02 May 2023, 11:35 | #21 |
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I am an ASIC designer and I work as part of a team that design SoC chips today. When silicon comes back from the fab the first time, it takes approx 2 years before it is qualified to go on sale. There are 3 firmware teams, one developing the HAL, another the low-level test firmware sitting on the HAL to help diagnose all the ASIC bugs and devise workarounds for the HAL and another team developing the mission firmware that sits on top of the HAL. Mission Firmware would be the equivalent of AmigaOS and it doesn't run for a long time.
Even if the chips are functional enough to sell they have to go through what is called corner lot testing to ensure that they will still work at extreme ranges of temperature and voltages. That itself can take half a year. I know I sat putting samples into an oven and a freezer, wrote software to monitor and modify voltages, to find an ASIC bug. Yes our SoCs are more complicated than AAA, but we have 10x more people. |
02 May 2023, 11:44 | #22 |
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02 May 2023, 16:21 | #23 | ||
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In 1997 I had an Amiga that was as powerful as a typical PC of the day, with an 060 CPU, 32MB RAM, RTG card and Ethernet. What it didn't have was the software required to do what I needed. Therefore I reluctantly had to use a PC instead. For most people that happened earlier. In fact most people never even considered the Amiga as an option - they were PC from day one. The name of the game back then was IBM compatibility, and that hasn't changed much today. Quote:
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02 May 2023, 17:22 | #24 | ||
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02 May 2023, 18:24 | #25 | |
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AAA would never ever have made it to an A500/1200 price bracket machine, that being the bulk of Commodore's income. Ditto for Hombre. Ditto for absurd CPU successor PA RISC/MIPS etc ideas when clearly the answer was to move over to dirt cheap in terms of price performance x86 (via AMD). Apple made the right choice, pick a powerful spec x86 based off the shelf solution (CPU and graphics chips) to replace your esoteric slowly advanced hardware choice. That's why Apple are still here, they put in the effort of migrating off Motorola and onto cheaper x86 PC world options and they understood the advantage of not owning a PC wasn't the alternate CPU architecture etc it was the superior OS exclusive to their own computers. |
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02 May 2023, 18:38 | #26 | ||
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Same for Hombre, which according to Commodore's own documents had a design goal of a low cost (sub-40$), high performance chipset. Quote:
Pictures have been publicly available for a good while. It seems manufacturing was courtesy by HP, not sure if this is true for each chip though. |
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02 May 2023, 20:12 | #27 |
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Hilarious, not sure if this is Dave Haynie upload but it looks like reviving dead body by applying some voltage across muscle and making it contract... AAA would not change anything for Amiga, perhaps only extend a bit misery of falling Commodore...
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02 May 2023, 23:50 | #28 |
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For context, if you haven't watched it already, you need to watch Dave Haynie's video, The Deathbed Vigil. It provides a ton of insight into what Commodore engineering was trying to do versus what Commodore management would allow them to do.
AGA/AA/Pandora was never supposed to exist, but came into development as a "quick" stopgap because AAA development was taking too long (probably because it was starved of R&D resources). But even then, management dragged their feet, insisting on the development of useless new ECS machines like the 2200/2400; AGA was supposed to be available somewhere in the window of late '89 and early '91. Instead, it came out late '92, and too late to be available for the holiday shopping season in high quantities. By the time it was widely available in 1993, VGA had become immovably entrenched. Imagine if we'd gotten the A3000+ and a 1200-like machine in 1990. VGA existed by that point, of course, but it was expensive and wasn't yet ubiquitous. Most PC games were still EGA at that point. If the original engineering timeline had held, with AGA in ~1990 and AAA in ~1993, the Amiga definitely could have remained competitive as the "obvious" (and drastically less expensive) choice well into the late 90s, or certainly long enough for a post-AAA architecture to be available. A 1280x1024 screen on AAA? That would have been a game-changer for CAD and other workstation/productivity applications. That sort of resolution didn't become common on PCs/Macs until well into the late 2000s. In other words, if you look at AA/AAA in the contexts for which they were originally intended by engineering, e.g., the markets of ~1990 and ~1993, respectively, they're damn impressive. And if that timeline had held I think computer history would be much different and much more interesting. |
03 May 2023, 08:33 | #29 | ||||
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On the software side, Commodore faced a much harder task than IBM did with VGA (which just needed a BIOS ROM to use the new screen modes). Workbench 2.0 was a major rewrite of the OS. It was released in late 1990 with the A3000. Had AGA support been necessary it probably would have taken longer. I think the earliest AGA could have been released was late 1991. Dave Haynie says the development of AA/AGA was paused sometime in 1991 by 'human bus error' Bill Sydnes, then restarted in 1992 when his plan to introduce mid-range A3000 style Amigas failed. This is the only time that realistically could have been saved. But let's say they did manage it in 1990. At that time the A500 was still selling well with numbers increasing, and OCS software was still getting better. It would be foolish to withdraw the A500 when demand was still high, and it would take a while for AGA to take over. So how much difference would it make? I suspect not much. OCS would still be the 'lowest common denominator' that games were made for. OTOH 1990 was the year that VGA games like Monkey Island and King's Quest V were released. Perhaps if an Amiga which was capable of running such games in 256 colors was available then it might have revitalized the Amiga games market. Quote:
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Still, that doesn't stop us from imagining how awesome an AAA Amiga might have been to own in 1993. Your PC friends would be so jealous! |
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03 May 2023, 09:04 | #30 | |
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That would have been the death of the Amiga as we know it. But hey, what did you want a computer for? If it was playing games or running apps the PC was the obvious choice. Just make everything 'off the shelf', and keep your old Amiga to run legacy Amiga stuff if you still want to. Which is what we are doing today. Hell, today we can have an 'Amiga' more powerful than any hardware that could be produced for it using just a stock PC! Of course to do this a few chips need to be emulated... |
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03 May 2023, 11:12 | #31 | |
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You need both software and the hardware to run the software *well*. |
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03 May 2023, 11:22 | #32 | |
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For a long time after 680x0, Apple used PPC hardware as a selling point of difference, and this was in addition to MacOS eg the "altivec", "super computer" ads they ran. When it became clear that PPC could not match the price/performance of x86 they moved to intel, and then as the hardware point of difference no longer existed, they focused on the OS as their point of difference. Today with the M chips, its back to hardware and software as their point of difference. Seems this thread has to many software guys. Hardware matters. |
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03 May 2023, 12:47 | #33 |
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I totally disagree with that. If Apple's history tells anything then that hardware did not matter too much - as long as they could preserve their software basis, they changed the underlying hardware and added a translation layer. It is just that x86 development is at standstill, and that is because the hardware is about to collapse about its legacy.
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03 May 2023, 16:41 | #34 | |
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And this is why I think Commodore's biggest mistake wasn't hardware or R&D cuts by management (which was dumb, but)... It was (IMHO) not going after the education market and dislodging Apple. I think the Amiga, with it's TV video compatible subsystem, was a perfect match for the education market. Commodore needed to do what Apple did, but more. Discounts / support for the education market. It is the market that kept Apple relevant during their down times (well, until they got into the phone/music business). Of course, for Commodore to recognize that, they would have had to have good marketing and business awareness. And they just wanted the next C64... Until they wanted the next PC, which was too late and not going to happen. I'm not as worried about the application software not being there. If you get into the schools, the software will be there. The publisher's would be smart enough to follow that market... |
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03 May 2023, 23:48 | #35 | |
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Forgot to add to be not completely OT, Miner in interviews claimed that before his departure from Commodore, Ranger chipset was ready (silicone proven) yet Commodore decided to go for ECS instead Ranger, later AAA seem to be more or less ready yet Commodore decided to go for AGA (AA) chipset - this also can be considered as one of main reasons for Commodore failure - many projects started but commercialized are those very "conservative". And 'Advanced AMIGA Architecture' nicely shows cost of Commodore product - they had wide margin. Last edited by pandy71; 03 May 2023 at 23:54. |
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04 May 2023, 02:15 | #36 | |
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It happened to all of them, Acorn had a nice CPU but there was no real innovation on the graphics end of their low end machines. Atari did put a DSP in the Falcon and it did magical things for musicians but it wasn't going to suddenly make Ridge Racer possible on your £600 Falcon etc. Nothing to be ashamed of, happened to Sony too as the PS3 was highly esoteric but PS4 is not much more than a highly optimised x86-64 type system with a highly focuses UNIX core. Xbox was always a PC in disguise except for the Xbox 360 too. Amithlon is the sort of thing Commodore should have been working towards, the 486SX CPU was a game changer for home computers, they really should have noticed that x86 had already overtaken Motorola 68xxx CPUs in bang/buck terms. It was dumb to assume there would be no blitter equipped SVGA cards, and indeed there were such things whilst Commodore was still pimping the £2000 A4000 right to the bitter end, which in reality was no faster than a £400 33mhz 486SX PC in 1994. To make things worse the Mac LC475 was about the price of an A4000/030 with the same CPU and 16 million colours of A4000/040. Commodore were stuck, there is no evidence anything they were doing at CSG would have saved them because Commodore didn't have the financial reserves to fight, like Nolan at Atari had he not sold to Warner there never would have been the financial power to make the VCS a thing. You would need to manufacture a million Hombre chipset based motherboards in a single production run to compete with Sega/Sony in the mid 1990s. If you don't have the cash you can't take a seat at this poker game. Maybe Commodore should have spent more effort making a success of their PC business, it worked for Amstrad in the early 1990s and Amstrad branding was more of a stigma than a bonus lol and yet you still saw Amstrad PCs in offices. They gave up on one sector to concentrate on another that was rapidly disappearing. Maybe if the 3DO chipset was made for an A1200 successor and shoved in a £500 internal CD equipped option it would be OK, there is no way AAA could ever have done anything like that and 3DO by Xmas 1994 is the minimum quality consumers would be interested in. There was some cool stuff in AAA, something to do with real-time video etc but this is no use for a mass market machine to keep Commodore afloat, they needed RJ Mical & Dave Needle levels of engineering talent not to go bust in 1994, simple as that. Dave Haynie and co at CSG were no Dave Needle/RJ combo of genius that's for sure |
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04 May 2023, 03:47 | #37 | |
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It would have allow the modernization of the MOS plant, and the 6502. 2020 Apple of the time. Note that the improvement of the 6502 was finally done by others and was widely used: 6502 Computers and Games, 6502 Variations and derivatives. Last edited by TEG; 04 May 2023 at 21:32. |
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04 May 2023, 04:38 | #38 | |
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Hell, their entire marketing philosophy was literally that: Think Different! PPC was part of that. And it worked- many Mac users argued and genuinely believed that PPC was one component that gave them better performance and experience. |
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04 May 2023, 04:41 | #39 | |
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04 May 2023, 06:30 | #40 | ||||||
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Between 1991 and 1994 I was a developer in a small educational software company. Like many it was run by a teacher who developed his own software for classroom use, then attempted to market it. I wish I had started working there earlier when I could have had more impact. |
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