Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!emory!gatech!prism!dali!ken From: ken@dali.gatech.edu (Ken Seefried iii) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.hardware Subject: Re: RISC Amiga Keywords: well there's going to be a RISC Mac!! Message-ID: <16105@hydra.gatech.EDU> Date: 30 Oct 90 18:55:45 GMT References: <1156@iceman.jcu.oz> <22914@grebyn.com> Sender: news@prism.gatech.EDU Reply-To: ken@dali.gatech.edu (Ken Seefried iii) Organization: The House Of Fun Lines: 52 In article <22914@grebyn.com> ckp@grebyn.UUCP (Checkpoint Technologies) writes: >In article <1156@iceman.jcu.oz> cpca@iceman.jcu.oz (C Adams) writes: >>So what would we want a RISC Amiga to be based on, 88k? Sparc? i860? MIPS? > >Given the Amiga product philosphy of "inexpensive", I'd have to guess >the AMD29K. They're real cheap, and quite fast. After that I think 88K, >because of the Motorola heritage of the Amiga. Plus I just read that >Motorola dropped the price of the 88K chip set, don't remember how low. >Still much higher than a 68030. > First...the AMD29K is a tremendously unlikely choice. First, almost noone (maybe one company) uses it as a general purpose CPU, and AMD does not market it as such. It is used almost exclusively in embedded systems applications. It also has some not-insubstantial memory sub- system requirements (the optimal configuration implimented with VRAMS) that doesn't seem, to me at least, to lend itself to inexpensive implimentation, especially in the 8+MB range. Someone with direct 29k hardware experience should comment further. Second...loyalty to motorola seems to be a signal to *not* use the 88k (witness Sun(SPARC), SGI(MIPS), NCR(80x86), etc.). Both SPARC and MIPS can be had for less money than the 88k, and both currently have installed base advantages over the 88k. The 88k is a damn nice chip (I *love* the Tek XD88/10 on my desk at work), but there are some real caveats in the market (not technically) in using it. This has been hashed out over (inconclusively) in comp.sys.m88k and by e-mail. I'd bet that C/A could make a helluva a run at the SPARC clone market (something that is about to take off...). A low-priced colour AmigaSPARC would *really* be popular. >>What about compatibility with existing software? > >Forget about it. RISC is a new architecture, a new instruction set, a >new philosophy. This is simply not true. I regularly run MS-DOS programmes on a SPARCStation 1 using SoftPC (a programme that has been ported to the MIPS, 88k and (I think) the 29k as well). The IBM RS/6000 emulates a 386 completely in software as fast as a real 386 in many cases. RISC processors very much lend themselves to emulating other machines (within limits). A RISC simulator of an Amiga, while probably not easy, is certainly doable by reasonably sharp team. Hell, it might be easier than SoftPC since the 68k instruction set is so much cleaner and more orthoginal that the Intel rubbish. -- ken seefried iii "A snear, a snarl, a whip that ken@dali.gatech.edu stings...these are a few of my favorite things..."