Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors

[Cymric]

leirbag28 wrote:
Amiga wins in Responsiveness and better overall system.

Absolutely not. Any system where one app behaving badly through unintentional error causes the entire machine to freeze is BAD. Any system which doesn't offer built-in security to prevent unauthorised access to crucial system components is BAD.

I also saw something about sticking a VLAB and a Picasso IV in an Amiga and then compare it to a Pentium II. My dear Leirbag, let's be fair, then, and stick a GeForce2 MX (better yet, a Riva TNT) in the Pentium. The Amiga will be gently blown away, like a feather in a light breeze. And please note that Pentium II's are museum pieces, although the P2 @ 366 MHz in my Thinkpad laptop performed to full satisfaction until the screen gave out. I compiled, I drew, I wrote Java, I played Diablo II and Civilization III, I listened to MP3s---it was a wonderful machine. (And that was with a crippled video card.)

I can sum up a great deal of numbers, all of which point to the same thing: the P2 has more bandwidth, performs computations much faster, and is therefore, given the same algorithms embedded in software, the better machine. Period.

The truth is hard and painful sometimes.

[Cymric]

koaftder wrote:
How did you come to the conclusion that x86 is obsloete? Then you mention the instruction set. So what about the instruction set? All that really matters is that you can run blah alogrithm on blah hardware with blah efficiency. The c compilers are better at producing efficient assembler code than the majority of programmers out there so thats not an issue either. x86 provides good performance at a reasonable price. Whats wrong with that? I think your main issue isnt hardware, but the quality of software.

I agree with you 99.9%. 99.9 because there is a little voice inside me which insists that good algorithms should run on elegant hardware too. I know, in practice it doesn't make one iota of difference save in speed, but that's because I am an engineer by training, and we all have our little fetishes.

Right?

The only thing which truly matters right now is multicore (whether on-chip, or on-motherboard) and multithreading capabilities. The rest is no longer an issue for the normal consumer market. The embedded market is something else, however.

[Cymric]

leirbag28 wrote:
Ok then..........why do you suppose many of us Amigans still use our Amigas as Main machines???

Because you know every nook and cranny of the machine. You know its idiosyncracies. You know at what phase of the Moon you should ritually slaughter a chicken and perform dark magic rites to exorcise the pent-up bad juju.

Partly its because of its responsiveness............When I am Doing Visuals I use:
Scala MM300
Elan Performer
DSS8
MindEYE
Trip A Tron
Brilliance
AMPlifier

all at the same Time! on a 68030 CD32/SX32  and I swap between them with the LEFT  AMIGA + M key!   Never seen a PC swap that fast!  and still no slowdown.

You are a sick masochist to use all that on a 68030 simultaneously. You know what I think? I think that you are grossly overestimating the response time of your tiny setup, and grossly underestimating that of a PC. You are also comparing task switching times when none of these programs are busy doing calculations and are in fact just waiting for user input. (The reason why I joined this forum was a discussion on task switching times. Someone wrote a program to demonstrate that Windows Sucked Badly. Unfortunately, he silently ignored setup delays, memory paging, and what not. And I am very certain you are ignoring that, too.)

I also think that you never gave the PC equivalent a sporting chance because, as I said earlier, you know your way around this setup, and actively dislike learning something new. You have developed a certain way of doing things, you feel comfortable with it, and damn the rest even if it would boost your productiveness. That's fine with me: if you are happy playing with techniques developed in the Stone---okay, Bronze---Age, who am I to argue. But that doesn't mean that PC's automatically suck.

Everyone knows PC's are massive headaches...I have never ever in my entire life had a pleasurable PC experience. not even with my Pentium 4.......thats why we and all Mac users consistently complain....The Proof is in the Pudding.  PC's just suck and so does Windows. Something is just not right.

You know, this sort of fanboy talk just makes me smile vaguely. Somehow the word of anonymous users, all of whom are of course implied computer experts, must make it credible. My dear Leirbag: it won't, so stop wasting bandwidth on tactics you know are blatantly obvious. Let's start at the beginning. Define a 'pleasurable experience'. Explain to me why your Pentium IV can't give you that, but your whoefully underpowered and stressed-to-breaking-point 68030 can.

Im not excited because I am a fanatic......I am excited because I know what this machine can do at such low specs.....and only imagine if there was the AAA Chipset and a 400Mhz 68090 with Workbench 3.6 Nuclear Edition with a free bottle of Plutonium for powering your CPU. hehe!

You are a fanatic---in more ways than one, I should add---and ignoring that fact, so blatantly obvious to anyone else, won't make it go away. I think you never really, genuinely, looked at what the other machines can do when they are flexing their muscles.

Oh, and I noticed that you ignored my remarks on why Amigas are BAD, and chose to counter it with meaningless issues on task switching and anonymous computer users complaining. I have this awful sense of déja vu when I think of other discussion subjects where people behave in the same way---and that also means I should stop discussing things right here and now.