Atari ST versus Commodore Amiga in pictures

[AeroMan]

Atari and Commodore are very close companies. They even swaped their chairmans (Bushnell was at Commodore when Tramiel was at Atari)

If you guys have read On The Edge, there is a part where it says the ST's design started inside Commodore. Amiga's creators were ex-Atari people.

Amiga's hardware is closer to the Atari 800 than to the C64. It uses a list to feed the video chip for graphics and sprites, as Miner did for the 800. It has DMA to obtain this data, and lots of similarities.

The ST is closer to the 64, in the way it has a number of fixed modes, and they work in a simpler way. It has a single video chip that shares RAM just like the VIC did. It is a simple machine. Shivji was part of the Commodore 8 bit team.

What really disapoints me is to see this world dominated by PCs. Crappy processor, crappy video, crappy sound, crappy OS, and It won the big fight over all the nice machines...
(crappy world ! :-? )

[AeroMan]

Hammer wrote:

Can CSG/MOS compete against Intel's 487 FP co-processor?

68K's had FP coprocessors too. The problem was how to compete against clones. That made hardware cheap, and not dependant on one company's finances like Amiga and Atari were.
There were no reasons for Amiga not to go in the 3d accelerator field, and chunky modes were in AAA. It was a matter of time, but C= died first.
Intel processors are fast now, but they have the burden of a 30 years old 8086 to carry as compatibility. They are also faster because they are produced in big volume. I would love to see what would happen if a better architeture like ARM or PPC had dominated the PC industry. We would be way ahead of our time.

@DigitalQ:

Engineering is a form of art. We take our signatures in our projects. If you analyse the design of the VCS, 8 bit Ataris and the Amiga, you can clearly see Miner's style.

This becomes a dilluted in automobiles as they are designed by big teams, but they reuse the company's resources leaving the cars with the company's signature. (have a nice example, PM you later...) :-)

[AeroMan]

Hammer wrote:

CSG/MOS would require some talent in building a fast RISC processors. During late 80s, SGI uses Intel 860 RISC/3D hybrid as its 3D accelerator.

Today’s 3D accelerators are FP processor arrays. Both ATI and NVIDIA have engineers from SGI.

Agree, but they could use 3rd parties chips, like the Intel you said, or TMS3XX. Besides this, Hombre was expected to have a PA RISC. As this thing turned into industry standard, They would probably follw the others and use off the shelf chips

This burden didn’t stop AMD and Intel adding SIMD, Out-Of-Order, super-pipelining (includes FP), Fused FMUL/FADD(C2D), RISC-core, quad-instruction issue(C2D), speculative instruction(C2D) and data prediction and any other DEC Alpha EV6 features.

Those features are also in other chips like PPC and even ARM. It is a natural way to go, but the base stuff still the 386 architecture

Unit sale numbers doesn’t inherently equals faster CPU cores e.g. ARM and MIPS.

What’s important are the people who designs these CPUs.

Yes, it counts. Selling more chips measn you have more money, and this means you can hire the hot shots to design your stuff, and they can have bigger teams.
It also means you can pay better research, which is where the new technologies come from, and production lines capable of state of the art silicon manufacturing.
This also leads to competition. I can think about 4 companies doing x86 chips, and this means different people working on the same thing (more innovation).
ARM or MIPS could be faster if they find someone willing to pay for faster chips

In the alternative timeline, PowerPC gets beaten up again in early 90's 1Ghz race, via DEC’s Alpha (or any neo-DEC teams).

GigaHertz are very relative stuff. Apple had the fastest desktop some time ago with a PPC at the same clock that x86 ran. I see it is quite interesting what is happening with consoles, where compatibility is not a huge problem like desktops, but massive processing power is a must. Everybody is going PPC. Even Microsoft.
They could stand with x86, but Sony, M$ and Nintendo went PPC. The fastest computer in earth is a PPC array (http://www.top500.org/system/8968). It seems a good sign to me  :-D