They tried telling Commodore's sales reps about Amiga's advantages of efficiency, multi-tasking, video capabilities, painting and animation in just 2-4 MB at time when the 486 needed 4 times that, when 32 meg simm cost over $1000, and a 1 gig HD was $1500, when PAL and NTSC output on a PC was an expensive waste of time, but no they wanted a games machine, they were never interested in pushing the productivity side.  Commodore, they say, didn't know what they had.

I think it was PA-RISC not PPC.

[Hammer]

Commodore's marketing was simple:
1.  A500, A600, A1200 cheapish games machine to play the 2D games that the were in vogue.
2. Anything with Zorro Slots: professional use, and 4 times the price for the privelage.

Not far off the Apple all-in-one Imac's Vs the expandable PPC towers that jobs introduced.  If only Apple had a multi-tasking OS to go with their PPC technology in the days of Win 95.

Apple would be in the same position i.e. it will lose against the cloned PC platform.

[Hammer]

I agree, though a straight quote from Darwin fits even better in my opinion. -"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change."

In other words the future looks bright for Linux...

Windows platform has ReactOS.