Was PCI for Amiga a good choice?

[ElPolloDiabl]

I read that getting the specifications for PCI cost at least $1000 it may have cost more when there was only PCI.
At the same time there was AGP by intel, not sure if it cost anything back then to get the specs.

Is PCI fast enough to justify the extra cost?

[spirantho]

If we didn't use PCI, what should we have used, though? Zorro? That would have cost a load more than $1000 and limited us to our own hardware only.
Anyway, $1000 is nothing compared to the development cost of the rest of the board.

AGP will have cost more probably, and of course is utterly useless for anything other than graphics cards anyway, and we needed a generic bus.

[carvedeye]

I read that getting the specifications for PCI cost at least $1000 it may have cost more when there was only PCI.
At the same time there was AGP by intel, not sure if it cost anything back then to get the specs.

Is PCI fast enough to justify the extra cost?

PCI is fantastic with the amiga, I have the mediator lt4 it has given my amiga a new lease of life

[AAACHIPSET]

i still have my trex  card  ..useless without a working ppc card ..but was  good  when i used it all those  years ago  ..before i knew how lucky i was ..and then my ppc card died ...:<

[Rob]

It was absolutely the right choice.  The original Mediator 1200 went on sale at £130 (later £140) and you could go to the high street and get a Voodoo 3 for about £80 and a NIC and sound card for about £10-15 each.  At least double that total for a similar Zorro based set-up.

[Kronos]

AGP is just PCI with a different connector and some extra treats to speed up GFX.

[itix]

I read that getting the specifications for PCI cost at least $1000 it may have cost more when there was only PCI.
At the same time there was AGP by intel, not sure if it cost anything back then to get the specs.

Is PCI fast enough to justify the extra cost?

$1000 is peanuts.

[mechy]

I read that getting the specifications for PCI cost at least $1000 it may have cost more when there was only PCI.
At the same time there was AGP by intel, not sure if it cost anything back then to get the specs.

Is PCI fast enough to justify the extra cost?

It was the only practical choice really,since so many cards exist in pci. The $1000 is a trivial expense compared to dev costs.
I would love more native zorro3 cards,but that is not going to happen.
With a mediator and radeon  it makes a nice workbench at 1920x1440 or even wide screen modes. its very fast even in 32bit screens.

[matt3k]

Anyone tried a 3000Di?  How is the stock power supply for powering PCI video, audio, and a nic?  I would imagine since no issues with zorro cards performing the same function, that there wouldn't be an issue?

[mechy]

Anyone tried a 3000Di?  How is the stock power supply for powering PCI video, audio, and a nic?  I would imagine since no issues with zorro cards performing the same function, that there wouldn't be an issue?

I have a friend who ran the 3000Di and he used all the cards(radeon,sb128,rtl ethernet) with the stock psu, as long as its in good shape it should do fine.

[slaapliedje]

It would be better if there were drivers for more PCI cards.  For example, if I could use my Matrox VGA card with my Voodoo 1 card in my Amiga, it'd be pretty sweet.  Then again, with only 4 slots in my 4000Di, it's hard to pick and choose which cards to use, right now I have Spider 2.0, Radeon 9250 and a 10/100 ethernet card.  

I have an adaptec scsi card as well, and there is a driver for that, but unfortunately there isn't really a way to boot off of such a device.

slaapliedje

[danbeaver]

Using a PCI setup is the same as using a CSPPC card, they were not in Amiga's plans and are not "original hardware," but much of the appeal of the Amiga (and many other systems) is the ability to adapt to the user's needs; I call this, "Wouldn't it be cool to..."  This is the same statement that gets us in trouble as well -- usually with a significant other.

With a PCI configuration, one is only limited by the software drivers for the card, not the hardware development.

Again, only in my opinion.

[matthey]

Using a PCI setup is the same as using a CSPPC card, they were not in Amiga's plans and are not "original hardware," but much of the appeal of the Amiga (and many other systems) is the ability to adapt to the user's needs; I call this, "Wouldn't it be cool to..."  This is the same statement that gets us in trouble as well -- usually with a significant other.

November 7, 1993:

There is a very good chance Commodore will endorse the PCI bus sometime in the future.  No official announcement has been made yet, of course. However, PCI is very much a solution to a problem I started working on over two years ago. It's very close, in fact, to my solution to this problem. And standard, as well.  Draw your own conclusions :-)

October 01, 2003:

Well, it’s hard to say everything for sure. But I can tell you this. In the fall of 1991, with Sydnes basically cancelling every project, I decided to sit down and design the next system architecture, the thing that would hopefully replace the A3000 design (used in all A3000/A4000 machines). This was called “Acutiator”, and fully modularized the architecture, so that graphics, for example, could be separate from sound and basic I/O. This originally used a custom bus I designed, called the AMI Bus (Amiga Modular Interconnect).

But then a funny thing happened: PCI came out. PCI was designed to solve the very same problem, and by the time Intel kicked it out to the PCI SIG and they improved it, it was way better than the AMI bus at a bunch of things. And also, it was likely to be this huge standard. That’s a good thing....

See, there’s this misconception about C=/Amiga engineering and standards. We LOVED to use standards – any standard – as long as they did not suck. So you see all these proprietary buses and such around the Amiga, and figure, these guys hate standards. Not at all. We liked the good ones. PCI was a very good one, even then.

So, with all of that said, the next generation Amiga would have had a PCI bus. Also, probably, a PCI to Zorro III bridge. Graphics would have been on PCI. I had speced out PCI interface chips for AA and AAA subsystems, so the graphics could go on a card. Not at all cloning The PC; but the functionality is correct, to make these pieces modular if possible. I’ll let you say I’m copying the Apple ][ here is you like – after all, that’s what IBM did anyway.

There was a feature in Acutiator most systems simply don’t have: the TPU, or Transfer Processing Unit. Any time you had a bus to bus interface, you would (ideally) have a TPU there, in the chip that did that bus to bus interface. This was a very simple 32-bit microprocessor (I designed the architecture) which would transfer data, efficiently, from bus to bus. It would so largely because it understood, perfectly, both of the buses at issue. So, no imposed wait states if there were synchronization issues, speed mismatch, etc. You could write directly to memory/IO on the far side of that bus, but better still, just drop a transfer instruction into the queue for a particular TPU, and it would run the transfer for you, then signal when done. The goal: every bus in the system could be busy, all at once.

Anyway, that’s the kind of things I had in mind for the system. For graphics, Hombre, as mentioned, and that was also PCI – Dr. Hepler also saw the wisdom in PCI, even as I did independently. Beyond that, it’s questionable if Commodore would have remained in the graphics business. Most of the PC markers used to make their own graphics chips, too. Today, it’s nVidia, ATi, Matrox, and few others. Like Intel, Motorola, and National Semiconductor, you only need so many different CPUs around.

[danbeaver]

Dave is a great guy and I missed that talk, but then don't I feel foolish having misunderstood what I said.

[gertsy]

It was the only practical choice really,since so many cards exist in pci. The $1000 is a trivial expense compared to dev costs.
I would love more native zorro3 cards,but that is not going to happen.
With a mediator and radeon  it makes a nice workbench at 1920x1440 or even wide screen modes. its very fast even in 32bit screens.

+1