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From: davewt@NCoast.ORG (David Wright)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: A3000UX Seems Fated
Message-ID: <1990Dec15.040442.6106@NCoast.ORG>
Date: 15 Dec 90 04:04:42 GMT
References: <1990Dec14.045924.20212@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Organization: North Coast Public Access *NIX, Cleveland, OH
Lines: 36

In article <1990Dec14.045924.20212@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> sl35746@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (By-Tor) writes:
>almost moot to combine them in one box.  The Unix side is limited to the hard-
>ware that is needed to keep it Amiga compatible.
	You couldn't be more wrong here. ANY Amiga with slots will outperform
a PC-Compatible runing a Unix-type OS, with the exception of some
(rare) clones that have full 32-bit EISA busses, and even then you would
still not be able to beat the 3000 in performance, even with a '486.
Unix demands a lot of RAM, and a very fast bus. the IBM ISA bus is very slow,
and in most clones is only 16 bits wide. They also have much less DMA channels,
and hardware has to be trickily configured to work around every other board
in the system. I put Unix boxes togather every day, and in many loaded systems
based on PC-type motherboards, it is simple IMPOSSIBLE to configure a system
the way a client might want, due to hardware conflicts.
	An Amiga 3000, with an '030 or a '040 would leave a '386 or '486
system in the dust when it comes to hard drive and memory transfer speed
over the bus, even if the PC was using an EISA bus. Not to mention that the
3000 will AUTOMATICALLY recognize over 1.2 GIGABYTES of RAM, with no user
configuration whatsoever. Microsoft has locked the PC user into yet another
memory bottleneck, if they ever got OS-2 off the ground. It only recognizes
a maximum of 16 megabytes of RAM, and I have seen some PC clones that can now
have up to 24 megabytes of RAM on the motherboard (a total waste in a
machine with a 16 bit bus).
	There is just no way that the '386 clone you would be atlking about
(if you want to try and compare by price) would have full 32-bit EISA
slots, and full access to that much memory, thus making the 3000UX a far
better machine to run Unix. But I suspect that being able to tell people
that a machine can also run DOS will matter more to most people than how
fast the hardware itself actually is. People believe what they read in
PC world, not what their intelligence should tell them.


>
>I guess they only real market niche they could sneak into, and probably won't
>succeed in reaching, is a low-cost color workstation.  If the current
>implementation of X doesn't support color, then there is no way anyone will
>buy it for color.