Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cbmvax!daveh
From: daveh@cbmvax.commodore.com (Dave Haynie)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Sorry Guys, There is NO WAY!
Keywords: AMIGA 3000 vs NEXT
Message-ID: <16455@cbmvax.commodore.com>
Date: 11 Dec 90 18:39:51 GMT
References: <21993@well.sf.ca.us> <1747@aldebaran.cs.nps.navy.mil>
Reply-To: daveh@cbmvax.commodore.com (Dave Haynie)
Organization: Commodore, West Chester, PA
Lines: 35

In article <1747@aldebaran.cs.nps.navy.mil> schweige@cs.nps.navy.mil (Jeff Schweiger) writes:
>In article <21993@well.sf.ca.us> yoo@well.sf.ca.us (Young-Kyu Yoo) writes:

>  As for matching NeXT's price/features, the Amiga has a very long way to 
>go.  Where's that Amiga DSP?  Those Amiga DMA channels?  

Some clarifications are in order.

As for DSP, we didn't find DSP far enough evolved to build it in at this point.
You can get REAL DSP, as in floating point, on an expansion card built by one
of the third parties. Like the CPU, once you pick a DSP, you're locked into 
that instruction set.  When DSP has advanced enough to be useful to the average
system user, it might go on the motherboard, assuming there's nothing better to
spend that money on.  NeXT, for instance, would have done much better 
installing a display processor to make Display PostScript run faster, at least
on the original cube.  That would be appreciated by everyone using the box, 
not just audio people.

As for DMA channels, we've had considerable DMA channel use since the A1000 
came out -- there are essentially separate asynchronous DMA channels for hard 
disk, each expansion slot, and the Coprocessor slot in the A3000, and 
synchronous Chip bus DMA channel slots for floppy disk, audio, display, sprites, 
memory refesh, copper, and blitter.  There's nothing new in the NeXT in terms 
of DMA.

>That Amiga Mach with parallel processing capabilities?  

Is the NeXT Kernel the multiprocessing verison of Mach?  If so, where are the
multiple processors?  A board full of '030s, if it could have been used by
the NeXT OS, would have solved NeXT's speed problems much earlier than the
'040.
-- 
Dave Haynie Commodore-Amiga (Amiga 3000) "The Crew That Never Rests"
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		"I can't drive 55"	-Sammy Hagar