@matthey

Quote:

matthey wrote: kolla Quote: In 1995, the biggest "flaw" with Amiga wasn’t the hardware, it was the operating system. And that’s why so many Amiga _developers_ moved to Linux, BSD and even Windows. Sarcasm? In 1995 the biggest issue with Amiga was that CBM was defunct and the Amiga future was in doubt.

Of course, I meant Amiga as in the thing we had in our hands already.

Quote:

The 68k Amiga would not have been competitive in low end markets with Linux.

?

Amiga hardware _was_ low/mid end Linux systems already.

Quote:

https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2090 [quote] Like Linux/i386, 4MB of RAM is the absolute minimum, with 8MB being sufficient for most uses. The X Window System requires a minimum of 12MB of RAM for a usable system. A minimal installation currently requires about 55MB of hard drive space, plus at least a few MB of swap space. My personal system currently has about 830MB of hard drive space devoted to Linux (one SCSI hard drive and most of two IDE hard drives). When it comes to RAM and hard drive space, you can never have too much. An Amiga would have required a MMU, 55+ MiB hard drive and 12MiB of memory to use Linux with a GUI which was only available in 1993.

Hey, I was there!
(heck, I still am... Linux/68k is far from dead)

My A1200 that I used for that animation job, with its Blizzzard 1230 III was upgraded to 16MB of RAM (which was more than several of my PC friends had in their 486DX4 systems), was "triple" booting with Linux/m68k and NetBSD in addition to AmigaOS. It also fitted a 540 MB Conner disk, and later a additional Seagate 1.2 GB disk.

Quote:

The Amiga 3000UX came with 9MiB of memory minimum and a large hard drive (200MiB?) for $4998 but did not include the A2410 graphics card recommended for a GUI? Linux reduced the OS cost of a Unix like OS to zero and brought it to cheap and available 386 hardware but it was primitive for several years and 386 hardware was a pain to develop it on.

But "cheap and available" 386 hardware wasn't the only thing that ran Linux.
And there were other alternatives, like NetBSD, that specifically also targeted 68k systems.

Quote:

Did he overlook the Amiga or choose the 386 because Amiga's with MMUs were too expensive? Amiga did not have a high end market after they chose to make the chipset low end and use embedded CPUs. The Amiga 3000UX became available at about the time he bought his 386 PC but it was expensive.

He didn't overlook Amiga, he was perfectly aware.

386 systems were _MUCH_ more _available_, especially second hand.

Quote:

(Linux perhaps played a role in the Amiga 3000UX being discontinued?)

No, not at all - Amiga 3000UX was discontinued because there was no need for dedicated "UX" branded Amiga and because AMIX was falling way behind competition. Not from Linux on 386, but from other 68k vendors - why buy an A3000UX system when you can get a NeXTStation for just about the same price, and with a faster 040?

Quote:

AmigaOS was a much better embedded OS than Linux or Windows in 1995

Was it? At least Linux had networking and access control for remote management, AmigaOS did not.

Quote:

The Amiga would not have been as successful with Linux as the AmigaOS even if it had been available way back in 1985. The "thin" 68k AmigaOS allowed the small footprint and cheaper hardware that made the 68k Amiga popular.

Sure, but then along came the growth of Internet and changed the premise.

Last edited by kolla on 28-Jun-2024 at 08:40 AM.

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@matthey

Quote:

This was not unusual for a DSP. The Amiga AT&T DSP would have had similar limitations. Actual performance depends on DSP local memory, interface(s) to other memory and cache coherency with other processors if there are caches involved. Some people think MIPS and FLOPS of a DSP can be added to that of the CPU to determine cumulative performance. A DSP has limited ability to directly boost the performance of the CPU but is very good at offloading specific number crunching tasks away from the CPU.

DSP3210's on-chip 8KB SRAM is not a cache.

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@matthey

Quote:

The 8088 IBM PC was more fail than nail and it handicapped the PC for a long time and even today. .

8088 is selected for 8 bit related chips and PCB design.

Quote:

The x86-64 code density is poor for a VLE, decoding cost is well above any other current ISA .

Bullshit.

Quote:

and x86-64 cores are large and power hungry limiting their ability to scale down.

Bullshit.

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@matthey


Reminder, MIPS R3000 is 1988 released hardware. R3000 attracted SGI.

80486 was released in 1989.
68040 was released in 1990.

------------

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.benchmarks/c/zvnlKLIgUDk/m/ut4VeY_t0lcJ
SpecINT92 and SpecFP92 scores

SGI Indigo R3000 @ 33 32/32KB cache
SpecINT: 22.4
SpecFP: 24.2
Benchmark date: Nov92


DEC 5025 R3000 @ 25 Mhz 64KB/64KB cache,
SpecINT: 15.7
SpecFP: 21.7
Benchmark date: Jun93


HP 425t 68040 @ 25, 4KB/4KB cache
SpecINT: 12.3
SpecFP: 10.3
Benchmark date: Jun93


Compaq Dkpro 80486DX @ 33 Mhz, 128KB L2+8KB L1 cache
SpecINT: 18.2
SpecFP: 8.3
Benchmark date: Sep92


Compaq Dkpro, 80486DX2 @ 66 Mhz, 256KB L2+8KB L1 cache
SpecINT: 32.2
SpecFP: 16.0
Benchmark date: Sep93


Compaq ProXL, Pentium @ 66.7 Mhz, 256KB L2+8/8KB L1 cache
SpecINT: 65.1
SpecFP: 63.6
Benchmark date: Sep93


DEC 5260 R4400 @ 60 Mhz, 1M L2+16/16KB L1 cache
SpecINT: 57.1
SpecFP: 54.5
Benchmark date: Sep93


DEC 2300 Alpha 21064 @ 150 Mhz, 512KB L2 + 8/8 KB L1 cache (there are faster Alpha CPUs in 1992-1993 year)
SpecINT: 57.1
SpecFP: 54.5
Benchmark date: Oct93


HP 705 PA-1.1 @ 35 Mhz, PA-RISC
SpecINT: 21.9
SpecFP: 33.0
Benchmark date: Nov92


HP 750 PA1.1 @ 66 Mhz, 256KB/256KB cache
SpecINT: 48.1
SpecFP: 75.0
Benchmark date: Oct92


IBM 250 MPC601 @ 66 Mhz, PowerPC 601
SpecINT: 62.6
SpecFP: 72.2
Benchmark date: Sep93


----------------------------
Motorola 88000 is a joke. Check out 88000@ 33Mhz's Spec89 scores i.e. refer to my link. LOL. It's pathetically bad.

Motorola deserves to go bankrupt or taken over by NXP!

IBM PowerPC 601 @ 66Mhz smashed 68040 @ 25Mhz into the ground.

The RISC threat is real, you're in dreamland. Motorola was largely missing in 1992-1993 in the "powerful" workstations. Most of these "powerful" workstations have external 64-bit bus.

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@kolla

Quote:

kolla wrote: @matthey In 1995, the biggest "flaw" with Amiga wasn’t the hardware, it was the operating system. And that’s why so many Amiga _developers_ moved to Linux, BSD and even Windows.

It was the smallish install base with certain CPU features and compute strength.

Unlike Intel's guaranteed MMU for 386-based PCs, the Amiga didn't have wide-scale MMU deployment for the mass-produced Amiga models. Intel made sure that the "32-bit PC" evolution includes an MMU. Motorola made MMU as a premium feature instead of a guaranteed standard for 68K's full 32-bit evolution.

The OS runs on hardware. Large-scale MMU deployment on the PC enables Windows 95/NT, Lintel, and Darwin.

Last edited by Hammer on 29-Jun-2024 at 01:03 PM.

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@matthey

Quote:

Did he overlook the Amiga or choose the 386 because Amiga's with MMUs were too expensive? Amiga did not have a high end market after they chose to make the chipset low end and use embedded CPUs. The Amiga 3000UX became available at about the time he bought his 386 PC but it was expensive (Linux perhaps played a role in the Amiga 3000UX being discontinued?). Inferior but cheap x86 PC hardware won with inferior OSs.

The business PC has SCO Xenix 386 from 1987 and Windows NT 3.1 from July 1993 and Intel's Pentium 60/66 from March 1993.

For the transition phase, Windows 3.1 386/3.11 has beta Win32S addon since October 1992.

Quote:

Windows 95 had just graduated from a GUI file manager for MS-DOS to a real OS in 1995. The AmigaOS was a much better embedded OS than Linux or Windows in 1995 although perhaps not as advanced of desktop OS in some areas.

Windows NT 3.1 was available from July 1993.

QNX has RTOS.

https://hackaday.com/2024/02/10/the-usage-of-embedded-linux-in-spacecraft
Quote:

SpaceX uses Linux kernel 3.2 (with real-time patches) on the primary flight computers of both Dragon and its rockets (Falcon 9 and Starship). SpaceX’s flight computers use the typical triple redundancy setup, with three independent dual-core processors running the exact same calculations and a different Linux instance on each of its cores, and the result being compared afterwards. If any result doesn’t match that of the others, it is dropped. This approach also allows SpaceX to use fairly off-the-shelf (OTS) x86 computing hardware, with the flight software written in C++.

SpaceX uses Linux with real-time patches and three dual-core X86 CPUs.

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@Karlos

Quote:

Karlos wrote: Doom on a stock 030 Falcon https://youtu.be/59VGI14_U7E?si=nPejkT3kg1d1m03M From reading the description and thread on the linked forum, I think this is just using the CPU, but I've asked for clarification.

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Bad_Mood
Quote:

Development of Bad Mood began in 1995. The initial DView base, programmed entirely in C, was able to render Doom maps, albeit only as flat-shaded surfaces without texture mapping. This initial architecture, which was slow on non-custom hardware, was optimized by the Bad Mood team with addition of assembly routines to accelerate rendering. The last version to use this architecture was released as version 1.32a in November 1995.[1] DSP programming, additional optimizations, and code for rendering of textures and sprites were added to the engine between 1995 and 1997 [2][3], with significant contributions from Doug Little[4], a prominent developer in the Atari Falcon community[5]. At this point the port still remained a map viewer rather than a fully playable game. Following the 3.07a release of August 1997, development halted until 2013 due to lack of developer interest and occupation with other projects. This was partially related to the 1997 release of the official Doom source code, reducing interest in development of a custom engine. As demonstrated by the PmDoom source port, however, the results of a direct translation of the official code to the Atari could not produce tolerable performance on all but the most powerful of these machines. Doug Little returned to Bad Mood development in 2013. He merged the GPL Doom codebase with the existing Bad Mood rendering engine and several additional optimizations to both the gameplay simulation and rendering code, creating a playable game. [6]. An alpha version was released in January 2014 which was the first playable release of Bad Mood. Since then, development has continued[7], and a beta release was presented at the Sillyventure 2014 party on 5-7 December 2014. This beta significantly improves on the alpha release in many ways, but most obviously with support for playing back the ingame music, and improved visual quality thanks to a texture pack and support for effects such as freelook and support for translucent textures (for the Spectre).

https://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?p=225029&sid=f5274d7aa586b382199dcf864738dd24#p225029
Additional information from DML's Bad_Mood engine.

Last edited by Hammer on 29-Jun-2024 at 01:40 PM.

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@Hammer

All very interesting but without knowing specifically what the DSP is being used for, it's hard to draw any solid conclusions, beyond the obvious that in reteospect a 4MB Falcon 030 was enough hardware to play Doom.

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@Karlos

I wonder if it uses the chunky mode? Granted, that's a 16 bit mode so more data needs to shifted around, but I imagine a CLUT translation copy from 8 to 16 bits may be faster than a C2P. Also, it's interesting that chunky was 16 bit, like the planned Amiga mode, where 8 bit was called half chunky and seems strange to me.

Perhaps Motorola were inspired by the 16 bit chunky and half chunky naming, when 16 bit half word was used to describe a short word, when everyone else just called a 32 bit word a long word, except Motorola who called it a word.

Even with the crippled bus the Falcon at 16 Mhz looks faster than a 14 Mhz A1200 with fast ram would do. Definitely better than the CD32 Akiko. Rethink: The Amiga needed a full 16 bit chunky mode like AAA featured and the Falcon had.

Last edited by Hypex on 01-Jul-2024 at 05:16 PM.

@Hypex

The "crippled bus" argument is a bit moot, since it runs at full speed. In practise, it's a bit faster than the 32-bit bus on the A1200. That's not to say 32-bit wouldn't have been even better, but I'm sure the decision helped simplify the design.

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@Hypex

Quote:

Even with the crippled bus the Falcon at 16 Mhz looks faster than a 14 Mhz A1200 with fast ram would do. Definitely better than the CD32 Akiko.

I hope you know whom haven't heard you say that! xD

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@Karlos

Quote:

Karlos wrote: @Hammer All very interesting but without knowing specifically what the DSP is being used for, it's hard to draw any solid conclusions, beyond the obvious that in reteospect a 4MB Falcon 030 was enough hardware to play Doom.

Reminder, Atari Falcon with 4MB RAM + 65 MB HDD has an 899 UKP price range in late 1992. DSP56K has a 32 Mhz clock speed and good IPC.

DSP56K is not general purpose like near comparable priced 486DX-25-based PC which accelerates all CPU-based workloads. The ideal situation is for Motorola to fix 68030's MUL instruction's weak IPC e.g. 68030M.

During the ARM60 release, ARM released the ARMv3M with MUL instruction. ARM60 models can either have ARMv3 or ARMv3M.

Unlike the A1200 and CD32, the Atari Falcon has very few games to show for it.

A1200 had the "32 bit" and "16.7 million" colors marketing.

Last edited by Hammer on 02-Jul-2024 at 04:07 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 02-Jul-2024 at 03:46 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 02-Jul-2024 at 03:43 AM.

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@Hammer

Quote:

Hammer wrote: Reminder, Atari Falcon with 4MB RAM + 65 MB HDD has an 899 UKP price range in late 1992.

And the base model with 1MB and no hard drive cost US$799, $200 more than the A1200. This was too much for a machine with a buggy OS, poor compatibility with the ST and new features that wouldn't be fully exploited for several years. Ergonomically it stank too, being no different from the ST.

Quote:

DSP56K is not general purpose like near comparable priced 486DX-25-based PC which accelerates all CPU-based workloads.

At that time the way forward was a faster CPU rather than fancy hardware that would take a long time to be fully utilized. DSP was designed for specialist applications like audio processing, and would become more dedicated when used in modems etc. Pentium CPUs had enough power to emulate a modem with a dedicated DSP chip just doing the codec.

@bhabbott

Quote:

And the base model with 1MB and no hard drive cost US$799, $200 more than the A1200. This was too much for a machine with a buggy OS, poor compatibility with the ST and new features that wouldn't be fully exploited for several years. Ergonomically it stank too, being no different from the ST.

During the hardware generation transition phase, ST majority has very aged graphics that are not enough for building Falcon's user base.

PC EGA to VGA transition took a few years.

From Dataquest November 1989, VGA crossed more than 50 percent market share in 1989 i.e. 56%.
http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/components/dataquest/0005190_PC_Graphics_Chip_Sets--Product_Analysis_1989.pdf

Low-End PC Graphics Market Share by Standard Type
Estimated Worldwide History and Forecast

Total low-end PC graphic chipset shipment history and forecast
1987 = 9.2. million, VGA 16.4% market share i.e. 1.5088 million VGA.
1988 = 11.1 million, VGA 34.2% i.e. 3.79 million VGA.
1989 = 13.7 million, VGA 54.6% i.e. 7.67 million VGA.
1990 = 14.3 million, VGA 66.4% i.e. 9.50 million VGA.
1991 = 15.8 million, VGA 76.6% i.e. 12.10 million VGA.
1992 = 16.4 million, VGA 84.2% i.e. 13.81 million VGA.
1993 = 18.3 million, VGA 92.4% i.e. 16.9 million VGA.

Unlike the 68K desktop competition, existing PCs can join VGA/SVGA capability at any anytime.

A "game console" generation transition can make or break a platform holder.

Atari Falcon's 1MB RAM as its baseline standard is the last generation.

A1200/CD32's 2 MB Chip RAM needs an extra 1 MB Fast RAM baseline standard to sync with 3MB RAM equipped 3DO, PS1, and Saturn group.

Cheap 3D DSP and 1 MB Fast RAM would enable A1200/CD32 to join the 3DO, PS1, and Saturn group.

A1200 could be modified with 1MB Fast RAM via the C0000 address range without affecting the internal expansion slot's Zorro II address range and it's shared with the PCMCIA slot.

PiStorm-Emu68 can reuse the C0000 memory address range on the A1200.

Quote:

At that time the way forward was a faster CPU rather than fancy hardware that would take a long time to be fully utilized. DSP was designed for specialist applications like audio processing, and would become more dedicated when used in modems etc. Pentium CPUs had enough power to emulate a modem with a dedicated DSP chip just doing the codec.

The main claim to fame with DSP is high IPC math operations and the type of instruction.

My 1996 Pentium 166 (Socket 7) was running Yamaha's S-YXG50 MIDI Soft Synth driver and it's improved with MMX. This was before I obtained a Yamaha YMF724 PCI sound card.

Motorola 56300 DSP was resold as NVIDIA's SoundStorm brand during nForce 1, 2, and original Xbox.

At the time, SoundStorm was the only available solution capable of outputting Dolby Digital Live in home theater PCs i.e. encoding PC's 5.1 channels for DDL output, not just passing pre-encoded bit stream from DVD source.

Y2005's Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium has Dolby Digital Live in software implementation. My ASUS Xonar D2X, CL Sound Blaster Z and AE-7 PCIe sound cards have Dolby Digital Live and DTS, hence fully replacing SoundStorm's Dolby Digital Live features.

Last edited by Hammer on 05-Jul-2024 at 05:53 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 05-Jul-2024 at 01:25 AM.

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@Hammer

Quote:

Hammer wrote: PC EGA to VGA transition took a few years.

True. EGA was introduced with the PC-AT in 1984, but was still in common use in 1991, 7 years later. Not that different from the Amiga, where OCS was the 'standard' for 7 years.

Quote:

Unlike the 68K desktop competition, existing PCs can join VGA/SVGA capability at any anytime.

While the vast majority of PCs could have a VGA card installed, it didn't make make much sense for XT class machines. I installed a VGA card into my Amstrad PC-20, but that didn't magically make it suitable for running VGA games. I now have an Amstrad PC2086 (8 MHz 8086) with built in VGA and it isn't much better - won't even play Wolfenstein 3D properly.

Quote:

A1200/CD32's 2 MB Chip RAM needs an extra 1 MB Fast RAM baseline standard to sync with 3MB RAM equipped 3DO, PS1, and Saturn group.

The A1200 wasn't intended to 'sync with' the 3DO, PS1 or Saturn. None of them existed when the A1200 was released. The 3D0 was out by 1993 but was hardly on the radar, and the CD32 was designed to be a CD-ROM console version of the A1200, not a radically new machine.

Amiga games at the time of the A1200's release only required 1MB max. AGA games might need more, but 2MB would be plenty. But of course the A1200 was expandable, and Commodore fully expected users to install RAM boards or accelerator cards in the future - just like they with the A1000, A500 and A2000.

Quote:

Cheap 3D DSP and 1 MB Fast RAM would enable A1200/CD32 to join the 3DO, PS1, and Saturn group.

Sez you. I say DSP would have unnecessarily raised the price and taken years to make full use of, and still not match the PS1. I don't remember any Amiga fans talking about DSP at the time, and it wasn't missed. It didn't do much for the Atari Falcon either.

Quote:

A1200 could be modified with 1MB Fast RAM via the C0000 address range without affecting the internal expansion slot's Zorro II address range and it's shared with the PCMCIA slot.

Some RAM boards did map into that area to get up to 5.5MB with PCMCIA. But if you are talking about putting 1MB on the motherboard, this was a non-starter due to the cost. The A1200 was a low-end machine like the A500, designed to keep the cost of entry as low as possible while still being expandable to mid or high end performance.

Quote:

PiStorm-Emu68 can reuse the C0000 memory address range on the A1200.

That's nice. C00000 memory was hard-coded into some older games, so mapping RAM there could help with compatibility. PiStorm could also emulate the 68000 for even greater compatibility, as well as mapping in a KS1.3 ROM. If it had an MMU it would be even better. Almost unlimited possibilities!

Quote:

At the time, SoundStorm was the only available solution capable of outputting Dolby Digital Live in home theater PCs i.e. encoding PC's 5.1 channels for DDL output, not just passing pre-encoded bit stream from DVD source.

Oh wow, Dolby Digital Live pre-encoded bit stream from DVD source! Sorry, but that would be wasted on me because my ears couldn't tell the difference. This is no reason to put DSP in the A1200.

BTW I tested Doom on my recently built 386SX-16 system today. The motherboard came with 16MB of RAM which is quite unusual for a 386SX - they normally only had 1 or 2 MB. I put a Trident TVGA8900C VGA card with 1MB RAM in it. This might seem like old technology for the time, but the card was manufactured in October 1994 which proves they were still being installed in the VL bus era.

I ran the Doom timedemo on all standard settings with no sound and the result was... 1.34 fps! (no, the decimal point is in the right place). I expected more like 2-3 fps, but even that would be painfully slow so I guess it doesn't matter. Point is that even after you had upgraded your 'low-end' PC to the required 4MB RAM etc., it was still hopelessly under-powered. Since it has 16MB and the hard drive has Windows 95 on it I ran that too - and yes it was very slow. Microsoft Solitaire worked OK though, so...

@bhabbott

Cue wall of spam from dataquest archive.

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@Karlos

They were doing something wrong if the A1200 32 bit bus was beat by the Falcon 16 bit bus. I imagine for 68000 specific code, that used 16 bit ints for variables it would be fine, but only have an impact for lots of 32 bit variables. Once in the CPU it's full speed ahead.

@bhabbott

Quote:

I ran the Doom timedemo on all standard settings with no sound and the result was... 1.34 fps!

That's shocking. I expected better from 386 compared to an A1200. An A1200 at 14Mhz and 16MB I expect would get that FPS if you are lucky. With a 68030, which compares better with a 386 (both 32 bit) an Amiga can perform better, but it usually is clocked faster.

Did you shrink the screen? If your 386 felt better from it. I don't think John Carmack was thinking of the 386 people, did he think of what impact Doom would have on the majority of 386DX with TVGA8900C VGA card users?

I don't think so!

@Hypex

The width of the bus is only one dimension. The other is speed/ how many cycles are needed. The 030 in the falcon has *faster" access to 16 bit memory than the 1200's 020 did to 32-bit memory. The 030 in the falcon was only slow compared to it's theoretical potential with a 32-bit bus. It wasn't slow compared to the A1200.

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