The 68000 Wars, Part 3: We Made Amiga, They Fucked It Up
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filfre.net
Part 1: http://www.filfre.net/2015/03/the-68000-wars-part-1-lorraine/
Part 2: http://www.filfre.net/2015/04/the-68000-wars-part-2-jack-is-back/Of course if they had they would probably have been tricked into buying Amstrad shit.
The problem was that platforms that were limited to a single nation were not viable, Acorn never really broke into the US market. I don't believe there was even much adoption in Europe. You can see the same story in Japan with MSX.
That said, I agree that RiscOS was far superior to many competitors. But as we still see, it is adoption and the ecosystem around the platform which is often the deciding factor in success than the superiority of the basic technology.
Still more than a little nostalgic though... and wish it was able to address international markets better. Anyone have some cash to buy the rights to RiscOS and open source it? I think it only take 30K GBP or so. :)
QnX now, that would be another matter but I suspect RIM will want more then 30 K for it. I already approached Quantum when they still owned it but there was absolutely no way to get them to even respond. Which is a pity because I think something like QnX in open source form would absolutely rock.
Hmmm.. if you count non-commercial restriction, parts have that.
Ah that is not true. In fact Acorn paid the BBC a royalty on every Beeb sold.
[1] http://www.rafmuseum.org.uk/documents/Research/RAF-Historica...
A plane so hot that one of the protype's on a single engine could walk away from the fastest fighter of the era!
If I ever run a laundry files game 666 squadron will be using the advanced version of the TSR 2 rather than the Bombcords
The first book in the series "racing the beam", especially so.
Like Atari with the ST, Commodore basically failed to capitalize on the original amiga and by the early 90s PCs have mostly caught up.
While the amiga 1000 was revolutionary in 1985, AGA[1] was not that special in 1992 (especially as it wasn't particularly beneficial to 3d games like doom, which were becoming the new hotstuff).
The amiga of the 90s was the 3dfx voodoo.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Advanced_Graphics_Archite...
I'm not sure if you ever used a PowerPC Mac when they were a mix of emulated 68k and PowerPC, but they were notoriously unstable. The mix of a lack of memory protection and emulated CPU instructions would have been the same for the Amiga and Atari ST whose OSs also lacked memory protection and safety features of more modern operating systems.
I have an Atari Falcon 030, Atari's last and best machine. It is a really really nice machine. But it was hobbled by poor software support -- it's only now that hackers are discovering what they can do with the combination of the 68030 and the Motorola 56k DSP in it (Example: Quake 3 has been ported/rewritten recently for it, using the 56k for 3d acceleration.)
I used to wonder what the world would have been like if the 68000 systems won out. But now we're seeing a world where the ARM belatedly wins out, which is kind of neat, tho ARM is arguably now as "evil" as Intel :-)
What is an interesting mental exercise is imagining what would have happened if the 6502 or 6809 architectures had expanded and done well. Those architectures had insanely fast interrupt processing and very fast (single CPU cycle) memory access. Some really neat machines could have been made if they'd continued to advance them, gotten past the 64k memory address limit and into high clock rates. Western Design stopped at the 65c816, a 16-bit variant of the 6502. Something faster and funner than the Amiga could have been built with a 32-bit 6502 descendant and chipsets similar to what was in the Amiga. That would have been really neat.
I think one of the factors could be that 68k is a bit harder to decode than x86 - while the instruction set is more orthogonal, the encoding has less structure; compare http://goldencrystal.free.fr/M68kOpcodes.pdf (68k) with http://i.stack.imgur.com/07zKL.png (x86).
very fast (single CPU cycle) memory access
That was possible only because at the time, memory was faster than the core and could keep up. Modern CPUs run the core at several times memory speeds, and there is latency involved due to physical constraints.
If the 68k family had continued to evolve past the 1994s 68060, I'm sure they could have just dropped backwards compatibility to some of the more complex addressing modes, or just devoted less silicon to them, and making what remains faster. Kinda like happened with the ColdFire version of the 68k family.
What really killed the 68000 was the move to RISC, in particular Apple's move to PowerPC. That took away any hope of future evolution (they even managed to release the 68060 after that, but that was it) and collapsed the high-end 68K business.
The Motorola Series 900 machines were interesting - I had one under my desk at work for quite a while. They had stackable units, including one that contained a SCSI 3.5" floppy drive that was way faster than regular ones. We also had a DG unit with the m88k.
> That was possible only because at the time, memory was faster than the core and could keep up. Modern CPUs run the core at several times memory speeds, and there is latency involved due to physical constraints.
That begs the question: Would we be better off if CPU clock speeds were set such that the memory could keep up again, and we software developers learned to work within real constraints again, rather than expecting the CPU makers to keep working miracles to deliver ever more performance? I have no wish to go back to programming in Applesoft BASIC or 6502 assembler as I did in my childhood and early teenage years. But programming a 32-bit processor clocked to match the speed of memory, in C++ or Rust, wouldn't be so bad.
Absolutely not, because of the locality principle. As Terje Mathisen used to say, "All programming is an exercise in caching."
Locality isn't a property of a specific coding style or methodology, it's just the way programs work. No matter what kind of architecture we end up using 50 years from now, it will have a fast cache of some kind, backed up by slower memory of some kind. We'll have a different set of problems to confront in day-to-day development work, but hobbling the CPU won't be the answer to any of them.
Power efficiency is more complex, often it's better to briefly burst then get back to sleep faster, rather than drag things out at 100 MHz, but a specific answer would depend on many factors.
Memory latency is at best about 10 ns. I don't think a 100 MHz CPU would better in any way than what we have now. Well, except power requirements would sure be very low.
It was, but for some reason Hitachi didn't publicize it, and word only escaped years too late: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitachi_6309
Wow, what is that like? I'd love to see a demo video .. know of one?
Long thread here: http://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=68&t=26775
They did; that's what the mc68060 was. Too little, too late and (as you say) corporate attention directed at PPC.
My first 386 dev box was purchased in 1987. Within a year of that, I was using a Compaq portable 386 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Portable_386). 386 was a big deal because it finally got us Intel devs a flat address space... so no more trying to fit data into tiny pages (64k). 386 killed the chief advantage of 68k architecture, and for whatever reason Motorola just couldn't get the clock speed up fast enough.
There were two things that were interesting about the Amiga in 87: video toaster for doing cheap video effects (think intro sequence to Better Call Saul, not awesome demos) and gaming.
But gaming on the PC made a huge leap in 1987 when IBM shipped ALL of their new PS/2 computers with a 256 color video adapter called the VGA (seem to remember the lowest end models only doing 256 colors in 320x260 mode... but that was good enough)... Eventually TrueVision and even ATI had video cards that could do the same sorts of things (or better) than an Amiga.
So many great computer ideas died in the 80s and early 90s... but it was really evolution... most of them died because a generalized solution (i.e. VGA with video out + software) eclipsed a specialized solution (i.e. Amiga with video toaster).
I think that, in the way that Apple products are now showing up in work places due to people preferring them at home. The reverse happened in the 90s. People wanted or needed to bring work home, and their offices supplied them with PCs.
The productivity situation on PCs was always just a bit better or standardized than Amigas.
What mystified me more was that, during this time period, the Apple Macintosh took over the creative market -- especially in visual arts. The Amiga always came across to me as a far better creative machine, with better tooling, than the stuffier Mac. Again it may be due to better support for WYSIWYG output during printing and pre-press, better color matching etc. But the Amiga just felt more creative and fun to me.
Also, by the time the 68040 came out, it was starting to become clear to everybody that Motorola wasn't going to be able to keep the performance edge up. Apple switched to PowerPC but Commodore couldn't afford to. There was a whole plethora of PowerPC cards for the Amiga, to try to keep them going, but it was really obvious by then that it was game over, and people started to hunt around for the next system.
Amiga "owned" the TV market for a long time because it happened to get some important products first (Video Toaster for example).
Apple got better desktop publishing tools first.
E.g. if you wanted to do TV you during some period would want a product like the Video Toaster. If you wanted to do newspapers, you'd want Quark.
While there may have been certain platform quirks that tilted the initial creation of those tools in one direction or another (such as genlock support for video for the Amiga), platform mattered far less than application, and early application traction in a niche would paper over a lot of other platform issues.
WYSIWYG output for printing was largely still an application issue, not a platform issue, for example. Exactly for those kinds of reasons, an application lead also translated to a platform lead for those kind of niches where people would buy the platform to support an application rather than the other way around. People would buy Quark, and a Mac to run it, not pick a system and see what desktop publishing would run on it. If you loved the Amigas pre-emptive multitasking and "colourful" (compared to the Mac..) environment, tough - it couldn't run Quark (been there - had exactly that discussion back in those days).
Regarding PPC, note that the PPC cards for the Amiga appeared after Commodore had already gone bankrupt, as far as I know. At least PowerUP first appeared in '97 after Amiga Technologies announced Amiga going PPC in '95. It'd been largely obvious the game was over at least from 95-96 even for most die-hard supporters.
Interestingly, had Commodore continued it's clear the next generation Amigas would have most likely been different - the prototype "Hombre" chipset was a SOC that included a HP PA-RISC core [1]. Interestingly Commodore apparently choice PA-RISC primarily with the intent of being able to run Windows NT (at the time of the decision, the lower priced PPC - and MIPS - alternatives were not supported for NT) - something which would have been massively controversial with a lot of Amiga users.
I didn't know anyone with an Amiga, and there weren't any at school. The only Commodore machine I ever got my hands on was my paternal grandfather's Commodore 64, which seemed quite limited compared to the Apple IIGS we had at home. From what I've read, it seems that the Amiga had better graphics than the GS. And of course, the Amiga's processor was faster, unless one added an accelerator card to the GS, which we never did. The GS's sound chip (an Ensoniq) was more advanced in some ways; it had 32 oscillators. But samples had to be stored in that chip's own RAM, and there was only 64K of that. Still, there were a few good trackers for the GS; the best one was NoiseTracker from the FTA.
The Mac had a couple years head start on Amiga, and Apple had a pretty large brand name and relationship with retailers that catered to businesses than Commodore did. By 1985, Commodore (despite the CBM name) was fairly synonymous with games. There were games for Apple as well (Macs, IIe, etc) but there wasn't as much of a stigma of Apple as a 'game computer company' at that point.
And... it cost more. We all know when something costs more it must be better, right? ;)
Basically that. Whenever you wonder why something "odd" gets a foothold, look for the money trail.
One thing to note is that there was a couple of Amiga variants that lived on in broadcast media, as it was very capable of doing video work.
BTW, the BYOD kinda happened back in the day as well. There is a claim that accountants brought their personal AppleII to work so they didn't have to fight for mainframe time.
Edit: oh, and i wonder how much the dock connector had to say for the long term uptake of iPhone in the corporate world. Never mind that Apple was quick to offer a WSUS like service to handle app rollouts.
I seem to recall that right around the time Intel released the 80486 they started getting into the Mhz wars and clock multiplying the hell out of everything. DX2 then DX4. The fastest 68040 maxed out at what...40Mhz, while the 486 ended up somewhere at 150Mhz or so.
But the low volumes definitely hurt Motorola's ability to keep up with Intel's R&D. Clock for clock, the 68k architecture was faster, but Intel figured out how to throw a lot more clocks at the problem and they kept doing that until PowerPCs were not really a consumer-level home computer chip anymore.
For those reading who aren't old timers, this needs to be elaborated on.
This wasn't any trick or sleight on Intel's part. The parts really did run 2x as fast or 4x as fast internally. That was a major achievement. An instruction that took 5 clocks to execute at 33 MHz took 5 clocks to execute at 50 MHz and took 5 clocks to execute at 100 MHz. This was all accomplished over a relatively brief period of time compared to today's rate of CPU speed advancements.
What slowed the CPU down was the growing mismatch between the internal operation and the external memory bus which continued to run at (usually) 33 MHz. It was possible to run the external bus at 50 MHz but most designs didn't. The 8K byte on-chip cache helped mitigate the mismatch.
Actually, the Intel 486DX4 ran at only 3x the speed, despite the name. Intel couldn't use the DX3 name because of a trademark owned by AMD, who also had a part called the Am486DX4. The AMD part was also available with a 40MHz bus and a tripled 120MHz CPU clock.
The other problem is the Amiga never had Adobe as a developer. That would have made a huge difference.
Jay Miner was lost that same year. It is just so sad.
They'd have continued to support Commodore if Commodore didn't continuously mess them around. A major factor was the price war that was to be Jack Tramiel's parting shot: Commodore overnight announced a massive price drop and left their dealers to take the hit on all inventory they already had on hand.
That was typical for Tramiel playing hard-ball but also severely hurt a lot of businesses that had bet on Commodore.
You see the difference when you look at the US market vs. Europe - Europe was handled by subsidiaries that often handled their dealer networks far better. Particularly the UK and Germany were Commodore strongholds. The UK subsidiary actually tried to get financing for a buyout of Commodore International after the bankruptcy, and survived for quite a while on their own financial strength.
The IBM PC was basically off the shelf components bar the BIOS. And so when Compaq clean roomed said chip, it was a free for all.
Especially as IBM was a old name in the corporate world, and so the PC had a foothold where the Amiga did not.
Which is the exact opposite of what they should have done. Instead they should have split their market into two, one focusing on high-end workstations and the other game and home computing.
I remember when they were talking about the next generation of custom graphics chips and there was all of this hold up, which was so unnecessary because there was a simple solution. They only needed to add three of the same chip in one for each color red, blue and green or for controlling every third scan line (I had even read of someone doing this with three separate Amigas). There's your next gen workstation right there.
That's exactly what they did (and very successfully), with the 500 and 2000 models.
The main problem for mainstream adoption at the time was that the machine, being so successful as a multimedia and games machine, was regarded as a toy.
But the stake through the heart of the Amiga, and all the other proprietary platforms of the time, was that the IBM PC architecture became a standard that was open for all manufacturers to produce for. You can't compete with that.
(Unless you are Steve Jobs. In fact the accepted wisdom at the time, with Apple and the Mac teetering on the brink of annihilation, was that they should open up their hardware platform and become a software company.)
I'd argue that while the 500 was what they needed, the 2000 was quite unambitious. What Amiga really needed in their 1987 high-end product was a 14MHz 68020 (or EC020) based, 32-bit system, with a graphics chipset to match. Take the old chipset, but give it 2x the clock and 2x the memory bandwidth, and all sorts of things (including non-interlaced 8-bit 640x400 video) become possible.
If they had started working on this in late 1985, I think they would have had a chance at being taken more seriously. Instead, they didn't even start revising the chipset until 1988, and they didn't have a native 32-bit based system until the 3000 in 1990 (and even then, still with the old chipset).
In fairness, I understand the US-based side of Commodore was thinking along these lines for the 2000, but lost out to the Commodore German division's model of a cheaper 1000 with slots and a better case.
What Apple proved was that an alternative to the PC was possible, if you were clever enough in your technology and your marketing. Commodore was neither.
[1] A bit-plane video architecture. For example, say the video is 256x256 (for simplicity) 1 bit color. That's 8 bits per pixel, 8K video buffer. What 2-bit color? Okay, the low bit of each pixel s in one 8K video buffer; the high bit of each pixel is in another 8K video buffer. Want 8 colors? Add another 1-bit 8K video buffer. Now you have one pixel spread across three bytes.
Never mind that Intuition also allowed control access to the Copper [2] so you could also specify the screen resolution and color. You could split the screen (upper half, 320x100, dual play fields (three bit planes defining the background, three bit planes defining the foreground) with 32 colors, and the lower half 640x200 (interlaced) with four colors). You could also specify up to 8 hardware sprites.
Yup, Intuition was very tied to the video hardware.
[2] A special 3-instruction CPU to control the hardware registers based on the video beam position, allowing you to change the entire video setup virtually anywhere on the screen (any given scan line, within four pixels horizontally); colors, memory used for the video buffer, resolution, sprite locations. You could literally display all 12 bits of supported color on a single 1-bit video page by mucking with the register settings on a per-4-pixel basis using the Copper. It'd be a long Copper program, but the 68000 would be completely idle.
Obviously there's more to improving the graphics architecture than just improving the clock and data path. My point was that the easy benefits of Moore's law at that point would have substantial improvements possible, if Commodore was able and willing to make the attempt. "What amazing graphics thing are we going to do next?" was the question Commodore needed to be asking themselves in 1985, but it's clear they didn't. How much of that was due to money, and how much was due to corporate culture, is not clear to me.
And WRT Intuition: it was tied to the hardware, but you overstate the case. Later Amigas had new graphics modes, and Intuition had support for 8 bitplanes from the beginning. I don't think 640x400x8 @ 60Hz was impossible, or even that difficult, in 1987, from an OS perspective.
BTW, anyone else disappointed that there are no Amiga engineering alum who have discovered this thread?
If the A1000 had managed an 80-column non-interlaced mode, it might have done better initially, but as it was, the machine was a joke for business.
There were many problems for Commodore, but lagging on the graphics side vs. the PC was not an issue until years later.
Doing productivity apps on the Amiga in its highest resolution vs the Atari in its highest (monochrome) was no comparison.
The Atari did better in certain markets -- MIDI sequencing, big time, and to a much lesser extant DTP -- because of this.
But having that nice mono screen for productivity didn't make the ST a big success, so I don't think the original comment stands.
The Amiga was not a success because it wasn't an IBM PC.
On the high-end the 2000 was also not enough, again they were hedging too much trying to keep costs down. They should have pumped up the specs and doubled the price. Instead of Sun Workstations in their offices they should have been using Amiga workstations.
Really loved those machines.
It's very interesting to see how good/bad managerial decisions or tiny details can totally sink an advanced technology and change the course of the future. Can we imagine a present with a current technology without the advances that, for example, Apple has brought? Maybe we'll all be still using Nokia phones or Palm PDAs.
I just bought an Atari TT off eBay. It will nicely drive a VGA monitor, but not for its highest resolution (1280x960), for which it needs a special ("ECL") monitor. An adapter from that to VGA is $175 from a hobbyist -- almost as much as I paid for the computer.