Quote:
Originally Posted by touko
[SNIP]
RAM always have been expensive, it's not an amiga fact, and i don't see how SRAM at 8mhz(archimedes) could be less expensive or more or less at the same price than DRAM at 3.5 mhz(amiga),even in 1992.
And the difference in price between an A500 and a base archimedes in france was close to twice ,maybe more .*
EDIT : in a french mag "atari ST magazine n°21" the archimedes A310 was sold 11990 francs vs A500 4490 francs, without monitor in 1988,so more than 2.5x the price of the amiga and the 512 KB of RAM for amiga was sold for 1090 francs,so i'll don't call the archimedes not that expensive .
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SRAM ? Where does this come from ?
DRAM at 3.5 Mhz for the Amiga ? What the heck ?
Where did you get that from ?
IIRC the Archimedes didn't use the same type of widely available DRAM as used in the Amiga, so yes by comparison DRAM for the Archie was expensive in 1987.
Remember the Archimedes' ARM (or better : ARM + MEMC) has a 32 bit wide memory bus, it doesn't access memory in chunks of 16 bits as the Amiga does ;-) , so it must have the right type of memory to do so, and it was rare and expensive at the time (how many true 32 bits machines in the world at the time ?).
It was not as rare in 1992, things had changed, so prices were much lower.
The price you give for the Archies are French prices, about 20% more expensive than UK prices ... And still if you want to keep up comparing an Archie with an Amiga just add an accelerator card to bring you over 4 MIPS (you won't find any), a graphics card to get higher screen modes and more colours (I doubt there were some at not-silly prices) and a sound card to get 8 voices (you won't find any). Plus excellent BASIC and so on and so forth ...
So comparing machines only using the price as a basis when they are so different is like comparing salads and carotts : that just makes no sense (but it is great to give the Amiga an advantage based on lower price and hiding the lack of features the Archie has as standard
).
But let's play with this idea of price-biased comparing machines, with a great sense of humour : I declare it just means the Spectrum or the C64 were the best machines, much better than an Amiga : after all they cost at the time less than a quarter / sixth of the price of an Amiga, when the Amiga wasn't more than 4 or 6 times better after all. Ah ah aha !
I love exposing lack of intellectual coherence, always used to bash the Archies.
Oh I was just going to forget : when comparing price of the Archie and the Amiga, maybe a bit of fairness would mean that you compare the Amiga 2000 with the A310, as they both use separate casing and keyboard.
And for the price of the Archies, they followed the same downtrend all machines know, high the year they are launched, and then becoming cheaper year after year ... Archie is from 1987, Amiga is from 1985, yes, it's good to remember that.
I won't tease you reminding you how ridiculously high priced the Amiga 1000 was, when it was launched, with only 256 kbytes of RAM ;-) and how much it cost in France when import circuits were not in place (as it has always been the case for the Archies in France. Acorn didn't give a damn about distributing in Frogland : for them it was UK 1st, then English speaking countries like Australia and New Zealand).
You can compare the launching price and the specs of the Amiga 1000 and the Archimedes A310, you'll see the overpriced machine wasn't the Archie.