Commodore announces A5000

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Aulapatchuc

If an A4000 with a full 040 costed 2200€ back in 1994, we must be talking about 5000€ + on this baby.

Yeah, that sounds about right. I mean that config must have raised some eyebrows, so I'm still a bit surprised that it really made it into the magazine even as a rumour.

[CCCP alert]

"Chinese Whispers" effect from the engineers hopes, to the magazine published journalist's articles to wild exaggerations in 'docs'.

The A5000 would have had to compete with existing Pentium PC's with the server strength PC-I X standard (133mhz bus with up to 64bit data transfers) as well as the hideously large gap in price performance between their proposed RISC chips vs top of the line x86 CPU in PCs/server rigs of the time like Pentium and Pentium Pro. All to run the same Win NT OS. It would have been a total disaster, it would have made the CDTV sales look like Playstation 1 market expanding record breaking levels.

The A4000 had an accelerator called Raptor, which had MIPS (HP PA?) RISC chip(s) onboard for obscene performance for Lightwave rendering. Price of like 5 A4000/040 computers but....
"One company rendered a frame, on a
A4000 running at 25MHz with 18Mb of memory,
which took in excess of 64 hours to complete.
The Raptor needed only 41 minutes to render the
same frame!"

It was used in conjunction with Windows NT. I suppose at $5000 such an Amiga 5000 would be a bargain for that top end market. Wouldn't do much for Commodore's profitability really though in the grand scheme of things.

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by CCCP alert

The A4000 had an accelerator called Raptor, which had MIPS (HP PA?) RISC chip(s) onboard for obscene performance for Lightwave rendering. Price of like 5 A4000/040 computers but....
"One company rendered a frame, on a
A4000 running at 25MHz with 18Mb of memory,
which took in excess of 64 hours to complete.
The Raptor needed only 41 minutes to render the
same frame!"

It was used in conjunction with Windows NT. I suppose at $5000 such an Amiga 5000 would be a bargain for that top end market. Wouldn't do much for Commodore's profitability really though in the grand scheme of things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_...aster_Screamer

[CCCP alert]

Originally Posted by pandy71

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_...aster_Screamer

Interesting read, the first version of Raptor I know of was on a card for the A4000. I will have to find the article again to find out if it went in a Zorro III or CPU slot.

PS1 used a MIPS R3000 type CPU and was dirt cheap so really we are talking an A5000 for 1000% the price of the best console of 1994 (OK Dec 1994 Japan only). The Amiga 500 at least was only about 250% the price of a MegaDrive in 1988/89.

[Bruce Abbott]

All this proves is that Commodore's death in 1994 was a good thing, because they were going to destroy the Amiga anyway. Different hardware, different OS, still not IBM compatible!

[TCD]

Not IBM compatible, but at least Windows NT compatible:

(Amiga Format issue 65, 11/1994)

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

All this proves is that Commodore's death in 1994 was a good thing, because they were going to destroy the Amiga anyway. Different hardware, different OS, still not IBM compatible!

Biggest problem of Commodore was inability to quickly adopt leading PC technology HW (mostly graphic) into Amiga ecosystem...

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by pandy71

Biggest problem of Commodore was inability to quickly adopt leading PC technology HW (mostly graphic) into Amiga ecosystem...

PC graphics hardware in the Amiga? Why would they?

[CCCP alert]

Originally Posted by TCD

Not IBM compatible, but at least Windows NT compatible:

Win NT was nothing special, a typical mediocre OS compared to all rivals like OS/2 Warp and Unix.Commodore chose not to start using the obvious choice of AMD powered x86 CPUs to cut costs drastically on top end hardware. It's not like you will magically be playing Pitfall The Mayan Adventure via Win NT either. DOS/Win 3.1 compatibility was inferior to OS/2 again.

Amithlon had the right idea, Commodore did not.

[TCD]

Yep, surely an inferior technology like Windows NT would never win against a superior technology like OS/2. That's never ever going to happen. Again.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by TCD

Yep, surely an inferior technology like Windows NT would never win against a superior technology like OS/2. That's never ever going to happen. Again.

OS/2 lost out because IBM was arrogant.

OS/2

The two companies had significant differences in culture and vision. Microsoft favored the open hardware system approach that contributed to its success on the PC. IBM sought to use OS/2 to drive sales of its own hardware, and urged Microsoft to drop features, such as fonts, that IBM's hardware did not support...

The two products have significant differences in API. OS/2 was announced when Windows 2.0 was near completion, and the Windows API already defined. However, IBM requested that this API be significantly changed for OS/2. Therefore, issues surrounding application compatibility appeared immediately...

OS/2 sales were largely concentrated in networked computing used by corporate professionals; however, by the early 1990s, it was overtaken by Microsoft Windows NT. While OS/2 was arguably technically superior to Microsoft Windows 95, OS/2 failed to develop much penetration in the consumer and stand-alone desktop PC segments; there were reports that it could not be installed properly on IBM's own Aptiva series of home PCs.

Microsoft made an offer in 1994 where IBM would receive the same terms as Compaq (the largest PC manufacturer at the time) for a license of Windows 95, if IBM ended development of OS/2 completely. IBM refused and instead went with an "IBM First" strategy of promoting OS/2 Warp and disparaging Windows, as IBM aimed to drive sales of its own software as well as hardware...

IBM officials later conceded that OS/2 would not have been a viable operating system to keep them in the PC business.

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

PC graphics hardware in the Amiga? Why would they?

Why wouldn't they? RTG graphics is nothing but PC hardware, yet more capable compared to what CBM could deliver with the chipset. The advantage would be that CBM could have profited from the development of a larger market.

[TCD]

There is a pretty good series of videos on YouTube about the IBM PC and OS/2: [ Show youtube player ]

[CCCP alert]

OS/2 Warp was 150 bucks extra and a user installed operation post purchase, Windows 3.1/95 was free and pre-installed on every PC sold.

This really doesn't have anything to do with the NEXT/UNIX OS sector that graphics workstations like the A5000 would have to compete with. There is also the slight problem Win NT doesn't actually bring anything to the party if your proposed tasks include desktop video or anything remotely cutting edge in the creative fields. Win NT is fine for a budget file server to save a few pennies off a Lotus Domino server from IBM etc but it is of zero interest to the sort of people purchasing graphic workstations.

MS logo does not sit well in the Quantel Paintbox marketplace of graphic workstations, it only reduces your chances. Commodore should have known this well before the A5000 vapourware rumours put out to magazines.

Perhaps they should have actually improved KS/WB 1.x rather than losing desirable features like text to speech everybody else was cramming into their OS. Amiga top end models in the 90s needed something as powerful as NEXT or UNIX as well as full integration of PowerPC CPU into the OS Kernal not some kludge of a wedge we had to put up with as PPC accelerator owners.

Commodore lost their way by 93/94, there was no evidence they had a clue what to do to stay alive. A5000 was a bit of a dumb idea, they had no base model chipset replacement even on the drawing board to rival the texture mapped 3D gaming consoles on sale for peanuts by Dec 1994. The A5000 is a sign of a very sick company, a terminal sickness with a very bad prognosis for the future.

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

PC graphics hardware in the Amiga? Why would they?

It is quite obvious that Commodore was unable to compete with PC graphic vendors (there was multiple billions of $ invested in PC technology) - so only one way for Commodore to keep Amiga alive was use PC technology enriched substantially by Commodore own, mostly software IP.
We had this discussion multiple times - this was no longer 1..2million $ investments in FAB where Commodore was able to compete, it required 20++ mln at the beginning of 90's and each decade raise investment stack 10..20 times. At some point Commodore could be fabless but doing independent R&D was expensive. So only wise way was to start using PC technologies (like PCI) and build ecosystem around those technologies adding Commodore IP value.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by CCCP alert

Commodore lost their way by 93/94, there was no evidence they had a clue what to do to stay alive.

I'd say by 93/94 they were already dead. They lost their way around 90/91.

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by CCCP alert

This really doesn't have anything to do with the NEXT/UNIX OS sector that graphics workstations like the A5000 would have to compete with. There is also the slight problem Win NT doesn't actually bring anything to the party if your proposed tasks include desktop video or anything remotely cutting edge in the creative fields. Win NT is fine for a budget file server to save a few pennies off a Lotus Domino server from IBM etc but it is of zero interest to the sort of people purchasing graphic workstations.

Um, you do know that pretty much all those graphical workstations now run using a direct decedent of NT right?

I don't think Commodore were necessarily wrong to have decided to bet on NT and, at the time, it wasn't necessarily clear cut that x86 would endure as well as it did so looking at other potentially cleaner architectures might have made sense.

The safe bet would definitely have been x86 PCs though, although at that point it's not clear where they could differentiate. Maybe using some of the Hombre technology in PC graphics cards? It wouldn't have been Amiga though, but by 1995 I think they'd lost way too much ground for that to be a wholly viable strategy.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

I don't think Commodore were necessarily wrong to have decided to bet on NT and, at the time, it wasn't necessarily clear cut that x86 would endure as well as it did so looking at other potentially cleaner architectures might have made sense.

It says a lot that MS didn't make Windows NT x86 only. PowerPC was definitely an alternative at the time.

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by TCD

It says a lot that MS didn't make Windows NT x86 only. PowerPC was definitely an alternative at the time.

NT was at first popular mostly in Alpha world, in fact x86 platforms need to be relatively high end to run NT so workstations based on DEC Alpha was quite natural partner for NT. NT on x86 started to be popular with NT 4 release... i recall it was very slow (barely usable) on 486DX33 Compaq with 4MiB installed, slightly faster (let say quite OK) on systems same x86 with 16MiB - RAM cost was prohibitive in those times.

[lmimmfn]

Let's not forget that Intel made a huge mistake with their roadmap and Itanium processors(their version of 64 bit processors) while AMD developed x64 which was backwards compatible with the 32bit processors.)

Today in our PC's we all use the AMD x64 implementation whether its Intel CPU or AMD.

Intel's Itanium was a complete failure.

My point is even x86 had a rough roadmap to where it is today.

On the Commodore side, they were far too late with everything, the PowerPC alliance was setup in 91(IBM, Apple, Motorola), they were not involved in the alliance(says it all really), reached a dead end with Motorolla processors in 94.
The writing was on the wall, CBM had 0 strategy.
Going bust was probably the best thing to happen Amiga with 0 transition strategy, yes Hombre was proposed but the PowerPC strategy started in '91 not '94.

There are many YouTube documentaries on Intels x64 failure/Itanium, AMDs x64 implementation and the fact that AMD got a license to develop x86 processors in the first place, its all fascinating.