Commodore 900 vs Commodore Amiga 1000

[WolfToTheMoon]

I managed to find a Sieve benchmark of Z8001 vs some other CPUs of the time...

http://www.atarimagazines.com/v4n6/STperformancetest.html

According to this, a 5,5 MHz Z8001 running Unix was 2 times faster than a ST with a 8 MHz 68000 in this particular benchmark.
So a 10 MHz Z8001 would give a very solid performance in a C900

[toRus]

I managed to find a Sieve benchmark of Z8001 vs some other CPUs of the time...

http://www.atarimagazines.com/v4n6/STperformancetest.html

According to this, a 5,5 MHz Z8001 running Unix was 2 times faster than a ST with a 8 MHz 68000 in this particular benchmark.
So a 10 MHz Z8001 would give a very solid performance in a C900

That's not a good benchmark. It compares different thnigs at the same time. And certainly not indicative of CPU performance, unless you are ok seeing the same CPU (68k) performing 3 times faster/slower using different OSes and compilers.

[WolfToTheMoon]

That's not a good benchmark. It compares different thnigs at the same time. And certainly not indicative of CPU performance, unless you are ok seeing the same CPU (68k) performing 3 times faster/slower using different OSes and compilers.

That's to be expected, with different compilers. It just shows that Z-8001 is certainly very competitive to a 68000 and 80286.

BTW, I think that the prime reason for poor Macintosh performance is that the C compiler on 128k models barely ran due to little available memory. ST is much better in that regard(512k)

[psxphill]

In 1984, Commodore was also getting ready to release the Commodore 900 UNIX machine, that was developed inhouse by Commodore Germany(the same team would later design A500 and A2000).

The Commodore 900 and the Amiga 500 were designed in the US.
 
The A2000 is slightly more complex. The first A2000 was designed in Germany by taking the A1000 and adding the Los Gatos Zorro 1 backplane and turning it into Zorro 2 by changing the form factor to fit the PC style case. They also added the cpu slot, video slot and isa slots. This was developed around the same time that the Amiga 500 was being designed in Westchester.
 
The second A2000 (the one that you want if you buy an A2000 as it's the one that actually works properly) was designed in Westchester based on the A500. The cpu slot was fixed so you could insert an accelerator without having to remove the onboard 68000. The video slot was made useful and a lot of the new ttl logic was shrunk down into buster.
 
The Commodore 900 might have been a good unix workstation, but it had been stuck in development hell for a long time & Commodore prototyped a lot of machines and only manufactured them if they got orders for them. The Amiga 2200 was one such system, on the other hand orders kept coming in for the c64 into the 90's.
 
The Commodore 900 was offered for sale as a development platform for the Amiga before development was self hosted. The few that made it out were likely left over from that.

[nicholas]

What if Apple had bought the Amiga rather than CBM?

[WolfToTheMoon]

What if Apple had bought the Amiga rather than CBM?

Unlikely, since they had Lisa and the Mac.
But, theoretically, had they bought Amiga, they would have positioned it as a high-end workstation and charged much more than C= ever did (Macintosh II was around 10 000$ with a video color card, and it still disn't multitask)

[psxphill]

What if Apple had bought the Amiga rather than CBM?

Atari were the only company that were likely to buy them and ship computers that we would have bought.
 
Supposedly some workstation manufacturers were interested in the chipset, but this was way before it was finished and they would have used their own software. It's unlikely we would have ever afforded to buy one & there would have been no real reason for us to either.
 
Commodore pumped a lot of money into Amiga to get it finished, the os didn't really exist and it was outputting yuv instead of rgb at the time. While the Los Gatos group were treated as heroes and commodore treated as villains who paid no part in the development, it wasn't really like that.

[Noth]

To understand the UNIX market of the early to mid 80s you do have to realize how many of the soon to be big / big companies were using M68000 and better chips. Porting UNIX, which is as portable an OS as they come, to a new arch like Z80000 or whatever and then getting important applications ported would have been beyond Commodore's capabilities. And for those who've not seen what could be done with mid 80s UNIX, go try NeXTSTEP in virtualbox (the hw is really hard to get, although it's brilliant). That GUI was a generation ahead from what was available at the time!

[psxphill]

And for those who've not seen what could be done with mid 80s UNIX, go try NeXTSTEP in virtualbox (the hw is really hard to get, although it's brilliant). That GUI was a generation ahead from what was available at the time!

NextSTEP came out towards the end of 1989, not really the same timeframe as the commodore 900 (which had blown the development schedule by 1985).
 
The commodore 900 wouldn't have been able to compete with the next computer on hardware, it's likely that commodore would have milked it as they did the Amiga & it would have ended the same way.

[WolfToTheMoon]

By 1989, C= could be using Z80000,  which blows the NeXT's 68030 away.

[Hattig]

The C900 looks like an interesting machine, the Z8001 being an early RISC CPU, albeit one with a lot of flaws.

The video chip is actually the same as the C128's video chip (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_8563) but presumably running at a faster speed to generate the 72Hz 1024x800 display. Despite having its own blitter, it was probably not a patch on the Amiga's graphics chip.

The line would have provided Commodore with a premium professional workstation line of products, but they were right to not spread themselves too thinly.  They needed to get the Amiga into new configurations far quicker than they eventually did.

[WolfToTheMoon]

The C900 looks like an interesting machine, the Z8001 being an early RISC CPU, albeit one with a lot of flaws.

The biggest flaw was that it was late to the market... performance was very good, once bugs were ironed out. The Z80000 had a huge potential.
And one more plus is that it was cheap... Z8000 had only about 51000 tranistors... That's some 17 000 less than the 68000 that came out the same year. Z80000 had 91 000 transistors, vs 273 000 for the 68030.

The video chip is actually the same as the C128's video chip (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_8563) but presumably running at a faster speed to generate the 72Hz 1024x800 display. Despite having its own blitter, it was probably not a patch on the Amiga's graphics chip.

video chip had it's own 128k of memory. Blitter was an add-on card, Haynie claims it was superior to Amiga's blitter.

[commodorejohn]

Even if the blitter was superior, the actual output of the 8563 doesn't have jack on the Amiga - a character-oriented bitmap mode with two colors per character cell, or one color per character in text mode, out of a palette of 16 with no custom palette capability included, compared to sane, linear bitmaps at up to 64 colors from a total of 4096 or even a mode that allows all 4096 colors? Yeah, you can keep your superior blitter, C900.

[WolfToTheMoon]

Even if the blitter was superior, the actual output of the 8563 doesn't have jack on the Amiga - a character-oriented bitmap mode with two colors per character cell, or one color per character in text mode, out of a palette of 16 with no custom palette capability included, compared to sane, linear bitmaps at up to 64 colors from a total of 4096 or even a mode that allows all 4096 colors? Yeah, you can keep your superior blitter, C900.

color was not an issue in those days, especially for Unix workstations. What was important is the 1 megapixel screen that C900 was capable of displaying. That was pretty much the same as the first NeXT box, but 4 years earlier, and at half the price.
And it could support something like RTG out of the box, thus being some 7-8 years ahead of Amiga in that regard(remember, C= did the A2410, which was only used by AMIX, only later did it became supported under AmigaOS).

[commodorejohn]

Who cares whether color was important for Unix workstations? The point is, the Amiga had that capability, and it was used for a lot of great stuff. The C900 didn't. Had Commodore gone the 900 route, would we have gotten the Cinemaware titles? Shadow of the Beast? Deluxe Paint? If we even had, they would've looked like ass by comparison, unless you sprang for an expansion card to provide the capabilities that the Amiga had right out of the box.

[psxphill]

By 1989, C= could be using Z80000, which blows the NeXT's 68030 away.

The z80,000 was cancelled in 1984 before it was completed, either because the z8000 was a failure or because the z80,000 never worked.
 
It's likely competitive to the 68020, although it's irrelevant. Commodore were still shipping 68000 based Amiga's in 1992. There is no way they'd have switched from the z8000 to a z80000 by 1989.