Is the Amiga architecture still relevant today?

[stefcep2]

It simply couldn't keep up...

Doing what?  Measured how?  Blue screens per minute Vs Guru's per days?

Having had an '030 A1200 and having to use a 486 running 3.11, and believe i knew many, many other in the same situation, I can't which was more enjoyable to use.

There's interesting review in Australian Commodore and Amiga review comparing Workbench 3.1 to Win 95 here? http://www.racevb6.com/acar/

Its the second last 1995 issue, its a nice read.

Comparing a 486 with Win 3.11 is a no contest.
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[stefcep2]

Well, perhaps the comparison was out of the box. A 486 out of the box is significantly faster than an A1200 out of the box.

Textured 3D games were a lot faster and smoother on a 486 with VGA than a non-RTG amiga, even with an 030 at a faster clockspeed. Just compare Doom on a 25MHz 486 with VGA to a 40MHz 68030 with AGA, let alone a stock 020.

Not that you could actually run Doom at the time, as it hadn't been ported. Try comparing, say, TFX to see the difference. It isn't particularly great on an 060, but works fine on a modest 486.

3D was CPU intensive.  The amiga was never just about the CPU, the PC was mostly about the CPU. The architecture was never designed with chunky graphics in mind.  If it wasn't for Doom, it might not have mattered, for a bit longer any way.  But then again, that 486 ney even Pentium  PC could do what an 68020 with 4 meg and Scala could do at the time.

[stefcep2]

@stefcep2
It is a nice read, I still have the mag here now. It was talking about usability and productivity and not raw power.  
A 486 25mhz pumped out around 15-20 MIPS depending on the architecture. Comparable to a 68040 @ 25Mhz.  
The 486 with 16Bit SB Cards in 93-94 was when the Amiga started being overtaken.  

Gertsy

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.

[stefcep2]

Breathless highlighted the flaws of the Amiga hardware! it was released in about 96 or 97... and at that time a cheap PC was doing far better stuff...

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.

[stefcep2]

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Ahhh, anyway, I do maintain that this was not a good compromise! Had they chosen my way, the Amiga of 1987 would have been just about perfect, considering the constraints of the time! :lol:

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.

That also explains the short-comings in the wedge-machines.  Then when Commodore died, all that people could afford were the A1200, and so we all tried to turn them into A4000's which we all really wanted but could never afford