Hyperspeed wrote:
What I want to know is why Motorolla never took Phase5 seriously. I
mean, who else bought $300 68060s off them?
The '060 was never used in a Macintosh apart from in a Phase5
accelerator, same with Amiga.
So who exactly did Motorolla sell these luxury super chips to in 1996?
Motorolas main buisness is and was in the embedded market, the Amiga scene, even at its hight was in income terms for Moto, a nice little bonus... Most went into industrial controllers for production lines, some into microwaves etc etc.
You've also got to factor in econnomies of scale, the reason Phase 5 were being charged $300 a pop was because they were only producing a couple of hundred boards per production run, whereas you'd be paying closer to $20 a chip for a 10,000 unit run.
And why was the Coldfire range abandoned when it would have saved us
all this hassle of converting AmigaOS4 to native PPC. Okay so there
are still attempts to bring Coldfire to Amiga but that is well passed
being viable now.
Because up until the very latest versions of the Coldfire series was it in no way a possibility for Amiga OS to be run on it in any way shape or form, the compatability simply wasn't there, and the speed of all but the fastest would not have been any greater then your commoner garden 68060, and a damned site more expensive to boot (In terms of having to rewrite the entire OS just to run it at *maybe* the same speed)! Coldfire V3, which was around shortly after the demise of C= and would only have offered the speed of an 030-25 on an off day.
Another thing, the biggest missed opportunity was no trapdoor GFX card
for the A1200, couldn't they have put a basic 4mb chipset onto the
Blizzard 1230-IV?
theres only so much power an A1200's motherboard can cope with, and having a new processor, and a graphics GPU capable of showing up the AGA chipset (With seperate memory for both) would have been far beyond the tracks could have coped with.
Then theres the whole thing regarding the bandwidth available through the trapdoor connector, Blizzard PPC's got around this by including a PPC - pci bridge chip and a mini pci card, afaik to this day there are no pci bridge chips for the 680x0 series of microprocessors.
:-(
Would have been nice if Amiga Inc. had stuck with the Transmeta Crusoe
like in the MMC designs and not gone G3. Full X86 compatibility
there...
As with the Coldfire, the first couple of rounds of chips produced by Transmeta were quite hidious as far as use in a desktop computer goes, efficeon may change this, but the Crusoe line gave a real world performance not unlike the Pentium 2...
PPC is the best way to go for a lot of reasons, not least of which is the fact the Amigas way of doing things lends itself better to the PPC archatecture. Yes its much more expensive, but you would recoup that in electricity costs when running the machine over the life of the machine (Pentium 4 uses, including supporting north southbridge, in the region of 150Watts of power at peek, and 130 idling. PPC runs at about 65Watts all in at full tilt, and 50watts idle)
