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

[Hyperspeed]

Amiga Format magazine in the UK compared Quake running on an AGA '060 system to it running on a 486 DX100.

The DX100 is alledgedly faster than the Pentium-1 60Mhz so I would tend to agree with this. It just seems faster as AmigaOS is so efficient.

I think the PowerPC '601' was made to compete with the Pentium-1, the '602', 603(/e) & 604 with Pentium-2 etc.

I admire Dave Haynie (doesn't he have an electric hybrid car?) and his programs have saved my life... but I think the old Amiga engineers' favour for PCI and x86 may have been a contributor to the demise of Amiga more than Commodore's poor business decisions. If only the AAA chipset had been completed!

:-)

[Sparky]

leirbag28 wrote:

Have you ever compared Apples for Apples ?  Have you ever compiled a peice of source code for your CD32 and the same code for a Pentium II and proved that the 030 is faster/smoother/slicker/tastier ?

Just curious is all, as I'm finding it hard to stretch my imagination enough that a CD32 can outperform a Pentium II (no matter if the Pentium II is running Windows 98/2000/XP or Linux.

[Hyperspeed]

Doppie... that was a very negative post...

We should all have the enthusiasm of Leirbag28.

I think the Amiga's main strength was it's video capability although I do think we cheated in that to get 31Khz horizontal refresh like PCs get we would be running at 50% speed due to ChipRAM bandwidth.

I hear the Commodore logo has been slapped onto some rubbish Windows based handheld PC again, let's hope the Amiga brand stays safe. Maybe it's time someone wrote a letter to Sir Alan Sugar or some other decent European entrepreneur to inject some serious backing into the Amiga, perhaps even re-buying the company.

If at the end of 1999 the Amiga and it's patents were bought for $10m, how hard would it be to raise that these days... it's peanuts in a market where Microsoft counts the success of the X-Box on how many hundreds of millions $$$ less it lost this year compared to last.

Custom hardware, assembly coded apps, low requirements for programs, hardcore gamer/creator users and a crazy demo-scene made the Amiga for me. I know the Amiga is an American machine but it has survived mainly in Germany so I believe a German hardware firm should ressurrect it.

There's still Amstrad though...

[mdivancic]

Hyperspeed wrote:
Doppie... that was a very negative post...

I don't know, I think Doppie is right on track. I'll be sticking with my "Classic" Amiga because I like some of the old programs and messing with the hardware. I'll work with my new x86 Mac that can dual boot into Windows XP and OS X. I'll play with my Amiga...

Mike

[leirbag28]

@Sparky


Hiya Sparky! :-D

Don't worry......I am not crazy........I know for sure that a Pentium 2 can process 30 jpg images and convert them to 256 colored Floyed Steinberg dithered images in the same time it takes my CD32 to just do one.

I know that............I mentioned that in my post when I said mathematically.  But performancewise....my Amiga always looks slicker............read higher above in my Original post how what I displayed put Two laptops users to shame. One was probably a Mac. Never even met them.

This was in a real enviromnet popping up images an animations real fast on the screen and intime with the music........I didnt say a word.........this was just what one of the Lighting personell there had to say.....plus they hired me and my Amiga.....and not those guys.

I know he was partially right......as I have seen how these apps look crappy and play crappy.......so far I have not seen much that my Amiga cannot do!   especially if I had a DCTV connected.
Even if it wasnt for the Amiga.......I have seen that the Amiga can stand up in these matters....especially with a Toaster4000.

 I dont think I'm cool or anything.......I rather think I kinda suck and am not good enough.   But PC's just simply.....are much suckier. Probably more correctly said if I blamed it on WIndows.  As I always say:

"It's NOT that Amigas are really GOOD, it's that PC's really suck!"

Im using Elan Performer and Scala MM300 on my CD32/SX32 pro 50mhz 128mb RAM 40 gig HD with MASPlaer MP3 hardware. and DSS8 plus. also the MindEYE hardware with software.

Honestly dude.....my Amiga rocks hardcore.  Imagine if I knew how to animate Visuals like Demo coders......

An Amiga is never obsolete.....just like a Piano isnt obsolete......it still does its job..and does it well.

[A3KOne]

leirbag28 wrote:
@cv643D

 (ie a 486 is about the same speed as a 040).

-------------------------------------------------------

I know what you are trying to say.....but just a sidenote.

a 486 is NOT the same speed as an 040...........though they were in competition with each other at the time and existed around the same time............an 040 will destroy a 486...........an 040 plugged into an Amiga is more like a Pentium II in my experience.

Mathematically calculating...........Yes a 486 will render about the same or faster.  But in actual use..a 486 is super unusable...........heck........my CD32/SX32 pro is 030 50 Mhz and its faster and smoother than any Pentium II.

Just amore satisfying experience is what I really mean.

an 030 cant play Quicktme or edit Video like a Pentium II, but when it comes to responsiveness..........Ah man! Amiga kills in this area.

I cant use a Pentium II today....too slow!.......  but my CD32  however, is my main machine and even use it over my Pentium 4!

ACK!!!!!

I don't post much, but I have to on this one.

First, your earlier post about Amiga having to come back as a hardware company may be partailly correct, only it is impossible.  In a perfect world Amiga execs would have $100 dollar bills on rolls like toilet paper but it does not work that way. Amiga will never return like that.  x86 would be a better avenue.  If there was an x86 port with open office and firefox I would be running it on this laptop right now.  I would spend the $100 price tag without batting an eye and have a portable Amiga environment.

Now...as for your 040=Pentium 2 comment.

The only way an 040 is close to a pentium 2 is that they both run hot.  The P2 runs laps around the 040.  The absolute slowest P2's were 133?  On the high end, there were 600 Mhz and higher P2's.  A 600Mhz p2 will playback 16bit MP3 while surfing the web and playing Quake in a window at 30fps without any serious slow down...that while running windoze 98!  A 40Mhz 040 cannot even play back MP3 well.  Maybe if you run songplayer and cut your quality to crap it will, but if you try to do more than IRC it will skip.

My P2 generation celeron desktop is in my son's room and it will play DIVX files full screen in 1024x768 24bit.  Try that on an 040.  Can you lower the resolution and color depth enough to get the image to move?

A 600Mhz P2 is more on par with a Cyberstorm PPC233/060 board, with the context switches thrown in to slow things down. The P2 would beat it at most CPU intensive tasks though. The slower P2's were on par with an 060.  Once PC hit P3, Amiga has nothing even close, including am1ga. This laptop is a slow 1.13Ghz p3 mobile.  I installed UAE on it with OS3.9 and it benchmarked faster than my miggy, but it was a pain to deal with so I dumped it.  If I could do a complete native OS install, I would be there in a heartbeat.

I don't understand why that is so difficult for Amiga companies to understand.  Sure there will be more piracy if you move the AmigaOS to PC, but you will sell so many more units that the pirated units will be insignificant by comparison.  I was a huge amiga fan.  I had an A4000PPC/060 system built to the gills.  I will probably never buy another Amiga system because the gap in hardware is so significant, especially given the premium price.  If I could log into Tigerdirect and order a $450 wintergreen PC that includes a DVD+/-RW, 512Mb ram, 80Gb HD, nic, AC97, etc...slap a $5 case sticker on it with a boing ball, and install OS4 for $100, I would do it within the next month.

But $500 for a bare motherboard that is 4 years out of date?  I might spend $50 on a tee-shirt, but I am not THAT gullible.

[Dr_Righteous]

I just wish people could stop trying to compare Amigas to PCs or other platforms. There's no comparison because their intended functions are completely different.

The "IBM PC Compatable" computers have always been designed for general business use. Walk into a cube farm today, or in 1994, you'll see a PC. A Mac perhaps if you go into the publishing department.

Where do you find the Amiga? TV stations (many still use them today for titling). Graphics studios (Took SGI workstations to pry Amigas out of the hands of the folks at Foundation Imaging, and most of them took their Amigas home). And of course, the home gamers, who loved the superior graphics capabilities and ease of use.

Amigas are graphics workstations. Always have been. Specialized machines designed for a specific task. Great games came as a result of the graphics cababilities. Trying to turn Amiga into a general business machine is rediculous at best, and doomed to failure.

If someone were actually serious about bringing the Amiga back from the shadows, they'd be sitting down with AMD and nVidia and designing a new kick-ass graphics workstation... Not x86 based, but the best RISC CPU AMD can dream up... Combined with the best chipset and GPU nVidia can crank out. Keep the simplicity of the OS, designed specifically for the architectural design. As it was before.

In other words, don't compete with Microsoft and Apple... Compete with SGI and SUN. Wow Animators and movie studios. The games will take care of themselves. Applications will of course follow suit as they always do.

Haynie is getting his wish already... AROS. It's success will be in combining the simplicity of AmigaOS with the cheapness of x86 hardware.

Perhaps this is blasphemy, but I believe the PPC is dying. Apple's announcement has essentially signed its death warrant. It's doomed to the same fate as the DEC Aplha Generation processors. Cost is determined by production, which is determined by demand. PPC costs will soar to unreasonable heights, making it useless for anything other than embeded systems... Which is not what Amiga is about (that's what BeOS and QNX are for).

Haynie is almost right... Amiga's future lies in the past. Follow the original model that succeded, and you will find success once again. But x86 is not the way (tho with enough support, AROS can beat Linux here).

[countzero]

Dr_Righteous wrote:
 AROS can beat Linux here.

ahem...

[Dr_Righteous]

Ahem what? Linux is being used to aid in development. So what? I still say done right, and with enough community support, AROS has a chance to unseat Linux as the number 2 x86 OS.

[DonnyEMU]

Did anyone see the see the New Intel Macs (MacBook Pro and IMac) using the IntelDuo processor?? They are 2-3x faster than the G4 and G5 macs (depending on the model you get)..

The differences people seemed to be shocked about here seems to be the difference between the US computer market and the European Market. A long time ago I quit being religous about which processor something is based on. The only better CPU is the FASTER one..

This week I am buying a motherboard with a dual-core 64-bit processor with a PCI express video card. I am looking at buying one with 1 Gigabyte of it's own memory and two GPUs on one card with SLI support 4 more cards of the same type.

Ask yourself a question does Amiga Operating System directly support this kinda hardware? If it did is there drivers for it? Does the Amiga OS still stay competitive? I still like the way it works, but until it edits my 1080i recorded video programs, I can do realtime modeling with shaders, and network all my multimedia jukebox style over my UPnP media extenders, then I really won't have a good reason to be using AmigaOS. Amiga used to be the multimedia machine. Now with just the OS left on what is now less than spectacular hardware that could you some major tech leaps no one here in the USA is gonna wanna use it, or innovate software for it.

I love the Amiga, but I see nails in the coffin every day. My portable media player now will run AmigaOS, and that's a Playstation Portable..

[leirbag28]

@A3KOne

 I think you respond unecessarily......as I already explained that....if you read more closely, I think you will get what I am saying. Already said that the Pentium II will win in Mathematical area.

but I think this part of my comment sums it up:

"Just a more satisfying experience is what I really mean.

an 030 cant play Quicktme or edit Video like a Pentium II, but when it comes to responsiveness..........Ah man! Amiga kills in this area."


 Plus you compare unfairly.........add a Picasso IV and a VLAB motion to an 040..and it can do quite amazingly.............no it wont play "DIVX"  but will play Divx quality movies.........one just has to know what they are doing......or if someone took the time to convert it to an Amiga format......you will be amazed.

its all about the Closeness of everything in the Amiga working together and AmigaOS

Windows is a horrible OS, horribly organized.

Amiga wins in Responsiveness and better overall system.

Keep in mind, one can easily say a Pentium II is even comparable to an AmigaONE...in some ways one can see that.......but in reality they would be wrong........as they are judging it based on lack of Apps, including DIVX playback, or FLASH or Quicktime.............these things just need to be written.


I think most would choose an Amiga with 040 VLAB and picasso set up correctly over a Pentium II any day.

Heck.....I personally would choose an AGA 030 Amiga over the fastest Pentium III
 

[countzero]

@ Dr_Righteous wrote:
Ahem what? Linux is being used to aid in development. So what? I still say done right, and with enough community support, AROS has a chance to unseat Linux as the number 2 x86 OS.

AROS cannot qualify as an operating system until they have their own kernel. I would like to remind you that it has taken nearly 10 years for linux to become what it is today (with a support AROS will never have). Also being the number 2 x86 OS does not mean anything anymore because x86 will be obsolete in a few years time. Right now it's too late to design an OS for this architecture.

[mikrucio]

SO!

whos gonna do the x86 port of OS4?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHHAHAHAHAHA! manical laughter

no one.....

[Glaucus]

motorollin wrote:
A very convincing and well articulated comment. If only he had said this to Commodore (and they had listened), they might still be here today.

He didn't have to say nothing, this is all COMMON SENSE! In fact, I mentioned all those points Dave mentioned directly to the current developers of OS4 on ann.lu before they even started development. I'm sure many here can recall the massive flame wars that ravaged the Amiga community back then, and most of it was over these points.

  - Mike

[Glaucus]

look at all the fancy stuff mos and os4 has

Oh yeah, well here's something it doesn't have: a user base! A small handful of people doesn't make a viable computer market. Dangle a few million installs infront of me and I'd consider writing software for it. Otherwise, you may want to buy some ear plugs as all the laughing will really get annoying soon.

  - Mike

[Dr_Righteous]

...and in 10 years Linux is still unusable by anyone but patient geeks and network admins.

Kernels alone don't make an operating system. BIOS and GUI/CLI are just as vital. AROS is concentrating on the interface first... Top-down design at its finest.

x86 has been obsolete for a long long time... It's been emulated by RISC processors since the late 90's. Even that hasn't managed to kill the instruction set... Expanding it to 64 bits won't kill it either. I suppose I should have said RISC86 instead.

If that's not what you meant, I'd like to know what you think will replace RISC86/x86.

"Support AROS will never have?" We'll see... I meerly suggest it is possible.