01 May 2023, 01:03 | #1 |
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AGA successor: Document about the Advanced Amiga Architecture published
Saw this linked over on Hacker News and couldn't see it mentioned anywhere here so thought some of you guys might be interested :
https://archive.org/details/advanced...ge/n3/mode/2up "Document for the Commodore-Amiga Advanced Amiga Architecture. Dated June 18, 1992, this was the never-released whole new Amiga system architecture. This project was started in 1988, and first silicon was available in 1993. Commodore's business problems prevented subsequent progress on this system. " Apologies if this is old news. |
01 May 2023, 01:56 | #2 |
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Evidence that "first silicon was available in 1993"?
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01 May 2023, 14:25 | #3 |
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It's a quote from the uploader of the document, Dave Haynie, who was a lead hardware engineer at Commodore and worked on the design + made this video about the last days of Commodore:
[ Show youtube player ]
So unless someone has evidence to the contrary it seems reasonable to assume that what he says is accurate. But I'm just an ST guy who knows next to nothing about Commodore and Amiga history, so don't take my word for it. |
01 May 2023, 18:36 | #4 |
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Oh wow this is new documentation on Triple A! Can't wait to digest, thanks for posting.
No secret we all know but they admit AA/AGA was outdated before it was released:- |
01 May 2023, 19:00 | #5 |
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01 May 2023, 22:04 | #6 |
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01 May 2023, 22:24 | #7 |
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01 May 2023, 23:48 | #8 | |
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Thanks for that, I didn't realize it was Dave Haynie himself who uploaded the document.
The problem here is that his statement was made on April 16, 2023, 30 years after the fact. However in an interview he did with Kees Witteveen of Amiga.org in 2003, he said "...and of course, AAA was abandoned before it was capable of even booting AmigaOS". So if there was a 'first silicon', it apparently wasn't good enough to be used in an actual Amiga. According to his AAA overview document, it consisted of "four completely new VLSI chips, implemented in high speed CMOS". AFAIK Commodore didn't have the ability to make such chips in-house, so where did they get this 'first silicon' from? He also states "The interface to any kind of system will be implemented in some kind of “glue” chip, most likely a new gate array, though this function certainly could be implemented in a PAL and TTL based circuit, as on the AAA prototype system.". So did he have a full working chipset, or was the prototype using something else? It might seem like nitpicking, but when we have people making statements like "AA was ready in early 1990, and Commodore slackers only released it at the end of 1992", I think it's important to stick to known facts and reasonable conclusions. If the AAA chipset was advanced enough to have actual silicon produced in 1993 then IMO Commodore's engineers were not 'slacking'. Quote:
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02 May 2023, 00:32 | #9 |
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We talked a lot about AGA was not enough in the other disappointed thread. Apparently it was even obvious to even Amiga engineers that it was "too little, too late".
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02 May 2023, 00:46 | #10 |
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Does this mean AAA chipset based Amigas ship in two weeks fingers crossed?
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02 May 2023, 00:48 | #11 | ||||
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Quote:
Quote:
What this means is that the window of 'slacking' is much smaller than has been suggested. Regarding AAA, I found this from Dave Haynie. Quote:
Quote:
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02 May 2023, 00:59 | #12 |
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So basically, your saying Dave's stories change from time to time, so it's tough to accept anything he says as detailed fact (i.e. what specific year anything happened)?
Well, he wasn't called HazeyDave for no reason... ;-) |
02 May 2023, 02:35 | #13 |
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02 May 2023, 03:03 | #14 | |
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Quote:
But perhaps we shouldn't dwell on the past too much. This document is interesting for what we might want to do in the future. Could we use it to help design a 'new' chipset with features similar to AAA? |
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02 May 2023, 04:03 | #15 | |
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Quote:
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02 May 2023, 05:18 | #16 |
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Yeah you know what if they just said, hey rather than spending $5-$6million, we just put a slot in there, and put the bestest cheapest card in there. Like they did on the A4000. And then proved everyone who made a better card, which was everyone was more competent at it than them. And now we have UAGA and XAGA and žAGA.
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02 May 2023, 06:39 | #17 |
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To keep the Amiga hardware competitive for a few years more in the 90's, improvements were not needed so much with sprites, blitter, or copper, but rather with chip ram speed. The PC's display hardware before 3D cards came out wasn't often more than a graphics card that offered to open a screen with various resolutions, while the CPU filled the screen with pixels. But Amiga was stuck with an ISA-like slow bus, while PCs got PCI, which was fast enough for fast 486's and Pentiums.
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02 May 2023, 08:09 | #18 | |
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Quote:
yea, they should probably have focused on getting the bandwidrth /speed to do 800x600 @256 colors at usable speeds by the time the A3000 was released, that would have been a good place to start. |
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02 May 2023, 09:24 | #19 | ||
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Quote:
First of all, you say yourself that the software is the critical part, not the hardware, so which difference does it make? Quote:
And why is that different from today? But even then, we *do* have such chipsets. They are just your average PC graphics cards - which can do a lot better than AAA ever could. |
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02 May 2023, 10:39 | #20 |
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AAA _could_ have made a difference if released in 1990.
After they missed that target they should’ve just gone with ISA and then PCI - and get access to the massive ecosystem that already existed for the PC. You could’ve kept the chipset as an integrated entry-level solution while power users could’ve purchased PC graphic chipsets. Which is what happened in the end - they just had to waste time to reimplement it in Zorro. |
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