| From: | Donovan Reeve |
| Date: | 8 Jan 2000 at 10:42:16 |
| Subject: | Re: GATEWAY SELLS AMIGA! :) |
On 06-Jan-00, Nick Lamburn flashed:
-clip-
>The 68Ks may not have L2 and Backside caches, but they are still very
>useful. Even a 75MHz 68060 can outstrip a Pentium 200 and sometimes even a
>233 on raw integer operations, the only thing holding back the 68k is
>development of which there is now none! :( The 68060 was about in 1994,
>(only made to CybStorm '060 in '95 though) the PII233 was 1997 iirc!!!!!
>Now the PowerPC is beginning to get recognised for the G4 and the future G5,
>the G4 is recognised by many now, and people even take notice of Macs that
>use them! G4s in Amiga will have to be strapped down to stop it from
>lifting off into orbit! :)) And then there's Transmeta, and the Russian
>Elbrus which also look very interesting.
>The choice of CPU and OS model is what makes the Amiga philosophy work, if
>Amiga had taken the Intel 80x86 series on, imagine how shite
>A1000/A500/A1500/A2000/A2500/A500+/A600 would've been if they used a 80286!
>:(( Not good at all. Besides AmigaOS would've been almost unworkable on a
>'286! Motorola CPUs are very very good, not because they are used in Amiga,
-clip-
Motorola also makes a follow-on CPU to the 68000 series called ColdFire
which
imho is better even than the PPC series. The cool thing is that they can use
680x0 code almost unmodified, and can use existing software with only a small
adapter utility running transparantly which causes almost no performance loss.
They can digest code at an even greater rate for a given clock speed than PPC,
and the code has got a much better command set, not truncated like RISC code.
They aren't CISC either, but a hybrid developed by Motorola to overcome the
drawbacks of each. They also run very cool and on low voltage, hence the
name "ColdFire". They were developed for the military and tellecomunications
industrys where RISC is to risky due to being very finicky about environment
and CISC is no longer fast enough. The 68060 was developed for the same
reasons, but is becoming to slow. BTW, as for being "shite", the 680x0 series
has been the most dependable and robust series of processors ever made, and
is still the heart of allmost all military guidance, detection and ECM systems
out there at present. No RISC chip, even PPC, is dependable enough under
adverse conditions (temperature extremes, unstable voltages, vibration, static
charges, etc). The 680x0 series was more forgiving on all of these than any
other 32 bit processors, and all others since with one exception. That
exception is ColdFire, the chips designed specifically to replace the 680x0
series.
At least one Amiga developer has been working on a ColdFire accelerator
for the Amiga which is intended to have twin ColdFires on it and fit in
a Zorro slot and controlling the Zorro bus directly so that it communicates
directly with other Zorro cards at a much higher rate of speed than normal
Zorro bus speed. I have not heard lately how this project is progressing.
I hope the Gateway/Amiga fiasco didn't kill it. The last posting on their
web-site said that the hardware was 100% complete and the project was waiting
on the software which was only 20% complete. This card would run existing
68k Amiga software with no modifications. I don't know how software that hit
hardware would be effected as this unit wouldn't replace the amiga hardware
except for the processor. Of course, many Amigans are getting graphics cards
and that rules out most hardware-banging effects anyway. I would forget
using Blitz mode in BB2 if it weren't for a couple of rather important things
which Acid didn't support in Amiga mode. I sure hope that the new Amiga Inc.
can get things rolling again so it will be profitable to make improved coding
systems for Amiga. Blitz is cool, but as with the first Blitz Basic, there
are a couple of very inconveniant holes in its capabilities. (Just not as
many as with most other languages) ;)
By the way, speaking of the new Amiga, Inc., it's sounding very promising to
this point. I like their attitude a lot.
cacha later,
Donovan Reeve (bubby.lnk@ispi.net)
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: blitz-list-unsubscribe@netsoc.ucd.ie
For additional commands, e-mail: blitz-list-help@netsoc.ucd.ie