Bloatware AmigaOS?

[persia]

Probably the closest thing to what AmigaOS would have become if not for bankruptcy is QNX.  I don't think it would have gone the Leopard route.  But the whole question is ridiculous because Amiga could not have survived, Apple, a far bigger company survived because of Steve Jobs personality, all the other alternative OSs died, sucked into the great Microsoft void.  Even with Jobs there was still a Microsoft bailout and the iPod revolution needed to save Apple.  The odds against Amiga's survival were, in retrospect, astronomical.

The current Amiga survives by outsourcing American jobs to India, which is far less endearing than the iPod...

[persia]

Yea, an OS goes only so far.   How much time does the average user cares about an application loader is debatable.  The Amiga has, at this point, no killer apps and lacks even most of the basic apps to get into the game.

[persia]

My guess is that we would be looking at AmigaOS 8.0 today, a single DVD distro, requiring just half a gig of ram on a Core 2 Duo machine.  

The custom chips would have long been done away with, it's easier and cheaper to use off the shelf video cards.

Trypos would have long been replaced with a BSD variant.

Toaster, now 100% software would be included with every Amiga.

Amiga would have several firewire posts, and a ton of USB ports, as well as DVI and ethernet.

[persia]

Custom graphics chips were a bad idea.  First of all you are reinventing the wheel, companies like NVIDIA and ATI spend millions of dollars on designing video cards, don't tell me that a company that can't pony up an additional $7K for it's OS could possibly do what NVIDIA and ATI do.

Also, having the video on a card means that you are in control, maybe you by your system with a low end video card and then expand later or you replace an old card with new.  Either way you are in control.  

Of course if you make the computer then a custom video chip set can be a big dongle I suppose, but the bigger and better dongle is intel's trusted platforn technology, that's what Apple uses.

I admit speculating on what Amiga would have done had they survived is difficult and there was virtually zero chance of survival, but the point is that had Amiga survived, Amiga OS today would look abosolutely nothing like Amiga oS 4.

[persia]

And how do you convince a graphics card maker you are serious.

I can imagine it now

Chip Maker:  How many computers do you produce.
Amiga: Well we have never actually produced amy, but the company we bought the name from, well, actually they didn't either, but the company before them, they, well they could have produced computers and so could the one before that, if it hadn't ended up bankrupt.

Chip Maker: I see, and how many are you planning to produce?
Amiga: Well we had this guy who said he was going to produce a lot of Amigas, but, well you know, he doesn't have a website, or a company actually, but I'm sure it'll all turn out.


Chip Maker:  What exact is Amiga Incs business?
Amiga:  Well, we basically outsource American Jobs to India.

And let's not even get to the City of Kent fiasco...

[persia]

So what about modern PCs and Macs which all use multi-cores, how do they compare with the old style P4s?

Hammer wrote:

Or is the some architectural reason that would have limited it from the same type of improvements that make the x86 still viable?

RISC hype...

What were the abilities of the 1993 Pentium or 1995 Pentium Pro in regards to clock cycles?

Like the other P6 class cores(e.g. Pentium II, Pentium III, Pentium M, Core1), Pentium Pro has three x86 decoders i.e. 3 X86 instructions per cycle.

Pentium Classic can issue two X86 instructions per cycle (with limitation).

The P6 has partially pipelined FPU (for instruction multiplies). Like Pentium Classic's FPU, 68060's FPU is not piplined.

K7 Athlon has a fully superpipelined FPU.