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Originally Posted by Hewitson
I think you are completely missing my point. I'm not suggesting that people throw their machines in the bin at all. I'm suggesting that instead of choosing PPC as the successor to 68k, x86 should have been chosen.
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How can 486 be chosen as successor to 68040 as they are comparable in speed (with even a slight advantage to 68040) ?
x86 by that time were a regression compared to 68k and it would still have been the case today if 68k development didn't stop.
They were looking for something faster than 68040 - which the PPC is.
Mere (actually unproven) fact of being able to emulate 68000 is clearly not enough, don't forget that A500 wasn't competitive anymore in 1994.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hewitson
It would have been capable of 68k emulation as well as running new, native x86 Amiga software.
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Ask yourself why even today we don't have x86 based accelerator boards - not even together with 68k like ppc.
Speed doesn't do everything.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hewitson
AmigaOS 4.1 would be written for this platform enabllng people to turn dirt cheap PC's into next-gen Amigas, instead of requiring a ridiculously expensive, outdated and underpowered machine.
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Nobody would have bought this. Anyone accepting to use x86 as cpu would have bought a PC instead.
And no, dirt cheap PC's could not be turned into next-gen Amigas without having to also emulate the hardware, and for this even 300Mhz machines struggled.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hewitson
x86 is still evolving and getting faster and faster. PPC died (as a personal computing platform) many years ago. It has no future.
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But what is current future of x86 ? Wouldn't have it been better to directly switch to ARM ?