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From: jeh@sisd.kodak.com (Ed Hanway)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Amiga Competitiveness.
Message-ID: <1990Sep27.203058.601@sisd.kodak.com>
Date: 27 Sep 90 20:30:58 GMT
References: <1080@ucsvc.ucs.unimelb.edu.au> <27015c2b-2d22.4comp.sys.amiga-1@tronsbox.xei.com> <YNM%XS|@rpi.edu>
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peck@ral.rpi.edu (Joseph Peck) writes:
>Here is another opinion on 68000 Amiga's.  Why doesn't Commodore start
>shipping them with a 14Mhz 68000?  The processor cost increase is less
>than $20, and the slight modifications to the motherboard should cost
>almost nothing.

I doubt if it would be worth it.  There are third-party boards that
piggyback a 14MHz 68000 + glue circuitry into the 68000 socket, and
I think their overall speedup is something like 10-20%.  The problem is
that the rest of the machine (memory, custom chips, etc.) still runs at
7MHz (and changing that would be a _major_ redesign).  That's why
Commodore's A2620 and A2630 accellerator boards have always come with
(relatively) high-speed 32-bit memory.

IMHO, it takes at least a 50% speed increase for a machine to "feel faster."
Anything less isn't worth it unless you're running programs that take hours
or days at a time to run.

Ed Hanway
uunet!sisd!jeh