Amiga 3000UX, X, OpenLook, Motif, Color, A2410, Etc. (somewhat long)

[Randell Jesup]

In article <1991Mar20.211652.3247 at kessner.denver.co.us> david at kessner.denver.co.us (David D. Kessner) writes:
>My point is:  Would it have been better for C= to wait an extra 6 months to
>get a Color X going-- BEFORE releasing Amiga UNIX?  I'm no marketing GURU, but
>my gut feeling is that C= will get bad market perception for releasing UNIX and
>then UPGRADING it so soon...

	Most OS's I've known that were released for the first time (from a
company/for a machine) were reved relatively soon thereafter.  Witness
MSDOS, AmigaDos 1.0 vs 1.1, etc, etc.

>Hmmmm.  If you took out the custom chips, leaving only DMA to "fast ram", 
>added a TEXT ONLY display (which is VERY cheap), then the savings would be more
>noticeable in cost, and board space (since there isnt a "chip ram" bus).  The 
>actual $$$ cost benifit of this is subject to C's price on sand, the phase of
>the moon, etc...
>
>I mentioned using a 1-bit-plane X display strictly for COST-- I dont like them
>myself.  But you missed (glossed over) my comment saying, "instead relying on
>a 34010 board for X-Windows" (somewhat paraphrased).

	Note 1-bitplane X doesn't mean 1-bitplane text.  In any case, the
cost of the Amiga custom chips is the cost of sand.  They're old (3+ micron
NMOS), we own our own foundry, and they're paid for.  Also, there was
essentially $0 cost for HW engineering (not really 0, but essentially
mimimal) when compared to the amount for doing a variant motherboard (different
casework/PS/etc would have really upped the engineering cost).  Essentially,
the Unix group is "leeching" off the AmigaDos hardware designs, getting
machines for close to 0 HW engineering cost.  If the Unix group does well,
it may make sense for us to do a (semi) custom machine for Unix (still
leveraging off our existing silicon/cases/etc).

>Otherwise, in the practical sense of the work, the A3000UX IS a workstation.

	Note that the term "workstation" has a highly variable meaning
depending on who is using it.  It means something different to a cash-strapped
student than to a random software engineer to a hardware engineer to a chip
engineer to a scientist doing simulations.

>>   And as I pointed out above, so has Commodore.  I don't think Dave
>>can "announce" things which Commodore has announce only in Europe, but
>>I don't work for Commodore.  Note that the 3000T has the same
>>motherboard but more slots.

	A slight correction: the machine shown at CEBIT has a variant of
the same motherboard.  It has more slots (and they're on the main motherboard),
and some other small differences in the motherboard (uses ZIPs for chip
ram, etc).  You can see some of this in the A3000 schematics in a box 
labelled "if 3500" or some such.  Note that I am not (and could not) announce
such a machine - that's done by the sales companies of the respective
countries, as is pricing and whether they carry it, warantee's, etc, etc, etc.
I know it was shown in Hannover, I don't know what the German sales company
said about it.  As usual, this is NOT any sort of official statement by
commodore, I could be having delusions, this could be a forgery, etc, etc.  :-)

>I seriously doubt the A3000UX's ability to do 38400 baud, and 19200 is
>questionable (this is under UNIX, ya know).  The limiting factor here is
>the ability of the OS to grab a character from the UART before the next
>character comes in.  If the OS cannot get it in time (ie, intterupt latency)
>then that character is lost.  A buffered UART (like the 16550) has a 16 
>byte buffer than can capture several characters during the intterupt latency
>period.  UNIX can be quite bad about servicing intterupts of this nature.  

	There are solutions to this.

-- 
Randell Jesup, Keeper of AmigaDos, Commodore Engineering.
{uunet|rutgers}!cbmvax!jesup, jesup at cbmvax.commodore.com  BIX: rjesup  
The compiler runs
Like a swift-flowing river
I wait in silence.  (From "The Zen of Programming")  ;-)