Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!linac!mp.cs.niu.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!news.iastate.edu!VAXF.IASTATE.EDU!XGR39 From: xgr39@CCVAX.IASTATE.EDU (Marc Barrett) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.hardware Subject: Re: Amiga Custom Chips - why hasn't C= made them faster? Message-ID: <1991Apr2.235710.13984@news.iastate.edu> Date: 2 Apr 91 23:57:10 GMT References: Sender: news@news.iastate.edu (USENET News System) Reply-To: xgr39@CCVAX.IASTATE.EDU Organization: Iowa State University, Ames, IA. Lines: 122 In article , cpetterb@glacier.sim.es.com (Cary Petterborg) writes: >The Amiga has been out for years now. There have been improvements >made to the custom chips, Agnus in particular. But, I am amazed at >the fact that their clock speed, etc. has remained the same. In an >industry where last years chip runs twice as fast this year, C= sure >has sat back on their b*tts as far as performance is concerned. Is >it because they aren't willing to invest any more money into the >technology because they can sell so many A500's as they are now? >What gives? Certainly the technology exists to speed them up. Here is why Commodore has not improved the Amiga's custom chipset. The following table lists the amounts that Commodore has invested in R&D since 1984, both as a raw figure and as a percentage of total sales (the better figure for comparing companies): Commodore International, Ltd. ----------------------------------------------- Year | Total Sales | R&D | R&D as % of Sales | ----------------------------------------------- 1990 | 887.3 | 27.7 | 3.12 % | 1989 | 939.7 | 19.3 | 2.05 % | 1988 | 871.1 | 15.4 | 1.77 % | 1987 | 806.7 | 16.4 | 2.03 % | 1986 | 889.3 | 36.8 | 4.14 % | 1985 | 883.1 | 46.5 | 5.27 % | 1984 | 1267.2 | 40.3 | 3.18 % | ----------------------------------------------- However, looking at stats from a single company is not very useful. Therefore, let's look at the same figures for a *REAL* company, one whose management knows exactly what they are doing: Sun Microsystems ------------------------------------------------ Year | Total Sales | R&D | R&D as % of Sales | ------------------------------------------------ 1989 | 1765.366 | 234.1 | 13.26 % | 1988 | 1051.618 | 139.9 | 13.30 % | 1987 | 537.537 | 69.6 | 12.94 % | 1986 | 210.104 | 30.6 | 14.59 % | 1985 | 115.249 | 15.2 | 13.18 % | 1984 | 38.860 | 4.8 | 12.38 % | ------------------------------------------------ As you can see, compared to SUN, Commodore has never invested much in their own future, which is the reason why the custom chipset is so ancient, and why improvements are nowhere in sight. This information also gives us some insight into the success of the two companies. As you can see from the first table, between 1984 and 1990, Commodore's total sales steadily declined. The decline is actually much worse than it appears, once you take inflation into account. A look at Sun, however, shows a different story. This company is run by management that is totally committed to the R&D process, and it shows, both from their R&D investments and their corporate growth. Between 1984 and 1989, Sun grew at a very impressive rate of 200% per year. This is very good for a company that was only founded in 1983. The results are very apparent. Sun controls a very respectable percentage of the worldwide workstation market, and there are actually more active readers of the comp.sys.amiga newsgroups who work for Sun than who work for Commodore. BTW, there is more to these R&D figures than just development of future chipsets. The R&D budgets given in these tables are the total R&D investments, including both software and hardware R&D. If you look around at what Commodore has been doing lately, you can easily see that Commodore seems to be putting more priority into software projects (especially AmigaDOS and UNIX) than into development of future hardware. This lowers the amounts that Commodore has actually been spending on development of the chipset. If software R&D only accounts for 50% of Commodore's total R&D budget (a conservative figure, since I think it accounts for more), and 'other hardware projects' account for 50% of Commodore's hardware R&D budget, then this leaves only a tiny portion of an already-tiny R&D budget for devlopment of that chipset. It is no wonder why that improved chipset is so very long-delayed. This also explains more than just why the heart of the Amiga's hardware is so old and frail. It also explains why more than six years have gone by between when the Amiga's original O.S. was finished and a truly significant update was available. It also explains many significant features -- including virtual memory, memory protection, resource tracking, and device-independent video -- are still absent from the Amiga's O.S. I sill maintain that there are no valid reasons why that 32-bit 'Super ChipSet' should not be available right now. Sun started devlopment of their first RISC microprocessors in 1984, and was shipping complete systems based on these microprocessors in 1987. Sun was still a very small company during these years, and yet they were able to develop the SPARC microprocessor completely from scratch and ship complete systems based on the SPARC in less than four years. By comparison, with the 'Super ChipSet' Commodore has it made. Commodore is still a much bigger company now than Sun was at that time, and Commodore is not designing from scratch but is merely improving an existing design. Despite this, more than five years have gone by since the original chipset was finished and significant improvements are still 2-3 years away. Short Bibliography: The tables containing the R&D and Total Sales information for Sun and Commodore came from the Moodies OTC and Moodies International volumes, respectively. The information about the development of the Sun SPARC microprocessor came from The Sun Technical Journal, in a paper called 'The SPARC Papers'. Check this information for yourself if you wish to verify this information. > >Cary > >PS. Sorry if this has already been discussed much. I just got back to >reading this and other Amiga newsgroups. >-- >_______________ >Cary Petterborg (801)582-5847 x6446 >Evans & Sutherland Computer Corp. Simulation Division SLC, UT 84108 >UUCP: ...!uunet!sim.es.com!cpetterb *NET: cpetterb@glacier.sim.es.com -MB- ---------------------------------------------------------- / Marc Barrett | BITNET: XGR39@ISUVAX.BITNET / / ISU COM S Student | Internet: XGR39@CCVAX.IASTATE.EDU / ----------------------------------------------------------