Is the Amiga architecture still relevant today?

[alx]

I have been wondering about this question for a long time now. What I mean about this question is this; in todays world, the differences between the Amiga architecure and the x86 architure still make sense? In other words if a new machine based on the Amiga architecture gets out, then is it really needed? Or?

Regards,
Sim085

By the "Amiga Architecture" do you mean a souped-up successor to AGA (think Natami) or something completely new that's inspired by the classic machines?  The former would be a great platform for demos and hobbyists, but isn't ever going to beat a modern systems for 3D graphics etc.  Tying AmigaOS to a custom architecture might not be the best idea either!

If CBM had carried on making Amigas to this day, they'd no doubt have been based on something very different to AGA anyway - look at the sorts of plans with the Acutiator architecture, which would itself have been ancient history by now.  Some sort of custom hardware is perhaps a more attractive proposition for a console these days (look at the PS3), but it'd be a very different architecture to AGA.

[alx]

The PC philosophy is pretty much the anthesis of the Amiga.  Driven by Intel it has steadily driven everything onto the central CPU.  A standard PC these days has very little dedicated hardware, only the GPU remains.

I dunno - I'm no hardware expert* so please correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like the average PC these days does at least as much to offload stuff from the main CPU.  The Copper might have been revolutionary for its time, but don't forget that it had three instructions - all it could really do was poke values into the custom chip registers at a given point on the screen.  You could do amazing effects with the Copper but (I'd imagine - I've never programmed to the metal on an Amiga) you cannot do complex stuff like writing a value to a register conditional on the value of something else, without the CPU getting involved at some point.  At any rate, the GPU in my x86 system does much more as a co-processor - the instruction set on a modern GPU, while being highly specialised for graphics, is capable of doing all the sorts of operations a CPU is and applying them to graphics.

Then there's sound: As far as I'm aware, Paula just grabs samples from the chip RAM through DMA and plays them out of the audio channels (taking into consideration the registers for stuff like channel volume) - she's not a processor.  The EMU10k1 in my ageing SB Live card is a full-on DSP that can be programmed to run arbitrary effects on the audio stream.  From what I understand that'd eat up CPU time on an Amiga (although Commodore were moving in this direction with their plans for a DSP on the A4000).  You can even get physics processors now that run little programs to deal with stuff like object interactions in 3D space (the Amiga may have had collision detection between sprites, but a physics engine can then go on and determine what to do with the objects that collided, without having to ask the CPU at all!)

All-in-all, I'd say that the modern PC delegates tasks to other processors that the Amiga didn't.  Not that this diminishes the Amiga whatsoever, given it was one of the first architectures to do this to any great extent


* Final warning: I'm really not a hardware guy but I think most of what I've said is kinda accurate:lol:

[alx]

In what way did the 486 run circles around your amiga?  What were your specs?  An A1200 with an 030 and 4-8 meg would have let you do anything a 486 could and Win 3.1 was laughable running on said 486.  You'd be a masochist to contemplate running Win95 on it.  So i don't see how the 486 was superior.

I've had a 486 with 16Mb RAM running Win95 (!) and a 68030/40Mhz A1200 with 8Mb Fast + 2Mb chip with 3.0 ROMs.  Concentrating on stuff that's vaguely hardware related, I'd say that the A1200 won out on:

• Displaying digital photos on a lovely HAM-8 screen rather than 256 colours
• General responsiveness
• Doing cool stuff with video.  In a few days I wrote a little AMOS program to do nice copper effects, plugged the A1200 into a video projector, and had a little effects system for concerts

On the other hand, the 486 had:

• Reasonable speed when running a 256 colour desktop.  WB in 256 colours is an absolute dog on the A1200 and extremely frustrating
• A slightly shorter boot-up time.  A lot of this will be down the the silly number of patches in the A1200's startup-sequence, although 95 had some of that functionality built-in for stuff like newicons.  And I reckon the overall hard-drive access times on the 486 were a bit faster
• As others have said, the chunky video hardware is simply better suited to 3D than AGA

They're both about as unstable as each other :lol: Swings and roundabouts, really, although the fact that the 486 got chucked years ago and the A1200 is still going strong maybe suggests which system was more fun to use

[alx]

...I had a 486 66 with 16MB RAM running '95 -- that was decent back then -- and a few vidcards in that box over time.  It had no problem displaying truecolor 24-bit images uner 3.1.  What vidcard did you use..?

Hmm, not entirely sure, although I think it had 1Mb of graphics memory and was an ISA card.  I can definitely remember seeing dithering you wouldn't get with 24-bit colour.

At any rate I'd still say that, when it was released, a stock A1200 could better display still pictures (via HAM) than a PC with a mediocre graphics card.  Not that that's an immense achievement really - if anything it shows how much the Amiga's advantages over the PC had diminished by the time AGA came around.