Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by hammer

[ Show youtube player ]
SmallPT path tracer on Emu68 with four threads. New features require new or modified software.

Read the description of the video:
"Please keep in mind, the parallel threads do not mean smp here!"

It is still using just one core!
There is no exposure of more than one core in Emu68 (yet).

That said: A multicore variant of AROSx86 does exist, so with a modified scheduler this could work under AROS-68k, if Emu68 would support it.

AFAIK this method under AROS was more a proof of concept and adds quite some instability to the system. More likely Emu68 will some day provide access to other cores via a an ARM.library or use the other cores for gfx-accelertion.

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by hammer

ADA:

.
.
.

Reference
https://www.cmc.ca/wp-content/upload...ffin-Lacey.pdf


IBM Power9 and some NEC vector addon card have native support for quadruple precision 128-bit FP.

I know... but thanks for effort.

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Gorf

Read the description of the video:
"Please keep in mind, the parallel threads do not mean smp here!"

It is still using just one core!
There is no exposure of more than one core in Emu68 (yet).

That said: A multicore variant of AROSx86 does exist, so with a modified scheduler this could work under AROS-68k, if Emu68 would support it.

AFAIK this method under AROS was more a proof of concept and adds quite some instability to the system. More likely Emu68 will some day provide access to other cores via a an ARM.library or use the other cores for gfx-accelertion.

Multithreading doesn't mean it's SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) i.e. older asymmetric multithreading model. The keyword is "parallel threads".

SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) treats all CPU cores as equal. Asymmetric multithreading has a master thread with slave threads i.e. treating the other CPUs as unequal co-processors.

Saturn did not have SMP despite the two SuperH2 CPUs. The two CPUs were not interchangeable. Each CPU is assigned to different VPx (visual processor) chips. This makes programming complicated. I prefer uber singe core 120 Mhz PA-RISC / PowerPC / Pentium.

SMP needs OS change. There's "A-EonOS" System 54+ with SMP. Legacy Amiga apps are not SMP friendly.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by hammer

Multithreading doesn't mean it's SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) i.e. older asymmetric multithreading model. The keyword is "parallel threads".

But these threads in the video are NOT parallel but handled consecutive!

SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) treats all CPU cores as equal. Asymmetric multithreading has a master thread with slave threads i.e. treating the other CPUs as unequal co-processors.

But that is NOT what's happening here!

SMP needs OS change.

And any use of additional cores in Emu68 needs change in Emu68.
It is not there yet (and may never come).

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Gorf

But these threads in the video are NOT parallel but handled consecutive!

"Not smp" and "parallel threads" was stated.

Sequential threads are not "parallel threads"

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by hammer

"Not smp" and "parallel threads" was stated.

Sequential threads are not "parallel threads"

But that's only as "parallel" as any task under AmigaOS

Michal Schulz:
Now, I wanted to have a look at old AROS code which was written there by me and Kalamatee when we were testing AROS SMP. I have ported both SmallPT path tracer and Buddhabrot fractal generator to AmigaOS using P96, removed SMP code from there ...
https://www.patreon.com/posts/61450003

SmallPT is just starting 4 ordinary Exec tasks in this video. Nothing more.
This is running under unmodified AmigaOS.
One Core.

[Dunny]

Like I said, Trippin'

Edit: As I think I may have pointed out previously, this is the guy that thinks Commodore was done in by yours truly for enjoying Frontier on a stock 1200. I mean, we all had a good laugh about that on the discords and the facebooks and such but I'm beginning to think he's posting here earnestly and believes this stuff.

[oscar_ates]

Can we say Commodore did everything wrong after the A500? A600 was a big flop, not wanted at that time by the consumers, and managers thought it will sell like hot-cakes and created a large stock. CDTV same story, they thought big hit and it sold a few hundred in US. What was the reason of this large discrepancy between market realization and expectation? CD32 was last ditch effort what they coould bring together and it did not save the sinking ship.

[Promilus]

Originally Posted by Gorf

Like any other part of the chipset or eventually the 68K-line:
you have to provide some substitute in form of a compatible DSP-unit or software emulation or a mixture of both.
(same is true for legacy gfx-modes on PC as well or of course the XT mode for DOS on newer CPUs..)

DSPs do come with software libraries/drivers and the DSP in the AA3000+ is spoken to via the dsp3210.library and the dsp3210.device
https://aminet.net/package/driver/other/dsp3210

If you want to avoid that risk Amiga is the wrong platform, since it always relied on specialized hardware.

Apple did use 68K+DSP and it turned out this is not really a problem in the long run, as long as the whole ecosystem is alive and well you can switch architectures - and Apple has not done that once but three times now.

P.S.:
I am not really a strong DSP proponent and I am only arguing this case, because the objections to it are not really sound.
I would indeed prefer a better chipset, a more capable Blitter and Paula and so on.
But if the question is, what the A1200 should have been like and what simple solutions could have made it a more capable machine FastRAM + DSP are things that would have been available at the time, were already explored at Commodore, were cost effective and not difficult to implement.

as I only glimpsed through that aminet resources I didn't found anything particularly "out of the box" accelerating anything. Just few tools to make it simpler to build DSP app and then run it under AOS. In other words you still have to compile own DSP binary and it's pretty obvious to anyone that this binary won't run on different DSP.

Now you might think it's fine because at some point you can just emulate 68k and DSP all together. Sure, it's possible. And that is exactly why decent Nintendo64 emulation requires PC at level of late 2000s, PS2 requires PC with at least 2cores, sse4.1 and few gigs of ram which translates to at least Wolfdale iirc, and that's bare minimum. Recommended is 4 cores and AVX. And of course fairly good Passmark single core performance. That's for ~300MHz MIPS processor from late 90s and 2 vector co-processors. Now the first PPC (601e) was hardly fast enough to emulate properly 68k with actual speedup over things like 030 ... why it's so hard to imagine that even G3 would've struggled to emulate faster 68k AND DSP on top of that?

It's all fine if you create some middleware between application and dsp hardware. Some libs which have standardized subroutines etc. Then you can recreate that basically with any other architecture and it should work. But if you do binaries for specific DSP ... well you are screwed. Especially because DSP requires - by design - specific processing to get proper results in proper amount of time; which means to accurately emulate DSP behavior you cannot just JIT it and hope for the best.

[babsimov]

Originally Posted by pandy71

AT&T DSP was cheapest one and additionally supporting floats - closest competitor offering floats was TMS320C3x family - approx 10..20 times more expensive...
Also strongly disagree with claim that 56k was industrial standard - industrial standard those times was fixed point Texas Instruments TMS320Cxx family, probably also NEC. Float DSP's was never popular from many reasons. Motorola with DSP56k was relatively late on DSP market - 56k was mostly popular in audio applications...

Atari probably selected 56k due audio, perhaps also this can be part combined deal with 68030.

Apple selection of AT&T was probably price driven (similarly to Commodore).
Having 3210 on Amiga board means that for 20$ you had float performance 20..100 higher than 68882.

Thanks for these informations.

I reread what had been said to me and I was the one who didn't remember quite well enough.
In fact they explained to me that as you say, the most common DSPs at the time were those with fixed point. On the other hand, they said that the DSP 56001 was one of the best sellers. They didn't understand why Commodore had somehow isolated itself with the choice of the DSP 3210.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I never found one that didn't work on the A1200. I did have a Quantum 100 MB 'Go' drive on my A600 with KS 37.300 that sometimes wasn't recognized on cold boot or reboot (once it got 'stuck', it stayed that way even on soft reboot). I fixed it with a switch in the cable.

My memory is getting a bit fuzzy. Here's the real story on that Quantum 'Go' drive:-

Bruce Abbott

Oct 23, 1998, 8:00:00?PM
to

This is caused by a bug in the drive firmware. Apparently it tries to
configure its parameters according to what the BIOS tells it at bootup,
which sometimes fails (because the Amiga doesn't have a BIOS?). Once
the drive screws up it will cause the Amiga to crash every time, as
scsi.device doesn't like -1 for the number of cylinders! The bad
parameters are held in non-volatile storage in the drive, so even
booting from a floppy directly after power-on is impossible.

You may be able to revive the drive by plugging it into an old peecee
and manually setting the correct parameters into its CMOS. If this
works (you may have to try several peecees to find a compatible BIOS)
then you can put the drive back into your Amiga. Unfortunately it
will fail again sometime later, which is dependant on the exact time
it takes for the Amiga to start accessing the drive after power-on. A
bare A1200 will fail after just a few cold boots, but with a RAM card
it may last a lot longer. Similarly, having an accelarator card may
improve your success rate.

If your A1200 shows the 'insert workbench' screen on bootup, the drive
has probably gone again. At this point you have _one_ chance to revive
the drive, provided that you do NOT reboot! If you do reboot at this
point then the crashing cycle will recur.

As I found this problem was really annoying on my 127MB GO! drive, I
wired a switch into pin 37 of the IDE cable so the drive could be
disabled during bootup. Then I wrote a small program which accesses
the drive directly (not through scsi.device), and resets the drive's
parameters to their correct values. If you want a copy of this program
then email me with your drive's parameters (cylinders, heads, sectors
per track) and I can send you a version assembled for your drive. I
also have included my asm sorce code in case you can do this yourself.

;----------------------------------------------------------
; Force disk geometry parameters into A600/A1200 IDE drive
;----------------------------------------------------------
;
; B.H.Abbott 12-12-93

opt i-

output ram:SetIDE


SECTS = 17
HEADS = 5 ; change to suit your drive
CYLS = 2891

main:
move.w #$4000,$dff09a ; disable interrupts
lea $00da2000,A4 ; address of IDE drive
move.b #SECTS,8(A4) ; sects/trk
move.b #HEADS-1,24(A4) ; numheads-1
move.b #CYLS/256,20(a4) ; cyls (high byte)
move.b #CYLS&255,16(a4) ; cyls (low byte)
move.b #$91,28(A4) ; command = set drive parameters
move.w #$C000,$dff09a ; enable interrupts
moveq #0,d0
rts

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bruce Abbott http://www.hawkesbay.com/hcw/ bhab...@inhb.co.nz
------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by oscar_ates

Can we say Commodore did everything wrong after the A500? A600 was a big flop, not wanted at that time by the consumers, and managers thought it will sell like hot-cakes and created a large stock. CDTV same story, they thought big hit and it sold a few hundred in US. What was the reason of this large discrepancy between market realization and expectation? CD32 was last ditch effort what they coould bring together and it did not save the sinking ship.

Commodore never understood what people loved about the Amiga1000 that was the reason they bought the technology in the cheaper form of an A500.

But then, some people here do not either .

[babsimov]

Originally Posted by oscar_ates

Can we say Commodore did everything wrong after the A500? A600 was a big flop, not wanted at that time by the consumers, and managers thought it will sell like hot-cakes and created a large stock. CDTV same story, they thought big hit and it sold a few hundred in US. What was the reason of this large discrepancy between market realization and expectation? CD32 was last ditch effort what they coould bring together and it did not save the sinking ship.

Maybe.

The Amiga 500 and 2000 were the ideas of Thomas Rattigan. Irving Gould fired him right after. But Thomas Rattigan protested and won over millions in compensation against Commodore.

If Thomas Rattigan had remained in office, perhaps the management would have been more competent.
Medhi Ali hired in his place clearly showed that he was totally incompetent. So combined with Irving Gould, we probably couldn't make a worse combination.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by hammer

...
amigaworld, october 1993...

Page 48 of 104
a1200 = $399.

Page 82 of 104...

I'm providing the price list and you're not.

I got my numbers from the same magazine.

Amiga World October 1993
Page 91
Software Hut advert
A1200 $399
A1200 w/40MB HD $545 (+$146)
...
2.5" IDE Drives
Conner 40MB Hard Drive $139.95

Happy now?

You're not going to win this debate.

So that's what this is all about - 'winning' the debate? Not for me it isn't. I'm just trying to counter the negativity.

VS

https://vintageapple.org/pcworld/pdf..._June_1993.pdf
Gateway Party List, Page 72 of 314

4SX-33 with 486-SX 33Mhz, 4MB RAM, 170 MB HDD, Windows Video accelerator 1MB video RAM, 14-inch monitor for $1494[sic]

More irrelevant PC crap. Spamming off-topic noise won't 'win the debate'.

But since you insist...

There's more than a slight difference between $399 and $1495. Sure, if you added all the stuff needed to give each machine equivalent hardware specs the PC would probably turn out a little cheaper. That's totally logical - and what I have always said (anyone who expected otherwise was an idiot).

But you couldn't get any PC for $399, let alone one that would run the latest PC games - while a base model A1200 would run the latest Amiga games. Even with a hard drive and accelerator card it was cheaper, with the advantage that you could add those things as your budget allowed (by which time they would probably be significantly cheaper).

Not that I'm advocating one way or the other. Buy both an Amiga and a PC if you can afford it, and enjoy using both (I did). But if you couldn't afford both the A1200 was a whole lot of fun for a lot less money.

SoundBlaster Pro clone ISA card is not expensive.

For $1495 I would expect a frickin' sound card built in! Imagine playing Doom on this machine - 'beep', 'squawk', 'grate'. What a disappointment!

[Tigerskunk]

Originally Posted by babsimov

Maybe.

The Amiga 500 and 2000 were the ideas of Thomas Rattigan.

The success of the 500 was because of the hype of the Amiga1000 though.

We all looked at that and wanted to have one, but it was kind of unreachable.

The 500 was our ticket into that dream world.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by oscar_ates

Can we say Commodore did everything wrong after the A500? A600 was a big flop, not wanted at that time by the consumers, and managers thought it will sell like hot-cakes and created a large stock. CDTV same story, they thought big hit and it sold a few hundred in US. What was the reason of this large discrepancy between market realization and expectation? CD32 was last ditch effort what they coould bring together and it did not save the sinking ship.

A1200 was a good move.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by Tigerskunk

The success of the 500 was because of the hype of the Amiga1000 though.

We all looked at that and wanted to have one, but it was kind of unreachable.

The 500 was our ticket into that dream world.

Hmm not sure of that myself, the A500 still took a while to get some decent sales numbers, and by the time it did the A1000 was a distant memory, i bet most people who bought their A500 didn’t even know about the A1000. Amiga magazines were mainly supplements before AUI came long, so unless you were buying Computing Weekly or whatever i doubt most people would have heard of it.

I am of course talking from a UK perspective *other perspectives may vary

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by babsimov

If Thomas Rattigan had remained in office, perhaps the management would have been more competent.
Medhi Ali hired in his place clearly showed that he was totally incompetent. So combined with Irving Gould, we probably couldn't make a worse combination.

While Rattigan turned C0 back into a profitable zone and initialized the A500 and A2000 development, he also made quite a lot mistakes.
The last round of lay offs was way too harsh on the engineering departments. Development came to an halt.

Spitting the development of the A500 and A2000 into two different teams was questionable - at least the way it was done. The German group did not communicate with the US group and vice versa. Leading to such absurdities as not letting Germany know about the integration of a many discrete parts into Garry, which was only fixed with the B2000.

Also the integrating the bus switch into Agnus but not making the small changes to be able to address the full 1MB as ChipRAM, despite of the package providing enough pins to do so, was a grave lack of oversight ... the SlowRAM stupidity was haunting the A500 for all its life.

Rattigan was a good overall manager, but coming from a softdrink company he had of course no clue about computers or electronics whatsoever.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Tigerskunk

The success of the 500 was because of the hype of the Amiga1000 though.

We all looked at that and wanted to have one, but it was kind of unreachable.

Speaking about it:

https://archive.org/details/1984-amiga-presentation/

The original sales pitch document from Amiga Inc. emerged from the deep.
This document was used in the early negotiations between the companies.

(I still think the stackable approach would have been a much better idea compared to the Zorro slot on the side on the A1000.)

[oscar_ates]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

A1200 was a good move.

A1200 was a better move but 2/3 years late in the game