The 486 DX2 66MHz was the target platform for gaming during almost two years (1992-1994). That was an huge achievement back in the days to be at the top that long.
Before it, you could claim that a 68040 was kinda-sorta keeping up with the 486 and that the nicer design and better operating systems of other computers made up for the delta in raw performance, but the DX/2 66 running Doom was the final piece of proof that the worse-is-better approach of using raw CPU grunt to blast pixels at screen memory instead of relying on clever custom circuitry was winning.
Faced with overwhelming evidence, everyone sold their Amiga 1200s and jumped ship to that hated Wintel platform.
The Aga chipset of the 1200/4000 stupidly only added 2 more bitplanes. The CD32 chip actually had byte-per-pixel (chunky) graphics modes but the omission from the 1200 was fatal.
Reading in hindsight there was probably too many structural issues for Commodore to remain competitive anyhow, but an alt-history where they would've seen the needs for 3d rendering is tantalizing.
I agree. Unfortunately, even with chunky graphics and/or 3D foresight, 68k would still have been a dead end and Commodore would still have been mismanaged into death. It’s fun to dream though…
Edit: I don't mean that their success was certain if they executed better. I mean they did almost nothing and got the guaranteed outcome: failure. (And their engineers were brilliant but had very little resources to work with.)
Had the Amiga retained relevance for longer and without a push for PowerPC I don't see a reason why 68k wouldn't have been extended. Heck the FPGA Apollo 68080 would've matched end of 1990s P-II's and FPGA's aren't speed monsters to begin with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset
It was going to be HP PA-RISC based and have an AGA Amiga SoC, including a 68k core.
https://archive.org/details/Hombre_201808/Hombre_Presentatio...
Biggest difference perhaps where 68000 is more complicated is postincrement but considering all the cruft 32bit X86 already inherited from 8086 compared to the "clean" 32bit variations of 68000 I'd make it a toss at best but leaning to 68000 being easier (stuff like IP relative addressing also exists on the RISC-y ARM arch).
Apart from addressing the sheer number of weird x86 instructions and prefixes has always been the bane of lowpower x86.
Maybe if these theoretical new 68k Amigas became a huge market hit they could have taken the arch further and it could have remained competitive, but all the other 68k shops had already pretty much given up or moved on already (Apple was already going PPC, Sun went SPARC, NeXT gave up on their 68k hardware, Atari was exiting the computer business entirely, etc) so I don’t know that the market would have been there to support development against the vast amount of competition from both the huge x86 bastion on one hand and the multitude of RISC newcomers on the other.
Remember, Intel also barked up the wrong tree with Itanium for 64bit and didn't really let go until AMD forced their hand with x64.
The intention was good, but the Akiko chip was functionally almost useless. It was soon surpassed by CPU chunky to planar algorithms. I don't think it was ever even used in any serious way by any released games (though it might have been used to help with FMV).
1: https://forum.amiga.org/index.php?topic=51616.msg544232#msg5...
This 16-bit memory (2 megs) is also where the framebuffer and audio lives, so the stock CPU in A1200 has to share bandwidth with display signal generation and the graphics and audio processing.
All-in-all, it meant the Amiga 1200 had only about twice the memory throughput of the Amiga 500. (About 5 megabytes/s vs about 10 megabytes/s)
If the A1200 had at least some extra 32-bit memory (it existed as a third party add-on) the CPU could have had its own uncontested memory with a troughput of about 20-40 megabyte/s.
Imagine the difference it would have made if the machine had just a little extra memory.
That's just a tiny detail. That the chipset wasn't 32-bit was another disappointment.
The bigger problem was that Commodore as a company was aimless.
If it's a sin or feature can of course be debated but I remember playing games on an Amiga in the early 90s and until Doom the graphics capabilities didn't look outdated.
By 1992 with AGA however I agree, flicker and planar graphics(with 8 bitplanes any total memory bandwidth gains were gone) was a downside/sin that should've been fixed to stay relevant.
If they addressed this, the Doom experience would have run better on Amiga.
(Also, a Pentium 60 is barely faster than a DX/2 66 at many tasks — it is a Bad Processor — but that’s another conversation ;)
From a 486 with VLB to a Pentium with PCI everything became a lot nicer.
Second gen Pentiums, starting with the 75 MHz, were great.
Another factor for the later P1s being better IIRC was improved chipsets.
I think my next computer came with an AMD Duron 900Mhz, an entry level at the time but the jump from the pentium 100Mhz was such a huge gap it still felt like a formula 1.
Now we have these amazing displays and graphics cards and there's literally no way to make my Mac have different window titlebars or anything. So boring
The FOOF bug was actually discovered on the first step of the later 90 MHz Pentium (which was released with the 100 MHz Pentium, which also suffered from the bug). However this was corrected with a hardware stepping. The 75 MHz Pentium was actually released as part of this later stepping, and it was a binned 90/100 MHz part. There were no first step 75 MHz Pentiums.
And sometimes the DX/4 100Mhz would be slowest of all those at 25Mhz bus.
The full name on the chip on some of them is ”Am5x86-P75 DX5-133” which implies a lot of things, some of which are flat out misleading (it does not get very close to ”P75” performance)
My peripherals seemed to take it. My graphics output showed some slight glitches, which I was OK with for the speed.
However, I think it was a bit unstable and would fail a correctness challenge like compiling XFree86 or the Linux kernel, which were like overnight long runs. Must have been some bit flips in there occasionally. I seem to recall that once that reality settled into my brain, I went back to the clock tripler config.
I think it was 1994. It was a loaded 486 with the best 17" CRT monitor money could buy at the time. I think he spent over $7000.