English Amiga Board - View Single Post - PC games that made the Amiga look like Shit

Karlos · 08 December 2022, 10:33

Ah the armchair engineer. Sure, yes, I'm not a hardware engineer. That immediately disqualifies any opinion gleaned with hindsight, right?

I wonder which engineer foresaw that wasting space on the motherboard for an FPU that would never be fitted was a better use of the available space than memory which even in 1991 was on already on a steep downwards trajectory in price. If, by the time you go into mass production, memory is cheap enough, you could fit it, or release a 1200+ model later. Clearly the system would benefit far more from fitting an FPU than it would uncontended memory for the CPU, given the huge corpus of FPU dependent software in 1991. No wait, the other thing.

I don't think these decisions were necessarily made by engineers. Management, more likely.

08 December 2022, 10:33	#462
Karlos Alien Bleed Join Date: Aug 2022 Location: UK Posts: 4,188	Ah the armchair engineer. Sure, yes, I'm not a hardware engineer. That immediately disqualifies any opinion gleaned with hindsight, right? I wonder which engineer foresaw that wasting space on the motherboard for an FPU that would never be fitted was a better use of the available space than memory which even in 1991 was on already on a steep downwards trajectory in price. If, by the time you go into mass production, memory is cheap enough, you could fit it, or release a 1200+ model later. Clearly the system would benefit far more from fitting an FPU than it would uncontended memory for the CPU, given the huge corpus of FPU dependent software in 1991. No wait, the other thing. I don't think these decisions were necessarily made by engineers. Management, more likely. Last edited by Karlos; 08 December 2022 at 11:01.