Quote:
Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott
I disagree. The entire PC industry was based on compatibility - no advance could be made without it because customers demanded it. Even IBM couldn't break free of it.
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PC's backward compatibility is based on runtime modes. The advancement is on i386's protected and X64's long modes. IBM OS/2 Warp and MS Windows 9X/NT were fighting for i386 OS dominance.
Doom runs in 386's protected mode.
For the 64-bit desktop computer era, IBM threw its hat in the ring with PowerPC 970, Intel had Itanium IA-64 (with weak IA-32) and AMD had AMD64 (with strong IA-32). AMD won this stage.
In current times, fat AArch64 directly competes against fat X64. AMD's Zen 5 CPU will directly compete against Qualcomm Oryon CPU (with key engineers from the Apple M1 team). MS is funding advertisements for Qualcomm Oryon-based laptops while AMD supports Valve SteamOS's Linux driver laptop and Samsung's Android (Linux) handset SoC initiatives.
The next Xbox generation doesn't guarantee an AMD X64 CPU since MS listed AArch64 or X64.
Unlike Intel, AMD's Zen 5 is going in full multi-pipeline AVX-512 hardware as mainstream and has a significant jump in integer units (4 to 6 IEU, 3 to 4 AGU). Qualcomm's Oryon team shouldn't be underestimated.
Like Apple's Rosetta 2.0, MS's X86 emulator for ARM doesn't include AVX since Intel threatens court action.
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PS5 has invested additional hardware for PS4 mode. PS5's 36 CU RDNA 1.9 (with RDNA 2 RT, missing other DirectX12_2 feature levels) GPU scale is based on PS4 Pro's 36 CU Polaris GCN and PS4's 18 CU Liverpool/Hawaii GCN scaling.
Unlike XBox's DirectX12.X(micro-coded front end for the GPU), PlayStation 4 and 5 have less freedom on GPU scaling.
MS's Direct3D ecosystem has resource-tracking features to enable hardware performance scaling from laptops to servers.
"Hit the metal" has a higher silicon price on backward compatibility.
PS5 is facing PiStorm-Emu68 (supports 68000 to 68060 instructions except for MMU) style timing-related backward compatibility issues despite full instruction set support.
Additional work was committed on Emu68's turtle mode features.
Reference
1.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PS5/comment...standing_ps5s/
"Turtle mode" is not new.
2.
https://www.hwcooling.net/en/amd-con...nce-avx-512en/
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott
Commodore had big plans to advance the Amiga, but they were always financially constrained and ran out out of money before they could achieve their goals. If it hadn't been for producing the 'backwards compatible' A500 they would have failed a lot earlier. When developing the A1200 they couldn't ignore the existing user base.
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Dave Haynie commented on Irving Gould's very high salary package in the millions.
Commodore Netherlands has a large-scale corruption that affected triple digits of millions. David Pleasance commented on this issue.
For UK and Germany CD32 unit sales:
68EC020 25 Mhz, 95,000 CD32 x $18 = $1,710,000
68EC020 16 Mhz, 95,000 CD32 x $15 = $1,425,000