NetNews Offline 2/NetNews Offline Volume 2.iso/news/comp/sys/amiga/misc-part2/13246

Text File | 1996-08-05 | 4.1 KB | 78 lines

Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy,comp.sys.amiga.misc,comp.sys.amiga.hardware,comp.sys.amiga.applications
Path: news-1.csn.net!ub!dsinc!scala!news
From: [e-mail] (Dave Haynie)
Subject: Re: Msg from Carl Sassenrath (VISCorp)
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Date: Thu, 18 Apr 1996 20:35:28 GMT
Reply-To: [e-mail] (Dave Haynie)
References: <[e-mail]> <4koncc$[e-mail]> <4kq0r8$[e-mail]> <4krh5q$[e-mail]> <4ksg9l$[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
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Organization: Scala Computer Television, US Research Center

In <[e-mail]>, "Julio C. Arroyo" <[e-mail]> writes:

>>         Low cost is attainable with a flexable OS on off-the-shelf parts
>> that can be cobbled together quickly.

>Low cost does not mean off the shelf parts etc..

Low cost is related to one thing: what you pay for something.

>A proprietary system of custom chips with a tightly integrated OS
>would require less resources on the motherboard than off the shelf
>components, hence a lower pricepoint per unit among other things.

Who's custom chips? The ones I spend the next two years desiging for a
500,000 unit run, or the ones I buy from a chip company with an
aggregate run of 50,000,000 units?

This is really nothing new, you just have to think in terms of "a
chip's a chip". Back when the Amiga came out, no one was making a
decent graphics and sound subsystem for use in a personal computer. So
it was necessary for Amiga Corp to make some custom parts to fulfill
this role. However, there were plenty of good microprocessors. It
would have been foolish for them to have designed their own, because
many larger companies with much more experience were making CPUs in
large volumes. There way they could have competed.

Today the story is much the same with graphics chips. There are a
large number of chips on the market. Most of these are from fairly
established graphics chip companies with millions of unit volume (S3,
Tseng Labs, Trident, Cirrus Logic, etc.). A few are from startup
companies backed by even larger chip makers. The whole AA chip set is
about 200,000 transistors (three chips), AAA was just under a million
(four chips). An aggressive graphics and sound chip of today will get
several million transistors on a single part. They take 2-4 years to
design, and that's usually being done by folks who've worked on the
last few generations.

>If this was not so then VisCorp has no reason to buy AT, the Mac
>Pippin and the Oracle system would have not followed the same route.

Again, who's custom chips are you using. The only difference between a
"custom" chip and an "off the shelf" chip is your viewpoint. If I can
buy it on the open market, it's "off the shelf", if I designed it
myself it's "custom", right? There's no intrinsic value in this
difference. The bottom line is what counts. Apple probably did the
design and chip for the graphics subsystem in Pippin, but do realize
that there's absolutely nothing interesting about that graphics
system. Which is why Pippin's scrambling to be seen as something other
than a videogame, it won't compete with the "custom" 3D graphics in
most videogames today. Perhaps the Oracle system (specified by not
designed by Oracle, they're a software company) will get more mileage
out of anything custom in their specification, but their main point is
building a cheap set top box that does what they claim an NC should do
at a specific price point. This is an open spec, too, so far as I
know, these NCs will be buildable by anyone who wants to license the
design. Thus, they're made from "off the shelf" chips (Oracle's
interested in selling the server side, the NC is just the way to
create that need).

Dave Haynie          | ex-Commodore Engineering |   for DiskSalv 3 &
Sr. Systems Engineer |  Hardwired Media Company | "The Deathbed Vigil"
Scala Inc., US R&D   |    Ki No Kawa Aikido     |     [e-mail]

         "Feeling ... Pretty ... Psyched" -R.E.M.