Beavis
New member
Didn't mess up, would Amigas have Intel inside?
What if Commodore..
- Thread starter Beavis
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Apple eventually had to bow down to intel because the PPC couldn't keep up. So yes, they likely would all have intel architecture by now. Commodore being Commodore however would likely have their own chipsets. I'm sure they could have kept up with the likes of VIA.
my personal thoughts...commodore wouldnt of survived anyway.
if your talking about the amiga's,well..i dont think it evolved fast enough if at all.
it stayed the way it was for a very long time and ,i'll just say that.
if your talking about the amiga's,well..i dont think it evolved fast enough if at all.
it stayed the way it was for a very long time and ,i'll just say that.
80sFREAK
New member
ARM? 
I would have imagined that Commodore would have stuck to Motorola. I don't know why, but why not? They are bound to have loved their part in the Motorola vs Intel rivalry. I'm not so sure what happened to Motorola.
Any scenario in which Commodore survived would be because they'd have made drastically different decisions.
So it's worthless to say "but they didn't upgrade the amiga enough" or "they'd have switched to intel" or whatever.
Because obviously, surviving would have needed them to upgrade the amiga enough. And you can in no way rely on Intel still being dominant in a timeline which diverged from ours in the mid 80s! The dominant platform could be RISC OS on SPARC for all you know.
So it's worthless to say "but they didn't upgrade the amiga enough" or "they'd have switched to intel" or whatever.
Because obviously, surviving would have needed them to upgrade the amiga enough. And you can in no way rely on Intel still being dominant in a timeline which diverged from ours in the mid 80s! The dominant platform could be RISC OS on SPARC for all you know.
Beavis
New member
AFAIK, Cbm went tits up due to mismanagement, they were ages ahead of M$.
An since I was an official
dealer, I know summat about it.
You always had to wait ages before machines were delivered, and when it was due, they usually managed to **** things up in an epic way.
Few examples:
At one moment they were short of A4K-030s, so they decided to downgrade the 040s, and it was done by a bunch of braindeads who were working at the warehouse, and who's daily task was to shovel boxes.
Needless to say that it was a drama!
All them machines were filthy as hell, the retaining clips for the dimms were broken (ok, they were not too solid anyway
), cpu boards which were not properly seated, etc, etc.
icard
I had quite a bunch of loyal punters who couldn't eat or sleep while waiting for their beloved machine, so you can imagine that D-day turned out to be a catastrophe!
Another one:
Cbm held an inventory blow out, so we could buy stuff for next to nothing, does anybody remember the brown tape-streamer in A3K style? AFAIK it has never been for sale, and suddenly it was available (years too late of course).
There were quite a lot of semi-pros using the Amiga, Dutch members might remember the commercial of the state lottery with the fishes, did you know that it was made on a 040 with a PAR?
An since I was an official
dealer, I know summat about it.You always had to wait ages before machines were delivered, and when it was due, they usually managed to **** things up in an epic way.
Few examples:
At one moment they were short of A4K-030s, so they decided to downgrade the 040s, and it was done by a bunch of braindeads who were working at the warehouse, and who's daily task was to shovel boxes.
Needless to say that it was a drama!
All them machines were filthy as hell, the retaining clips for the dimms were broken (ok, they were not too solid anyway
), cpu boards which were not properly seated, etc, etc.icardI had quite a bunch of loyal punters who couldn't eat or sleep while waiting for their beloved machine, so you can imagine that D-day turned out to be a catastrophe!
Another one:
Cbm held an inventory blow out, so we could buy stuff for next to nothing, does anybody remember the brown tape-streamer in A3K style? AFAIK it has never been for sale, and suddenly it was available (years too late of course).
There were quite a lot of semi-pros using the Amiga, Dutch members might remember the commercial of the state lottery with the fishes, did you know that it was made on a 040 with a PAR?
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If Commodore had been a good company from the start - and kept its talents and promoted cooperation and invention in their branches rather than put them against each other and break promises - Commodore and even MOS might have been in a different place. They might even never have needed Amiga. Then again - it is not how it became.
If Commodore had survived and their r&d had actually moved at a constant rate then we might have a very different computer landscape today. Apple only moved over to Intel because they ended up being the only customer for ppc processors in desktop computers. All others were developed for appliance and industrial use so they pulled out of the market. If other manufacturers like Commodore were also requiring cpus then we could still have been using ppc processors.
And Workbench/Amiga IS would be very different to OS4. As much as it's a nice achievement it is still very much stuck in the past, whereas in its day Workbench was ahead of its time.
Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk 4
And Workbench/Amiga IS would be very different to OS4. As much as it's a nice achievement it is still very much stuck in the past, whereas in its day Workbench was ahead of its time.
Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk 4
But I thought PPC was getting left in the dust and at the limits of its development potential at the time Apple switched? What difference would another customer have made if they couldn't push it any farther? Or was it simply that it wasn't being developed due to the lack of demand?
The latter.
Compare number of desktop x86 sold to the number of desktop PPC.
Intel had and still have waaaaaay more money to throw at development. Even simple economy of scale makes an equivalent chip cheaper.
A few million macs a year is not enough to pay for R&D equivalent to what £GODSPHONENUMBER gets you. Has absolutely bugger all to do with which instruction set is better.
Compare number of desktop x86 sold to the number of desktop PPC.
Intel had and still have waaaaaay more money to throw at development. Even simple economy of scale makes an equivalent chip cheaper.
A few million macs a year is not enough to pay for R&D equivalent to what £GODSPHONENUMBER gets you. Has absolutely bugger all to do with which instruction set is better.
commodorejohn
Shameless recidivist
That wasn't what happened. PowerPC was quite competitive up through Apple's switchover, particularly against the bletcherous Netburst CPUs. Apple made the move because Motorola kept dropping the ball on providing a good upgrade path from the G4 and then IBM grudgingly developed the G5 but couldn't be assed to make it energy-efficient enough for use in laptops (which is why the Powerbooks used G4s all the way into 2005.) Apple had enough of trying to get them to play ball and moved off of PPC.
Would Commodore plus Apple have been enough motivation for the AIM alliance to work? Who knows. But it wasn't technical inferiority that killed the PPC Macs.
I hear that Commodore had authoritarian dysfunctions dating back to the pre-C64 era. Amiga itself was unfortunate in its pairing/timing here.
Did Jay ever think bout offering production rights to other companies, IBM or Apple for instance? If so, I wonder what the result was.
Did Jay ever think bout offering production rights to other companies, IBM or Apple for instance? If so, I wonder what the result was.
edd_jedi
Active member
It's a question I often ask myself and find infuriating when reading old issues of Amiga Format. How on earth did Escom think that releasing the same A1200 from 1992 in 1995/1996 was a good idea? Especially after no machines had been available for nearly a year? Their claims that it was technically impossible due to time constraints were bull, it would have been no effort at all to at least stick a couple of extra MB of RAM or even an 030 in them. It was complete lunacy. Every other computer/console manufacturer in the early to mid 90s was pushing out a new machine every 3 or 4 years, or at least regular upgrades for existing hardware.
If things like the A1200CD had materialised, the Amiga could well still be here now (albeit looking very different.)
If things like the A1200CD had materialised, the Amiga could well still be here now (albeit looking very different.)
The 2meg Chip RAM limit was gonna bite the architecture in the a** eventually.
And, yes, it really needed to have an option of shipping with on-board Fast RAM too.
And by 1995 an '030, even an EC, needed to be the minimum offered CPU. By this time the software was carrying the hardware, and that scenario never lasts for long...
None of the buyers, whatever they said at the time, bought into the 'Amiga' ideal and wanted to expand on it. They just saw cheap box-shifting on the back of good quality games and GFX capabilities that, at the time, outstripped the PC - but this was not to last too much longer.
And, yes, it really needed to have an option of shipping with on-board Fast RAM too.
And by 1995 an '030, even an EC, needed to be the minimum offered CPU. By this time the software was carrying the hardware, and that scenario never lasts for long...
None of the buyers, whatever they said at the time, bought into the 'Amiga' ideal and wanted to expand on it. They just saw cheap box-shifting on the back of good quality games and GFX capabilities that, at the time, outstripped the PC - but this was not to last too much longer.
Apple was simply put... not stupid! Ol' Stevie was wise enough to see way ahead in the future and had them working on x86 versions of the OS from day one (talking about 10.x) which is far earlier than 2005.
From Wikipedia: Jobs revealed at the 2005 WWDC that every version of OS X had been secretly developed and compiled for Intel processors as well as PowerPC as they were developed; the portability of its predecessor NeXTSTEP had been maintained. It is not publicly known whether Apple maintains current builds for any other architectures although the closely related iOS project runs on the iPhone's ARM architecture.
From Wikipedia: Jobs revealed at the 2005 WWDC that every version of OS X had been secretly developed and compiled for Intel processors as well as PowerPC as they were developed; the portability of its predecessor NeXTSTEP had been maintained. It is not publicly known whether Apple maintains current builds for any other architectures although the closely related iOS project runs on the iPhone's ARM architecture.
I believe that most of the modern consoles have PowerPC chips in them - certainly the Wii and XBox360, so PowerPC is still out there.
I agree that the AGA chipset did not go far enough in 1992 and that Workbench was carrying the hardware for the following years, but if it had survived I think that we would have been running PowerPC hardware; like a Wii with a keyboard
On a related point, *IF* the Amiga line had continued, would there still be a market for it today? Is the advantage of co-processing custom chips as great today as it was, or can PCs now do pretty much anything at such a low price point that we will never see any alternative now or in the future?
I agree that the AGA chipset did not go far enough in 1992 and that Workbench was carrying the hardware for the following years, but if it had survived I think that we would have been running PowerPC hardware; like a Wii with a keyboard
On a related point, *IF* the Amiga line had continued, would there still be a market for it today? Is the advantage of co-processing custom chips as great today as it was, or can PCs now do pretty much anything at such a low price point that we will never see any alternative now or in the future?
