Reply 160 of 426, by ph4nt0m
- Rank
- Member
wrote:No. Not true. You needed a serious fast x86 machine, in order to compete against the Amiga arcitecture. There were no such thing […]
wrote:Well, there were fast and expensive x86 PCs back in 1987. For example, a 20MHz Intel 386DX was much faster than a 7MHz Motorola 68k. The former could also have much more memory, much higher bandwidth and a real FPU. 486DX made the difference even more noticeable. However this Intel hardware was very expensive, that's why it has never competed with Amiga in the 1980's. Different markets, different purpose.
No. Not true.
You needed a serious fast x86 machine, in order to compete against the Amiga arcitecture. There were no such thing as a superiour x86 machine in the 1980's and well into 1992/93. And if you found something that beated the Amiga, then it would only beat on certain levels and not all. And you would have to have tons of money. Like silicon graphics machines.X86 machines used brute force from the CPU alone compared to the Amiga that used different controllers and processors for indevidual tasks. Like the difference between single and multitasking. Try moving bitmap gfx on a 1987 x86 machine, formatting a floppy, playing sampled music and writing a letter at the same time and not using the CPU as the only chip for data processing inside the machine. Try that on a 386dx40 with ISA only cards. How about having 8 programs open at the same time, on MS Dos 5.0 or 6.22.
If you have followed this discussion, then you will know that the Amiga was an overall better machine for the money, untill some 1992 to 1993. And even with the introduction of Win95, the Amiga were still overall better. Plug and Play was laughable, compared to autoconfigure, untill somewere between 1998 and 2001.
And were is the Ramdisk that are 100 percent dynamic? It is on the Amiga. Sure we do not need it today, yet it still display that there are at least one technology left, in were the Amiga still have it's edge over the x86.
Amiga was a hybrid of an arcade machine and a personal computer. There were many things it could do better than an average x86 PC back in the day. However it couldn't match high end x86 PCs and workstations. BTW those didn't run DOS or Windows. There were commercial x86 compatible derivatives of AT&T System V such as Venix, Xenix, PC/IX or even Coherent, though it wasn't a derivative. Those could do multitasking easily. ISA wasn't the only choice. MCA was offered in 1987 and EISA the next year.