Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!rutgers!cbmvax!daveh
From: daveh@cbmvax.commodore.com (Dave Haynie)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re: The Amiga's Future
Message-ID: <22164@cbmvax.commodore.com>
Date: 4 Jun 91 20:26:18 GMT
References: <6678@vela.acs.oakland.edu> <1991Jun03.053144.3208@ariel.unm.edu> <1991Jun4.003619.3661@news.iastate.edu> <1991Jun4.025024.823@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu> <1991Jun4.105736.15468@news.iastate.edu>
Reply-To: daveh@cbmvax.commodore.com (Dave Haynie)
Organization: Commodore, West Chester, PA
Lines: 38

In article <1991Jun4.105736.15468@news.iastate.edu> taab5@isuvax.iastate.edu writes:

>   With the ECS, Commodore basically took some of the registers that
>were hard-wired in the old chipset and made them programmable.  

You don't have any idea what you're talking about.  "Registers that were
hard wired"?!?  What do you think they did in the old chips, build in 
programmable functions, then time them high and low?  Sure, and I imagine that
the 68020 actually had a data cache all along, only it was hard-wired in the
off state.

>From here, the new modes were achieved by using the new programmable 
>registers.  Overall, however, not all that many changes were made.

Again, you're clueless.  There was a reasonable amount of redesign necessary
to make things programmable.  There was an even greater amount of work
necessary to make Denise generate 35ns pixels, since that basically meant
that everything in the pixel path had to run twice as fast as it previously
did, or at least appear to.  

Another point of ECS was to bring the Amiga chips onto Commodore's CAD systems.
At Amiga, a good portion of everything was done strictly by hand.  While you
can technically design anything by hand, and I imagine somewhere, in some 
dark, hellish corner of the world, PC boards are still being done by hand and 
prototypes are still being wire-wrapped, you DON'T want to do design 10K-100K
transistor full custom logic by hand.  Unfortunately, that's the only way a
startup company could do it in the early 80's.

>   If you doubt my word, use common sense.  

Common sense would dictate that one only speak about what one understands,
less one be though a fool.  That's the problem with common sense; it's far
too uncommon.

-- 
Dave Haynie Commodore-Amiga (Amiga 3000) "The Crew That Never Rests"
   {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!daveh      PLINK: hazy     BIX: hazy
	"This is my mistake.  Let me make it good." -R.E.M.