51–60 of 171 posts
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My classmate kept his Amiga 1200 a bit longer! ...eventually he got a PC with Pentium 60 MHz.
Yeah, there were holdouts of course but the DX/2 really seems like the breaking point. (Also, a Pentium 60 is barely faster than a DX/2 66 at many tasks — it is a Bad Processor — but that’s another conversation ;)
The 486 and https://www.delorie.com/djgpp/history.html changed everything. Suddenly, it was possible to imagine running advanced software on a PC, and not have to spend 25,000 USD on a workstation.
I've got one sitting on the shelf above my desk, a 33 Mhz dx, I don't even remember what machine it came out of.
How was the person incorrect that speed increases won't continue forever? Pentium 4 was 3.8GHz and Ryzen 7 has 4.7Ghz some 20 odd years later?
How was the person incorrect that speed increases won't continue forever? Pentium 4 was 3.8GHz and Ryzen 7 has 4.7Ghz some 20 odd years later?
Clock speeds used to be going up in a straight line (the normal "interpretation" of Moore's law) - but once the P4 hit a (kind of useless 3.8GHz) we leveled off for decades.
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Yeah, there were holdouts of course but the DX/2 really seems like the breaking point. (Also, a Pentium 60 is barely faster than a DX/2 66 at many tasks — it is a Bad Processor — but that’s another conversation ;)
Many tasks perhaps, but running Quake was not one of them.
Nowadays, 486 computers are getting rare and relatively expensive. CPUs themselves are 25, 30, 40, sometimes 50 bucks on eBay. Whole working systems are in the low hundreds, and fully working 486 laptops can fetch 400 or 500 bucks.
sigh
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As I noted in my other comment (1), in 1985 Amiga OCS bitplane graphics (separate each bits of a pixel index into separate areas) was a huge boon in 2d capability since it lowered bandwidth to 6/8ths but made 3d rendering a major pain in the ass. The Aga chipset of the 1200/4000 stupidly only added 2 more bitplanes. The CD32 chip actually had byte-per-pixel (chunky) graphics modes but the omission from the 1200 was f…
> The Aga chipset of the 1200/4000 stupidly only added 2 more bitplanes. The CD32 chip actually had byte-per-pixel (chunky) graphics modes but the omission from the 1200 was fatal. The intention was good, but the Akiko chip was functionally almost useless. It was soon surpassed by CPU chunky to planar algorithms. I don't think it was ever even used in any serious way by any released games (though it might have been u…
1: https://forum.amiga.org/index.php?topic=51616.msg544232#msg5...
The 486 killer app was DOOM. It was butter-smooth at 20 fps if you also had a VLB graphic card. The 486 DX2 66MHz was the target platform for gaming during almost two years (1992-1994). That was an huge achievement back in the days to be at the top that long.
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The CD32 chip actually had byte-per-pixel (chunky) graphics modes but the omission from the 1200 was fatal. I agree. Unfortunately, even with chunky graphics and/or 3D foresight, 68k would still have been a dead end and Commodore would still have been mismanaged into death. It’s fun to dream though…
Was it necessarily a dead end? Considering the ways Intel and later AMD managed to upgrade/re-invent x86 that until x64 still retained so much of the x86 instruction encoding/heritage (heck, even x64 retains some of the instruction encoding characteristics). Had the Amiga retained relevance for longer and without a push for PowerPC I don't see a reason why 68k wouldn't have been extended. Heck the FPGA Apollo 68080 w…