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Author Topic: Amiga 1200 versus Atari Falcon?  (Read 18351 times)

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Offline basman74

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Re: Amiga 1200 versus Atari Falcon?
« on: December 28, 2010, 03:05:34 AM »
Personally, I like the high-res true-color possibilities of the Falcon out-of-the-box :)


Quote from: Iggy;602262
This bus width issue has been around a long time. Why did IBM use and 8088 processor instead of an 8086? Because the 8088 has an 8 bit memory bus (making it slower than the 8086 with a 16 bit memory bus). Considering what IBM was charging for PC when they introduced them how much did they save with that idea?

Considering that their upcoming computer would be competing with other 8-bit architectures in the marketplace, it probably made good business sense to use off-the-shelf (8-bit) peripheral and memory parts, instead of going to a custom chipset (to take full advantage of bus expansion possibilities of the 8086). This not only saved them money, but it also severely cut the development time!

Quote from: Iggy;602262
Technically, while touted as a 16 bit computer the PC and PC XT were 8 bit computers (8 bit memory, 8 bit expansion) with a processor that had some 16 bit instructions. How did we lose out to the desendants of this crap? In many operations a 4.77Mhz PC was no faster than a 1 Mhz AppleII or a .89MHz Color Computer.

The 8088/8086 processors both had identical instruction sets and register models internally. Therefore 98% of those instructions could deal with both 8 AND 16-bit data values, making the 8088 appear a 'true' 16-bit processing machine and promote the IBM-PC as a 16-bit machine they did! ;)

I hate to say it, but as crappy as the 8086/8088 was, still technically a better core overall than the 6502, Z80 or even (from what I understand) the 6809!
« Last Edit: December 28, 2010, 03:22:12 AM by basman74 »