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Author Topic: Will there every be another computer like the amiga?  (Read 29839 times)

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Offline bloodline

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Re: Will there every be another computer like the amiga?
« Reply #59 on: March 10, 2010, 03:35:17 PM »
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Offline Hell Labs

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Re: Will there every be another computer like the amiga?
« Reply #60 on: March 10, 2010, 04:23:19 PM »
Quote from: bloodline;546985
It's laughable to hear people still living in the SJ reality distortion field! I'm a big fan of what Steve Jobs has done, but have PPC Macs and intel Macs... And regular PCs, and at no point did the PPC ever run faster than an equivilent priced x86... And certianly not a power efficient... The ISA is relatively unimportant, what matters is the implemention... And unless you have the sort of money intel, AMD or ARM has you will not out compete them.

You're on drugs mate.

Look at the Pentium 4 era. Tell me, truly and honestly, that it wasn't a slow peice of shit whatever the clock speed. All the other cpu designs, like ppc, sparc, had only just reached 900mhz when intel were flouting 1.7Ghz. Great guys, you got a huge pipeline. Your processor is still clock for clock slower than the chip it replaced.

Look it up. Compare, speed wise, a pentium III 1ghz with a P4 1ghz. The P4 gets it's ass handed to it. It wasn't just the G4 that beat it, it was every other design out there. And power efficient? I'd say a 3watt proccessor is pretty power efficent. I've never seen someone have to bolt a big ass peice of metal with a fan to a G4. You know what? How intel CPUs seemed to reach 2.5-3.5Ghz in 2003 and roughly stay there ever since? That's because they were designed for pure megahertz ratings over actual performance. It was marketing.

The G5 sucked though. Was that one IBMs or Motorola's fuckup?
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Offline dreamcast270mhz

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Re: Will there every be another computer like the amiga?
« Reply #61 on: March 14, 2010, 03:26:36 AM »
The g5 is a good CPU, but it should've been skipped and Apple concentrate on clocking the G4s higher, plus if they used a 32-bit address space rather than 31-bits, then a max of 4 GB could've been achieved and the G4 would've been nice. The G5 remember is a POWER4 that was stripped down (Big mistake). If Apple had put its faith in PA Semi and money, we could've had a PA-6T Powermac and Powerbook instead of a CD Macbook and Xeon Mac Pro. Look, even the Powermac and Powerbook names trump the Macbook and mac pro names. SJ needs to bring 'em back
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Offline bloodline

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Re: Will there every be another computer like the amiga?
« Reply #62 on: March 14, 2010, 11:35:12 AM »
Quote from: Hell Labs;547011
You're on drugs mate.


Not today.

Quote

Look at the Pentium 4 era. Tell me, truly and honestly, that it wasn't a slow peice of shit whatever the clock speed. All the other cpu designs, like ppc, sparc, had only just reached 900mhz when intel were flouting 1.7Ghz. Great guys, you got a huge pipeline. Your processor is still clock for clock slower than the chip it replaced.


Not sure where I mentioned the Pentium4... that was a piece of junk... I used the AthlonXP and Athlon64 chips during the P4 era... my argument still stands.

Quote

Look it up. Compare, speed wise, a pentium III 1ghz with a P4 1ghz. The P4 gets it's ass handed to it. It wasn't just the G4 that beat it, it was every other design out there. And power efficient? I'd say a 3watt proccessor is pretty power efficent. I've never seen someone have to bolt a big ass peice of metal with a fan to a G4. You know what? How intel CPUs seemed to reach 2.5-3.5Ghz in 2003 and roughly stay there ever since? That's because they were designed for pure megahertz ratings over actual performance. It was marketing.


I bought a 1.5Ghz G4 Powerbook to run Logic Pro 7, I also had Logic Pro Platinum on my 2Ghz Athlon64... The Powerbook could only run half the number of effects/pluggins/tracks as the Athlon machine... it also cost twice as much.

The G4 was a slow old processor in 2005...

Quote

The G5 sucked though. Was that one IBMs or Motorola's fuckup?


Sure did.

Offline Hell Labs

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Re: Will there every be another computer like the amiga?
« Reply #63 on: March 14, 2010, 11:56:16 AM »
Quote from: bloodline;547511
I bought a 1.5Ghz G4 Powerbook to run Logic Pro 7, I also had Logic Pro Platinum on my 2Ghz Athlon64... The Powerbook could only run half the number of effects/pluggins/tracks as the Athlon machine... it also cost twice as much.

The G4 was a slow old processor in 2005...

Yes, and that's why they replaced it the next year. Saying they were "slow and old" at the very very end of their product lifecycle is incredibly daft.
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Offline tone007

Re: Will there every be another computer like the amiga?
« Reply #64 on: March 14, 2010, 12:04:20 PM »
Nothing wrong with being slow and old at the end of the lifecycle.  I like to think of the G4s as pensioners.
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Offline odin

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Re: Will there every be another computer like the amiga?
« Reply #65 on: March 14, 2010, 12:48:59 PM »
Quote from: tone007;547513
Nothing wrong with being slow and old at the end of the lifecycle.  I like to think of the G4s as pensioners.
:-).

Offline Amiga_Nut

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Re: Will there every be another computer like the amiga?
« Reply #66 on: March 14, 2010, 07:59:07 PM »
If you look at what the Amiga was, idealistically speaking, at the time of the A1000's launch compared to IBM XT or AT PCs and apply that situation today you would need to produce a machine that was 5x more powerful but for the same price  via clever custom hardware.

This is doubtful, although there is room for improvement because if you built a PC with the same raw CPU power as an Xbox 360 and identical graphics chip from ATI your PC's games would look nothing like as good as the DX10 games of a 360 but that's because it is running a bloated OS on a diverse open platform and the 360is not. You're not going to create a superior GPU in your garage compared to ATI/Nvidia and certainly not for less too so 'custom chips' as seen in the mid 80s are a difficult request as a technological price/performance solution.

Some of it IS down to OS and the fact you can't optimise PC games (running on win or linux) to the same level as a fixed hardware platform as a console like the 360, some down to just how sophisticated current hardware is.

So not really is the answer although if you wrote OS4 for the PS3 it would give high end PCs running any OS a good run for their money I suspect.

Early consoles at the time of the Amiga were quite sophisticated though too, Sega Genesis and NEC Turbo Grafix/PC Engine were quite adept at arcade ports, and usually superior to the Amiga port.

Look at it this way...you could produce a superior successor to a 60s Dodge Charger  for less quite easily...but could you improve on a 2000s BMW M3 for less? Nope. The bar has been raised to high and the problem with PCs is not the hardware, simply the nature of the beast of an open diverse platform and the sorry state of a 'modern' OS written in some crap high level language taking up far too much RAM to replace the simple beauty of when Amiga Wb 1.2/1.3 was around in the Days of DOS/Windows or OS/2 etc.
 

Offline kolla

Re: Will there every be another computer like the amiga?
« Reply #67 on: March 14, 2010, 08:17:15 PM »
Quote from: Amiga_Nut;547564
So not really is the answer although if you wrote OS4 for the PS3 it would give high end PCs running any OS a good run for their money I suspect
Nope. As I have written many many times now, my 1.33Gz G4 iBook (yes, the very same G4 that is described as old pensioner in this thread) runs in circles around the PS3, both running the same OS (linux) and doing the same tasks.
« Last Edit: March 14, 2010, 08:19:18 PM by kolla »
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Offline elhombre

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Re: Will there every be another computer like the amiga?
« Reply #68 on: March 14, 2010, 08:24:36 PM »
Well,  i think yes. I've just bought  a PS3 and i have very similar feeling what i felt when i got my A500 back in 1990. Revolutionary HW, custom chips, and forward looking games. I started my Amiga history with playing games (as weel as many of us - i think) and later i've discovered the many other possibilities the A500 offered. The PS3 still have a lot of potential to unlock (ie. it can be used as a very powerful computing unit in supercomputer cluster, and soon it will be usable to perform CPU intensve calculations for ie. finite element simulation software.

So i became fan of PS3 however i still like to use my A500, CD32, A3k and the A4k classics.
 

Offline Linde

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Re: Will there every be another computer like the amiga?
« Reply #69 on: March 14, 2010, 09:01:10 PM »
The Amiga obviously wasn't about ground breaking CPU power anyway.
 

Offline pkivolowitz

Re: Will there every be another computer like the amiga?
« Reply #70 on: March 14, 2010, 09:05:37 PM »
Quote from: Linde;547585
The Amiga obviously wasn't about ground breaking CPU power anyway.

I recently purchased a Wii and took note that everything it is supposed to be groundbreaking in was done by 1986 on the Amiga. ASquared did the conceptual equivalent as the Wii remotes and the original Amiga guys did the conceptual equivalent of the Wii Fit board (it was where the Guru Meditation came from).
 

Offline Amiga_Nut

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Re: Will there every be another computer like the amiga?
« Reply #71 on: March 15, 2010, 12:59:03 PM »
Quote from: kolla;547569
Nope. As I have written many many times now, my 1.33Gz G4 iBook (yes, the very same G4 that is described as old pensioner in this thread) runs in circles around the PS3, both running the same OS (linux) and doing the same tasks.


Pfft that machine would not be able to even display 1% of the visual output that the PS3 produces when playing Killzone 2 sorry.

As an OS engine the CELL is not ideal but as a package the PS3 is seriously powerful, just to display one gorgeous frame requires 8 overlaid renders to be combined in realtime @ 60FPS.

A new 'Amiga' would have to cost maybe $100-200 more than a PS3 but be able to do everything a medium range PC does and play games as shiny as Killzone 2 :)
 

Offline Amiga_Nut

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Re: Will there every be another computer like the amiga?
« Reply #72 on: March 15, 2010, 01:07:28 PM »
Quote from: Linde;547585
The Amiga obviously wasn't about ground breaking CPU power anyway.


In some ways it was, although the Mac and ST had faster CPUs it was still much better than an NEC V30 or 8086 in the PC XT. But yes it was a complete package, a colour multi-tasking GUI'd OS with some very nice custom hardware for the traditional 2D games all the same. For creative people it was a dream come true. So the CPU alone was not the whole story, without the blitter and stereo DACs and a multitasking OS it wouldn't have been quite the machine it could have. Digi-view was the first non gaming expense I ever made (Dpaint was free!) and  that says a lot....never bought anything like that for my 8bit computers and the Mac/ST/PC had nothing quite as sexy as Digi-view in my book so kerching *sold*  :)
 

Offline dreamcast270mhz

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Re: Will there every be another computer like the amiga?
« Reply #73 on: March 15, 2010, 09:36:29 PM »
G4 is far from slow for me, I use it for photo manipulation and general use. I rarely need that much CPU power and it runs lightyears faster than any PC I ever had. The Athlon series is a very good chip, but I still am more for PPC, as I have yet to see a big-endian X86/x64 cpu?
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Offline koaftder

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Re: Will there every be another computer like the amiga?
« Reply #74 from previous page: March 15, 2010, 09:44:27 PM »
The G4 line of products from Apple are overall, very well built. Good quality hardware that's sure to survive at least another 10 years. I have one G3 power mac that was built in '98 and it's been running my SVN repos at home for the past 4 years.