Commodore was the worst thing that happend to the Amiga

[HopperJF]

Darth_X wrote:

HopperJF wrote:
Commodore did great until around 1991 when Irving Gould got there and AAA was cancelled

you mean Mehdi Ali, right?

Most likely  :-D
But IIRC Irving Gould did something quite silly as well, I just can't remember what?  :-?

[minator]

Mehdi Ali was the guy who cancelled the projects which would have kept the company ahead.

Gould on the other hand was the guy who funded the company's way into computers in the first place.

http://www.commodore.ca/history/people/irving_gould.htm

[Hammer]

I think thats what the 68040 was supposed to be, a 68K equivalent of the 486DX, if only they had implemented the full 68882 into it's FPU rather than a subset.

Not in price during the late 1992/1993 hence my proposed integrated 020/881 with relatively high clock speeds. 040 was late and relatively expensive.

[Hammer]

The PowerPC was invented for Apple, they got 68K compatibility by doing it in software

It doesn’t make PC platform vendor’s job easy i.e. the OS porting issues is now on PC platform vendor not from the CPU platform vendor. Look at post-68K dead body count from such a migration move.

Secondly, Apple's 68k compatibility development remains only with Apple wouldn't be shared with the other PC platform vendors. This is a time waster due to 68k compatibility development duplications.

But if we move it up the chain (i.e. from Motorola’s POV), then Motorola’s 68k customers can benefit from easy mass core migration.

Thirdly, software emulators moves the front-end decoder from the CPU side to the memory side. Refer to Transmeta’s flawed compatibility solution.  

Intel also did a RISC design (the i860) but it never took off either.

This RISC core experience leads to "Pentium Pro"’s development i.e. Intel corrected their mistake**.
Secondly, i860's success wasn’t pivotal for Intel at that time i.e. it was basically an experiment. Intel is known to parallel their R&D i.e. refer to "only the paranoid survives" doctrine.

Btw, Intel i860 (N10) was used by many as a graphics accelerator.

No, they did their own in house RISC designs and the 68K couldn't keep up.

IF a particular RISC core suck then use another one.

As DEC's Alpha experience illustrates (e.g. "Why The Fastest Chip Didn't Win," BusinessWeek, April 28, 1997), it doesn’t needs to be the number 1 preforming CPU. It only needs to sufficiently increase the performance with legacy software being used for gluing it's customers to the existing software solutions.

Remember that the Amiga was never about high CPU speeds,

It’s a short term fix for boosting math performance for early 3D textured mapped games.  

Note that the 68882/68881 *is* a “co-processor” with specific job i.e. math related. 68882/68881 is not much different to Amiga’s custom co-processors since it takes over some of general processor’s jobs.

 everything intensive was done by the chip-set, had they of survived that strategy most likely would have continued.

Well, CBM haven’t solidified their 3D centric solution at that time.

[Hammer]

Doing it in hardware would of probably have proven as successful as Intel's attempt to do x86 compatibility in the Itanium

Remember, Intel botched the front-end of Pentium Pro (first member of P6 family) e.g. 200Mhz Pentium Pro runs like 133Mhz Pentium Classic in X86-16 software. Intel again botched it's X86 front end with Itanium (EPIC).

OOO features in Itanium was relatively crap compared to Pentium M/Pentium IV. Itanium’s focus was in-order execution while rest of OOO front end jobs was moved to software (in the memory domain).

AMD (J. Sanders III) was quoted to be saying that Intel’s Itanium was a good idea but poorly executed. Refer to AMD 29050, K5 and it’s similarity with the Itanium design. Note that, early X86 decoders with RISC cores actually preformed poorly compared to Pentium Classic. The X86 CPU vendors persisted with the design and fixed the problems.

[MASACREWILL]

..oh my god, you`re making me a little bit more melancholic and pesimistic than I usually am.. ;-(((

[Dan]

Hammer wrote:
Btw, Intel i860 (N10) was used by many as a graphics accelerator.

And LOTS of laserwriters.

[SyrTran]

@DonnyEMU

If it weren't for Commodore, the machine would have become the Atari ST and it would not have had a multi-tasking OS and it would be relegated to game system status..

Rumor has it that the 1850XLD was intended to have a "Unix-like GUI kernel."  This could have been either Unix itself or possibly be CAOS-based.  However, this was all pre-Tramiel, so they probably would have done something different.  It's a moot point, though, because Jay had no intention of working with Jack and the boys, which is why the back-room, last-minute deal with Commodore occurred in the first place.

[Dan]

BTW saying "Commodore was the worst thing that happend to the Amiga" is just as stupid as "Piracy killed the Amiga".

Very poor quality, expensive PCs thats what killed Commodore , oh and weirdo managment.

Sprocki wrote:
@ mdma

Why not http://www.rot-weiss-essen.de or http://www.coke.com/ ? They have at least _something_ to do with the Amiga even though it's only the colors.

Ok, then.

How 'bout Viscorp? ;-)

[Garyed40]

Hey guys

The way I mean 'Worst' is

1. Quality control problems

A. I’ve heard many times about people going through 3 to 4 Machines before getting one that worked.
B. The 1084 Monitor shipped with defective transformers known to be defective by Commdore

2. Questionable decisions about which machines to produce

A. A500+ What the heck was the idea here? Useless release of an already old design
B. A600 Same as above an old ECS design with surface mounted chips.. Bad idea
C. 4000 released instead of the much better 3000+ Scandoubler on 3000 but removed on 4000 Why?

3. Commodore undercutting dealers

4. No advertising for the Amiga… What responsible company tries to sell their product only by word of mouth?



Indeed Commodore saved the Amiga from likely vanishing early but only to turn around and kill it later

Gary