Is the Amiga architecture still relevant today?

[Manu]

3D was CPU intensive.  The amiga was never just about the CPU,

Maybe not "just" but in the mid / late 90's it was getting tiresome to have my acclerated Amiga 1200 switched on through out the night rendering the most a simple low resolution animation in Imagine. Boy, I wanted a "fast/faster" Amiga back then. I really started to feel back then how Amiga was not going to go anywhere at that time with all the promises hopes and so on.

[Roondar]

It's worth noting that the Xbox 360 design is rather similar to the non-fastram Amiga design of old. AFAIK that is.

(from an abstract point of view, it is naturally not exactly the same thing)

[stefcep2]

@stefcep2
It is a nice read, I still have the mag here now. It was talking about usability and productivity and not raw power.  
A 486 25mhz pumped out around 15-20 MIPS depending on the architecture. Comparable to a 68040 @ 25Mhz.  
The 486 with 16Bit SB Cards in 93-94 was when the Amiga started being overtaken.  

Gertsy

Usability and productivity is what mattered to me at the time, and i think thats the point that is being lost in the current discussion.  It seems to center around number crunching. PC had more mips, and more clours and bigger resolutions.  So you had more colors and more dots to look at as it incessantly swapped its memory in and out of the hard drive, whilst your menus jerkily opened and for no reason, you got a blue screen.

'94 was when I got my A4000 68060 with CV64 and cinema 4D.  Loved it.

[Karlos]

3D was CPU intensive.  The amiga was never just about the CPU, the PC was mostly about the CPU. The architecture was never designed with chunky graphics in mind.

Something Jay Minor openly admitted he would have changed later. Besides, it wasn't the CPU load in Doom that made it infeasible on the amiga, it was principally the lack of chunky pixel displays. A fast 030 powered amiga, the likes of which were available at the time, can play doom just fine provided there's a graphics card (or even an akiko as in the cd32).

If it wasn't for Doom, it might not have mattered, for a bit longer any way.  But then again, that 486 ney even Pentium  PC could do what an 68020 with 4 meg and Scala could do at the time.

Doom was riding the wave of increasing CPU/gfx power, not driving it.

[Hammer]

It's worth noting that the Xbox 360 design is rather similar to the non-fastram Amiga design of old. AFAIK that is.

(from an abstract point of view, it is naturally not exactly the same thing)

Xbox 360 includes a discrete 10MB smart eDRAM framebuffer.

[bloodline]

Engineering is always a compromise. The Amiga was a damn near perfect set of compromises for the technology of the 1980s... But when technology moved on the compromises that made the Amiga great became a millstone around the engineers necks... The 90s killed the 5year old Amiga design as it simply wasn't relavant any more.

[ejstans]

Doing what? Measured how? Blue screens per minute Vs Guru's per days?

To be honest, I think my Amiga probably crashed at least as often as my friend's PC...No memory protection and all that hardware banging...
 
As for what the PC was doing better. It was faster: my friend was playing around in 3D Studio and could have tezture mapped models moving in semi real time (if I recall correct) and raytracing was blazingly fast. Me in Real3D had like wireframe models and rendering took overnight...Ok, maybe I'm exagerating here, but it was obviously no contest which computer was faster. The graphics were more advanced (SVGA I think?) and of course there was nothing like Wolfenstein or Doom on the Amiga! That's actually another thing: there were much more software, including games, which were of particular interest to us at the time.
 
Now, I mentioned Real3D which is one of the few apps that would have benefitted from a faster CPU. But since "everyone" just had a baseline Amiga 1200 (if that, many people were hanging on the Amiga 500s), those few game companies still developing for the Amiga just targeted those baseline machines. Faster CPU didn't do su much since the game had to be playable without one. I remember the Sierra title "Rise of the dragon" actually had extra animations if you had a faster processor, but does that really make much difference for playability?
 

Having had an '030 A1200 and having to use a 486 running 3.11, and believe i knew many, many other in the same situation, I can't which was more enjoyable to use.

I'd say neither was probably particularly enjoyable to use. I can't exactly remember Win3.11 though, but as I recently dipped back into Amiga, I'm fully aware of the suckage that was Workbench. Give me a shell any time of the day...
 

There's interesting review in Australian Commodore and Amiga review comparing Workbench 3.1 to Win 95 here? http://www.racevb6.com/acar/
 
Its the second last 1995 issue, its a nice read.
 
Comparing a 486 with Win 3.11 is a no contest.
:

It's a bit tilted I'd say...Yeah, such points as Autoconfig, and possibly responsiveness (can't remember exatly), and video, I'll give the Amiga. But usability goes straight to Windows 95, and that's what matter. Not to mention availability of programs...
 
I have to question their technical competence though, as they claim that since Win95 was 32-bit, that meant a byte became 32 bits and made programs bloated...
 
Ahhh, this does bring back memories of when in the mid 90s I got Linux up and running on my new AMD K5 (first PC I bought). My friend (same 486 guy but now upgraded to Pentium 133MHz and Windows 95) commented on X11 and FVWM: "Yuck! It's like the old Amiga Workbench for goodness' sake"...And yeah, it wasn't particularly useful, especially compared with Windows, but all I needed it for was to bring up multiple xterms...

[Hammer]

Usability and productivity is what mattered to me at the time, and i think thats the point that is being lost in the current discussion.  It seems to center around number crunching. PC had more mips, and more clours and bigger resolutions.  So you had more colors and more dots to look at as it incessantly swapped its memory in and out of the hard drive, whilst your menus jerkily opened and for no reason, you got a blue screen.

'94 was when I got my A4000 68060 with CV64 and cinema 4D.  Loved it.

BSOD occurs due to flaky hardware or flaky kernel space drivers.

[Lockon_15]

To answer the initial post question.
No, it's both surpassed and irrelevant.
 
Surpassed by competition (to pay respect of certain era).
Irrelevant by comparing scope of engineering process and computing concepts.
IMHO, if CBM eventually made it through stock horror, it would still get nailed few years later. Demise in 1994 has roots in 1989, maybe even earlier.
 
Maybe in some other dimension...

[ejstans]

Engineering is always a compromise. The Amiga was a damn near perfect set of compromises for the technology of the 1980s... But when technology moved on the compromises that made the Amiga great became a millstone around the engineers necks... The 90s killed the 5year old Amiga design as it simply wasn't relavant any more.

What the...was with the slow-mem trapdoor expansion port on the Amiga 500?! Freakin' useless crap. Imagine if people could have added a cheap fastram expansion in the trapdoor slot instead? Would have fixed the major problem with the Amiga which was that it was bandwidth-choked without fastram. Manufacturer's could even have used slower (and cheaper) memory than chipram since the 68k alone would be consuming it.
 
My guess as to the reason of hanging it on the chipbus was to make it possible to upgrade to a newer Agnus and have the memory be chipram. But since that conversion involved cutting traces on the motherboard and bringing out the soldering, I have some doubts that it was really a planned feature...

[Hammer]

Usability and productivity is what mattered to me at the time, and i think thats the point that is being lost in the current discussion.  It seems to center around number crunching. PC had more mips, and more clours and bigger resolutions.  So you had more colors and more dots to look at as it incessantly swapped its memory in and out of the hard drive, whilst your menus jerkily opened and for no reason, you got a blue screen.

'94 was when I got my A4000 68060 with CV64 and cinema 4D.  Loved it.

CV64 includes a S3 Trio graphics accelerator i.e. a PC gfx accelerator.

[Hammer]

I had Amiga1200 and PC 486 DX2-66 MHz

Despite the fact it could render 3D images with enormous more speed than A1200, and it could handle 3D graphics better than Amiga1200 (Frontier game for example) it was too slow on bitmaps, and not only real 24 bit.

Also I had 8bit audio Soundblaster that rendered audio in Fm... It was pitiful compared to Amiga audio 8bit real DAC.

When using serious programs such as Ventura Publisher (in DOS with its own GUI interface) and other software in Windows, then it was totally not responsive to user... What a waste of power...

Once I tried a floppy version of QNX on my 486 PC... I was astonished! It flied....

Sure MS-DOS and Windows were the real snails that blocked the real power hidden in 486 Processor!

I recall doing the same thing with QNX X86...

[Hammer]

i never knew they planned to run windows, but it wouldn't surprise, as Commodore was stupid enough to build PC's instead.

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.

That's Windows NT btw.

[Hammer]

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.

The X86 CPU gained
1. SIMD co-processor unit.
2. Pre-fetch instructions and data units.

For DMA operations, modern X86 chipsets includes cache coherent hardware.

[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

[Lockon_15]

@ejstans
 
A500 is a great example of technology compromise Bloodline mentioned.
To be aware of what that actually means you have to know A1000 well in detail.
A500 - It wasn't designed for major upgrade path in mind, since for that purpose there was A2000 launched side by side. That crappy (as you said) trapdoor expansion was not part of Agnus upgrade either, but wise engineering made i.e. slow>chip ram hacks feasible at field service level. If you take a good look on various A500 revisions, you'll see the impact of cost economy on motherboard design - first revisions (Rev3 & 5) had then expensive DIL DRAM covering the whole lower left area for just a mere 512Kb of ChipRAM. In spite of hacks, I don't really belive CBM left trapdoor bus just to allow ChipRAM increase somewhere in future, when RAM price drop occur. It was a best-fitting solution for that time - it wouldn't compromise FastRAM bus; it won't help you with ChipRAM, but it may persuade Amiga development to start using. And it did in great exent, just after Kickstart v1.3 debut. Later revisons introduced cheaper DIL RAM with more capacity, which made platform even more attractive for modding. A500+ went to the edge, preparing for full 2Mb ChipRAM at the cost of trapdoor slot. So, in some way, CBM closed the circle.
 
If the crowd was left with true FastRAM only, platform wouldn't attract more audience than A1000 and there would be no A1200 nor else.
AFAIK, A500 trapdoor 512Kb expansion might be the most selling Amiga peripheral.