Commodore 900 vs Commodore Amiga 1000

[WolfToTheMoon]

By 1989, C= could be using Z80000,  which blows the NeXT's 68030 away.

[WolfToTheMoon]

The C900 looks like an interesting machine, the Z8001 being an early RISC CPU, albeit one with a lot of flaws.

The biggest flaw was that it was late to the market... performance was very good, once bugs were ironed out. The Z80000 had a huge potential.
And one more plus is that it was cheap... Z8000 had only about 51000 tranistors... That's some 17 000 less than the 68000 that came out the same year. Z80000 had 91 000 transistors, vs 273 000 for the 68030.

The video chip is actually the same as the C128's video chip (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_8563) but presumably running at a faster speed to generate the 72Hz 1024x800 display. Despite having its own blitter, it was probably not a patch on the Amiga's graphics chip.

video chip had it's own 128k of memory. Blitter was an add-on card, Haynie claims it was superior to Amiga's blitter.

[WolfToTheMoon]

Even if the blitter was superior, the actual output of the 8563 doesn't have jack on the Amiga - a character-oriented bitmap mode with two colors per character cell, or one color per character in text mode, out of a palette of 16 with no custom palette capability included, compared to sane, linear bitmaps at up to 64 colors from a total of 4096 or even a mode that allows all 4096 colors? Yeah, you can keep your superior blitter, C900.

color was not an issue in those days, especially for Unix workstations. What was important is the 1 megapixel screen that C900 was capable of displaying. That was pretty much the same as the first NeXT box, but 4 years earlier, and at half the price.
And it could support something like RTG out of the box, thus being some 7-8 years ahead of Amiga in that regard(remember, C= did the A2410, which was only used by AMIX, only later did it became supported under AmigaOS).

[WolfToTheMoon]

The z80,000 was cancelled in 1984 before it was completed, either because the z8000 was a failure or because the z80,000 never worked.
 
It's likely competitive to the 68020, although it's irrelevant. Commodore were still shipping 68000 based Amiga's in 1992. There is no way they'd have switched from the z8000 to a z80000 by 1989.

Not true... Z80000 was sold to military and telco, where it was used to upgrade from Z8000. They made a CMOS version too(Z80000 was NMOS), called Z320.

[WolfToTheMoon]

Who cares if Commodore might have made it through a few years more, if doing so would require sacrificing their hands-down best product for some generic-ass Unix box? I'd rather they have died doing something good (or even having done something good and just failing to follow up on it) than hang on through mediocrity.

I think a generic UNIX box is a little harsh to say about the C900.
It had custom graphics system. Commodore's own windowing system on top of Coherent.
And it was pretty cheap(for an UNIX box)... 3000ish $, and that's without the inevitable educational discount... It could have been far bigger than Amiga 1000 ever was.

Commodore the company was sunk at least as much by managerial malfeasance and refusal to commit to improving its product line

Apparently, Ghould wanted Gasse before he brought Ali into C=... maybe that was the last chance to change something...