Amiga: the fastest 68k Mac

NJRoadfan

Well-known member
Keep in mind that the Zorro bus was being developed by pretty much ONE person, Dave Haynie. No surprise it took a few revisions of the Buster chip to get stuff working. Reading the war stories can be funny at times. Things like "EISA got this nice feature, might as well add it to Zorro while we're at it."

Looking at the actual machines shows Apple was in a much better place in 1992-93. Compare the layout of the Amiga 4000 motherboard (released late 1992) vs. that of the Wombat machines (early 1993) or even the Quadra 700 (1991). Apple's boards were much more integrated and even included more onboard peripherals.
 

tokenalt

Member
Keep in mind that the Zorro bus was being developed by pretty much ONE person, Dave Haynie. No surprise it took a few revisions of the Buster chip to get stuff working. Reading the war stories can be funny at times. Things like "EISA got this nice feature, might as well add it to Zorro while we're at it."

Looking at the actual machines shows Apple was in a much better place in 1992-93. Compare the layout of the Amiga 4000 motherboard (released late 1992) vs. that of the Wombat machines (early 1993) or even the Quadra 700 (1991). Apple's boards were much more integrated and even included more onboard peripherals.
I agree with you but I also think it goes back even further to the IIci. That machine is where Apple really proved they could make a solid graphical workstation at an affordable price.
 

Unknown_K

Well-known member
The A4000 was released when the company was short on money and dying.

Look at the Mac IIci (Sept 1989 $6269) vs Amiga 3000 (June 1990 $3379)
 

tokenalt

Member
Maybe the reason Commodore was running out of money and dying is because they were selling below costs.

Mac IIsi (Oct 1990 $3800)

Sparcstation 1 (Apr 1989 $9000)
Sparcstation IPC (Jul 1990 $4995)
 

Snial

Well-known member
The difference is that PCs and Macs benefitted from a lot of third-party ASICs and FPGAs, but the platforms were not defined by those specific chips or compatible successors the way the Amiga was.
I like your reasoning, but I don't think it quite fits the facts. Let's consider. In the late 70s there were many 8080 / Z80 based business microcomputers that would run the 8-bit OS CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers). The natural successor was 8086 based computers running CP/M-86, or SCP's clone, 86-DOS, which became MSDOS.



Sirius One/Victor 9000 and later Apricot computers as well as numerous other computers were MS-DOS, but not IBM PC compatible. Now, if it was the case that the IBM PC was successful and 'won' the market because its platform wasn't defined by its specific chips (or upwards-compatible successors), then these other computers would have gained dominance, precisely because they didn't use the same chipset as the IBM PC.

But they didn't, all the MSDOS and CP/M-86 microcomputers that weren't IBM PC compatible failed, because they didn't include the exact chipset. Meaning: the exact I/O and memory addresses used by the exact same set of chips; the exactly memory map and to some extent early on, the exact speed (4.77MHz) and 8-bit bus.

Why was this? The answer is also simple, the IBM PC was an under-performer even by the standards of 1981 when it came out; provided a lousy OS API and none of the memory map was protected. This meant that programmers had to use the actual I/O addresses to achieve decent performance, which meant PC code was locked-into the architecture.

It was this lock-in and confidence in IBM itself that enabled the IBM PC to rise to dominance; rather than any openness of the chipset. In fact we can see that lock-in even in current computers which boot up in an MDA or CGA text screen mode.

Going back to the main thesis: the PC won despite the failings of its hardware and software, because IBM was big and a safe bet for businesses buying microcomputers. For example, the Apple ][ (and the Mac II) had Plug-and-Play peripheral expansion, whereas the IBM PC didn't, but the PC totally outcompeted both of them for hardware design. Why? Because IBM was big and a safe bet for businesses buying microcomputers. Why did, ForeThought, the company that developed PowerPoint from 1984 work on developing it for the PC for 2 years before, reluctantly, switching to a Mac despite the obvious inadequacy of the PC? IBM was big and a safe bet for businesses buying microcomputers.

And Apple/Dell/HP/Compaq weren't paying the full development costs for them the way Commodore was. Most 68k and PPC Macs had custom chips, but they were largely gate arrays rather than full custom silicon and generally had different combinations of the same set of building blocks.
I think this is a better argument: full custom silicon would be more expensive than gate arrays; though gate arrays were certainly a good way to reduce costs on computers (pioneered by Sinclair, Acorn and Tangerine for example by using Ferranti ULA technology in the very early 80s).

The other element is that the custom chips themselves are becoming more software-driven. The current AI craze is predicated almost entirely on graphics chips in the early 2000s deciding to become massively parallel CPU clusters to emulate the pipeline defined by Pixar's Renderman software.
Possibly. The Van-Dam book on Computer Graphics has a section which claims that graphics architectures go round in circles from simple hardware to hardware assist, to CPUs, which then offload basic operations to rudimentary hardware again.

Networking hardware with significant processing capability of its own to offload from the main system is becoming a big deal in the server space now too.
Quite possibly.
 

Arbee

Well-known member
Why was this? The answer is also simple, the IBM PC was an under-performer even by the standards of 1981 when it came out; provided a lousy OS API and none of the memory map was protected. This meant that programmers had to use the actual I/O addresses to achieve decent performance, which meant PC code was locked-into the architecture.

It was this lock-in and confidence in IBM itself that enabled the IBM PC to rise to dominance; rather than any openness of the chipset. In fact we can see that lock-in even in current computers which boot up in an MDA or CGA text screen mode.
It wasn't lock in in the conventional sense though. Anyone could call Motorola or a number of other companies and get 6845 CRTCs. After that every component of an MDA or CGA was available at Radio Shack except the font ROM. 100% compatible third party MDA and CGA cards and entire PC clones both started appearing before the PC took off, and I believe were instrumental in the success of the PC. The PC always was going to do OK in business because of IBM, but at home it would've sold a lot fewer if your only option was IBM at IBM's pricing and IBM's business-oriented sales network.
 

q700fan

Member
So, here is an Amiga 4000, CPU card is a BFG9060 with a real Revision 6 68060 at 100MHz and a ZZ9000 graphics card.

First image is 8 bit 1080p using the ZZ9000 and second image is High Res Laced mode in monochrome.

A 68060 at 100MHz is competitive with a PPC 601.

Only downside is the 68060 has trouble with more recent Mac OS versions than 7.5.5.

IMG_9893.jpg
IMG_9894.jpg
 

eharmon

Well-known member
Heh this thread kicked off a lot of discussion...
So, here is an Amiga 4000, CPU card is a BFG9060 with a real Revision 6 68060 at 100MHz and a ZZ9000 graphics card.

First image is 8 bit 1080p using the ZZ9000 and second image is High Res Laced mode in monochrome.

A 68060 at 100MHz is competitive with a PPC 601.

Only downside is the 68060 has trouble with more recent Mac OS versions than 7.5.5.

View attachment 81464
View attachment 81465
Ooh neat! Guess that shows an 060 really could compete with the first generation PowerPC. That's dang quick! I imagine a 100MHz 601 starts to really pull ahead though.

That's a sweet 4000 setup! I can't handle the blistering $3k that'd cost here haha.

Does the 060 choke on newer OS even when the 8.1 compatibility box is checked?
 

NJRoadfan

Well-known member
Motorola had a different approach to Intel in that the newer generation CPUs weren't 100% compatible with software written for the earlier generation. Apple got away with this by not supporting older OS versions on newer hardware. The Amiga worked around it by having loadable CPU libraries in Amiga OS.

Since no Mac shipped with a 060, no OS modifications were ever made for it. The emulator patches the ROM to get System 7.5 to boot, but likely needs more work for anything newer. Also, MacOS wouldn't have any optimizations for newer opcodes/architecture in the 060. It might be able to run even faster!
 

eharmon

Well-known member
Motorola had a different approach to Intel in that the newer generation CPUs weren't 100% compatible with software written for the earlier generation. Apple got away with this by not supporting older OS versions on newer hardware. The Amiga worked around it by having loadable CPU libraries in Amiga OS.

Since no Mac shipped with a 060, no OS modifications were ever made for it. The emulator patches the ROM to get System 7.5 to boot, but likely needs more work for anything newer. Also, MacOS wouldn't have any optimizations for newer opcodes/architecture in the 060. It might be able to run even faster!
Oh it actually patches the ROM? I assumed the CPU support library would bridge it but I guess that makes sense. It's largely passing control of the processor directly to the Mac so there's no place to interpose the missing instructions.

I know I'm just rehashing the great 060-for-mac debate, but I wonder if the stock ROM gets as far as DeclROM loading on an 060. It'd be possible for the DeclROM to apply the same patches on a physical Mac, potentially.
 

NJRoadfan

Well-known member
Most Mac emulators patch the ROM to an extent. Its one reason why the machine is fairly easy to emulate! It wasn't until efforts like MAME or QEMU that there was any attempt to emulate the machine with actual hardware.
 

Snial

Well-known member
It wasn't lock in in the conventional sense though. Anyone could call Motorola or a number of other companies and get 6845 CRTCs. After that every component of an MDA or CGA was available at Radio Shack except the font ROM.
Sure, but the same was true of other non-IBM PC compatible MSDOS computers. Also, you didn't need to clone the ROM. If the key thing to the PC's success was software-level compatibility, then MSDOS computers would have won and IBM PCs would just have been one amongst many successful alternatives. But in reality, only 100% hardware compatibility mattered, to the extent that part of the standard testing for new clones was running programs that compatibility-tested the components.
100% compatible third party MDA and CGA cards and entire PC clones both started appearing before the PC took off, and I believe were instrumental in the success of the PC.
I think that the clone & third-party market was key to the PC's dominance, but again, the PC took off before they were a significant factor:

1734687802812.png

Clones didn't make any significant impact until 1984 or so, given that the first two clones, given that there were few clones until 1984 and the best known clone (Compaq Portable) didn't come anywhere near IBM's sales. For example, the Compaq Portable sold 53K units in its first year (March '83 to March '84) and the IBM PC + clones sold 1300K in 1983. This means the Compaq represented about 4% of the market in the first year. Clearly, the IBM PC market had already taken off.

The idea that it was the openness of the PC that led to its success and dominance is, I'm afraid, just a PC-myth. It contains an element of truth (it made the clone market possible, which eventually dominated IBM's share), but it's really there to give virtue to the architecture, which isn't correct. Technically, the PC was average to poor (though the build quality was good). It was over-priced. It was physically much bigger than most competitors and therefore less suited to a desk. It was uglier than most competitors and visually less suited to an office. It was relatively under-powered (as it featured the 8088).

The IBM PC took off, in a world where proprietary microcomputers were the norm, because of the name IBM. If it had been released by any other company, it would not have won. Business people simply felt safe buying them. It's just normal market forces: businesses like to invest in winners. They kinda knew the microcomputer market was new, but couldn't be sure if their investment in any particular computer would be wasted. They didn't know if Apple, Commodore or Tandy would be around in 5 years, but they knew IBM would. So, it was a safe bet to buy an IBM PC.

The PC always was going to do OK in business because of IBM, but at home it would've sold a lot fewer if your only option was IBM at IBM's pricing and IBM's business-oriented sales network.
Your home market argument is a good point and I think, backed up by evidence (e.g. the spike in C64 sales). Home users (and there were already millions) didn't care so much about confidence in buying into a winner; they cared about having fun and were already used to jumping platforms. It might have been a bit different in the US where median income levels were higher than in Europe at the time, so they probably took off earlier there. I think in the UK and Europe, from memory, it wasn't until the late 80s, with the rise of clones for around £400 ($480 at the time), that they took off here (Apple ][s weren't bought by home users much here either).

I don't have figures for the level of the clone market; nor share of clones in the home market; so my above paragraph is anecdotal guesswork from memory.
 

Unknown_K

Well-known member
Clones took ages to make an impact in the home market, but they made an impact in the office environment because of price.

Before the PC every time you purchased a computer for the office you needed to buy all new software and train the office staff in its use and that was big money back then. Once people realized that each new faster PC would run their old software but faster sales went crazy. Clones and volume drove down prices which also caused an explosion of available software since it was very profitable.

Home users very much cared about buying a winner because platforms were abandoned very quickly and then you could not get software or service for an expensive home computer. I knew people who sent back their ADAM computers the second they found out it was being discontinued even if they liked it. Sure, if the price point was cheap enough people purchased the machine, but few really did anything with it. How many people actually used their Timex 1000 before buying something with actual software and a real keyboard? Home users tended to jump around with home consoles because of the rapid advances in technology.
 

Snial

Well-known member
Clones took ages to make an impact in the home market, but they made an impact in the office environment because of price.
I think what I'm trying to claim is that the IBM PC was already dominant, before clones dominated the market. That is, clones followed the pre-existing success of the IBM PC; they didn't make it successful. And this meant the reason the IBM PC became successful wasn't because it was open, but because it was IBM. For example, as far as I understand, MDA and CGA card clones appeared on the market with the rise of the clones, not because of the 'openness' of the IBM PC. Instead, different third party graphics cards such as the Hercules Graphics Adapter appeared first, but they were targeted at the IBM PC itself, not the clones.

Nevertheless, it's tricky to find actual figures. We could get a flavour for how the market changed by reading back issues of Byte, say every 6 months from when the 5150 appeared in 1981 to the late 1980s: that's 20 issues. I found this article:


Which said: "IBM's share of the PC market shrank from roughly 80 percent in 1982–1983 to 20 percent a decade later". Subsequently I found an actual graph from this Research Gate article.

1734733365566.png
So, rough estimates for when clones were the majority of PC + Compatible sales were, from this graph, the end of 1986 when top-tier clones were at about 4.9%, other clones at 31.66% and IBM at 36.25%. But the PC was already the computer standard by the end of 1983, beginning of 1984, 3 years earlier.

This is what I mean about tackling computer industry myths, like the idea that the Apollo Guidance Computer had less power than a digital watch or simple scientific calculator. In fact it had roughly the capability of a Commodore C64 (with a slower clock rate). Or the one where people claim users never expected to have more than 64kB, or 640kB or 16MB or 4GB of RAM or 32MB or 524MB of disk space. It's all rubbish, because at the time users and engineers knew perfectly well we'd need more RAM, storage and MHz.

I suspect people don't like the idea that the PC won, because of the name IBM, because we prefer to think that people made rational, technical, fair decisions and the idea that it won because of the IBM name, seems populist and unfair. But the people who have bought PCs in the past 40 years, because of its 'openness' and 'competition' weren't the ones who made it dominant. The people who made it dominant were ignorant sales and marketing executives. It had to be that way, because knowledgable computing types would have chosen it less frequently for multiple reasons:
  • They can cope with retraining or reengineering whereas these executives couldn't, as you say: retraining is expensive for them.
  • They can explain to higher management why computer x is better; these other executives couldn't justify other computers on a technical basis.
  • They had the technical expertise to truly compare computers; whereas these other executives weren't able to even justify buying a non-IBM PC to themselves, because they didn't have the technical expertise to compare an IBM PC with, say, a Sirius One (Victor 9000). They did have the confidence to understand IBM wasn't going to go bust next year.
It was already too late in 1987 for IBM to regain control with the MCA PS/2s, because they no longer had a majority (27.5% vs 12.5%+34%). But they did contribute the PS/2 keyboard/mouse and VGA graphics - things that could be easily ported to new PCs.

Also, we can see how names matter more than price or technical features from this graph too as the top tier PC manufacturers overtook generic clones by 1994. In fact generic clones peaked at the end of 1980s. Why? Because users who don't understand the technicalities are only able to choose based on a name they have confidence in. It's pretty much the same story, just with different players.

Before the PC every time you purchased a computer for the office you needed to buy all new software and train the office staff in its use and that was big money back then.
Yep, I agree it helped, but it applied to both original IBMs and clones.

Once people realized that each new faster PC would run their old software but faster sales went crazy. Clones and volume drove down prices which also caused an explosion of available software since it was very profitable.
80286 PCs appeared in 1984 with the PC/AT. The first 80286 clone appeared.. when? Compaq beat IBM to the first 80386 PC in 1986.

In most business and home environments though, slow 8MHz or so 8088 or 8086 PCs were dominant until the late 80s. My workplace in late 1989/early 1990 gave me a 12MHz, Intel 80286 Tulip computer with 1.25MB of RAM. My workplace in 1992 to 1995 typified that in that we had a few cheap Amstrad PCs; an 80286-based PS/2; an Apricot F1 (for stores, not even a clone) and several 80386s. When I arrived, I had the fastest computer, a 40MHz AMD 80386 and 2MB of RAM + 40MB HD! By the time I left we had 486's (including a DX2 or the IBM branded Blue Lightning DX3 at 75MHz/25MHz), but I was still using that same computer. We also had a few 386sx's for reception and other staff; while a no-name 386sx ran a Netware server.

Home users very much cared about buying a winner because platforms were abandoned very quickly and then you could not get software or service for an expensive home computer. I knew people who sent back their ADAM computers the second they found out it was being discontinued even if they liked it.
OK, so that's some anecdotal, but valuable evidence.
Sure, if the price point was cheap enough people purchased the machine, but few really did anything with it. How many people actually used their Timex 1000 before buying something with actual software and a real keyboard? Home users tended to jump around with home consoles because of the rapid advances in technology.
I have a different memory, but I'm UK based so it could have been different here. Home users here settled on ZX Spectrums and Commodore C64s by the early/mid 80s and were still using them in the late 80s; while gamers moved onto Atari ST / Amiga. I don't remember anyone in my computer science 1986 intake at UEA who used an actual PC in their room. We just couldn't afford one. At that level, most students still didn't have a computer, but for those who did it was mostly BBC micros and STs. I knew one person with an Amiga; one other with an Elan Enterprise; another with an Acorn Electron (who later bought an Archimedes). I had a Sinclair QL. Until my 3rd year, no-one I knew even had a Mac, despite the Uni having plenty.

Oh, hang-on. I think a few might have bought a PC towards the end of my degree, because I heard about people building up their own clones. At one point I looked into it too; scouring the back of Personal Computer World magazine for cheap motherboards, cards, RAM, disks and keyboards. However, I still couldn't justify the expense, even if I could get it down to about £500. Also, I was already sold on Macs, didn't like PCs and yet used my QL as my main machine until 1993.
 

Unknown_K

Well-known member
The UK was big in Sinclair and then Amiga because they were much cheaper, and Sinclair was home grown (so no import duties).

I purchased a new 286/12 Packard Bell probably in 1990 before I was done with college. Before that I had to deal with a C64 + 1541 floppy and a dot matrix printer. Before that C64 I purchased a Timex 2068 (Sinclair clone) and was stuck with it after Timex dumped computers shortly after I got it.

The thing that made the IBM such a big deal was it was 100% open source with full documentation with just the BIOS being proprietary (and easily cloned). So, you had big blue selling it and anyone can build cards for it. My early 5150 with 64K motherboard had Hercules video but they also sold CGA as an option back then. Those early 5150's had weird wide black brackets on the cards that was dropped when the later models came out. IBM would later come out with the proprietary PS/2 line, but clones had taken over by then and EISA was coming out to compete.

The place I worked in the early 90's had a Mitsuba XT they carted around to test serial ports on controller cards and my boss had a Compaq 386 he used for CAD. I went to the local computer stores and built my own 486 for work and built a few more for the other engineers as they were hired and we just kept upgrading motherboards as the newest stuff came out. It was much cheaper than buying OEM machines.
 
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