Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!cbmvax!daveh From: daveh@cbmvax.commodore.com (Dave Haynie) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Commodore, Amiga, Apple, and MAC Message-ID: <10436@cbmvax.commodore.com> Date: 29 Mar 90 20:48:29 GMT References: <15003@snow-white.udel.EDU> <10363@cbmvax.commodore.com> <133557@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> Reply-To: daveh@cbmvax (Dave Haynie) Organization: Commodore, West Chester, PA Lines: 56 In article <133557@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> fiddler@concertina.Sun.COM (Steve Hix) writes: >In article <10363@cbmvax.commodore.com>, daveh@cbmvax.commodore.com (Dave Haynie) writes: >> In article <15003@snow-white.udel.EDU> BARRETT%FOREST.ECIL.IASTATE.EDU@cunyvm.cuny.edu (Marc Barrett) writes: >> > Once again, Commodore has let Apple slip ahead of them in the >> >area of technological innovation. Had Commodore released (or at >> The Apple card sounds pretty good, even at the $2000 price tag. But it's >> mainly good for Apples, of course, since this is the first card of it's kind >> (eg, general purpose QuickDraw engine) shown for an Apple machine. >SuperMac and Radius both are selling QuickDraw accelerators. RaterOps may >also be shipping one. Not all of them are general purpose, though. At least, when I read the write-up of the ARM based accelerator (Radius?), the implication was that it would only speed up the operations of software that specifically knew about the board. In other words, it didn't replace the QuickDraw routines on the Mac, it simply provided a speedup for programs (like the CAD package sold by the same company) that knew about that card. According to the BYTE article, RasterOps does make a similar unit. >They and AMD both ignore to above mentioned products...even though one of >them uses the AMD 29000. Marketing trolls are curious thingies. Well, that's to be expected. Even if one of these does the same basic thing as the Apple card, you better believe Apple will imply they did it first. IBM pretty much made this Standard Operating Procedure, and Apple has picked up on it really nicely. >At least two of the chips are, essentially, versions of the 6502 running some of >the I/O for the 68K. 6502s are in many standard cell libraries. I imagine the I/O tasks weren't all that big, and they were byte oriented. You can gain quite a bit by going to an I/O processor like that. Commodore's A2232 seven port serial card uses a 4502 for I/O, and manages to keep up with seven RS-232 lines at 19,200 baud each. The 4502/6502 pumps bytes as well as a 68030, and responds to interrupts much quicker. >Weird memory that does latched read/writes. Expensive. Only from Apple so far. >But a bit faster. Well, yeah, if you latch your writes, you can run one no-wait-state write. If the very next cycle is a write, you probably have to wait, but if it's a cache hit or a read, it's probably a win. >Just about the exact same speedup shown by the SuperMac accellerator. Maybe that one does a full QuickDraw interpreter. I haven't heard anything about it. -- Dave Haynie Commodore-Amiga (Systems Engineering) "The Crew That Never Rests" {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!daveh PLINK: hazy BIX: hazy Too much of everything is just enough