DARKSEIDS OPINION çddf,faa,afa,aaf,faf,ffa,aff ³-------------------------------------- ¾Darkseid's Opinion ¢By²:¹ Darkseid ³-------------------------------------- ²If I remember correctly the Sega Megadrive/Genisis use a Motorola 68000 as their base processor along with a few 6852s and a few custom chips. The Amiga family use the 68000 series, 68060 anyone ??. Now if Ive read correctly, Commodore Uk under David Pleseance, MBO is being backed by the Chinese. This particular firm knocks out Sega compatible clones, at a greatly reduced price, without infringing any copyrights. What say the tech heads get together and build a cross platform that can run Sega carts /cds and Amiga cds/floppies..... AMEGACD64 anyone ...... Maybe Im being paranoid but then again.......... The risc based floor scrubber.... Lew Eggebrecht has announced a new development in the processor. With a new gate array design the scrubber can now run at 4.2 mips (Meter ImPecably Scrubbed) and with the new fpu can use 3d routines to clean well into the corners. Unfortunately teething problems have led to the inline cd drive being scrapped due to it jumping tracks when the scrubber is running at full capacity. The 68060 is being considered for a budget model, this how ever will only be able to run at 3.13 mips due to restrictions in the dma (direct Mopping access) and a ¶²hereditary fault in the vram adaptor (it cant get Mtv). The new risc scrubber is being tentatively called the Fs1800rs and will come with power steering, air conditioning and alloy wheels as optional extras retail price is expected to be in the region of $1250.99. ;) The 68060 and its uses for the future. A 4000/60 is an attractive prospect, its specs say it is at least 45-50% more powerful than the 040, say ... what happened to the 050?... As per usual, motorola are releasing the standard clock speeds, but I would say some naughty people will clock em up a bit with new timer chips, see most of the 1200 ram/accelerator cards, mind you they are running well within their operating tolerances but it could, no will shorten the life span of the chip. Back to my topic, most US (oxymoron methinks) will be most familiar with the Amiga through the Video Toaster, which goes to show it takes more than a fast cd drive and speakers to make a multimedia machine. Whereas Eurousers (Hmmm goood combination) will be more used to it as a games/work machine. For the games player, the 060 aint gonna make a blind bit of difference, well not for a few years yet, mind you flight sims would be simply stunning and Frontier (Excellent 'game') would be completely jaw dropping 68000-020 is impressive but that whooooarrrhhggghhhh. Work users ie home dtp/video titling again not that much of an impact, maybe if you are ¶²heavily into 3dart/rendering (and win the lottery ;) ) it would make a difference. The place where it 'will' make most waves is inside the toaster, I know you can get the screamer ($12,000.00 >8^O) or the Oven both of which are very quick. The 060 however will slot onto the mother board taking up less room and for all those who got mmu/fpu less 68lcs provides a great way of powering up your machine (030-060 whoo baby). The power the new chip gives 'could' mean that the time spent rendering could be slashed, Sgi machines are very good at that, the 060 cant quite match them but smart people do all the work during the day and naff off home at night leaving the machine to render away quite happily overnight..... So to sum up, for now the 060 is an expensive luxury, most users won need it, but if youre serious about rendering, or its your job and you dont have some sort of accelerator already the 060 could be what you need. As for me, well Im only a student, running one of the last 1.3 500s (soon to be wb2.04), and I sont have much cash, Ah well I wonder would the bank let me mortgage my liver or kidneys........... [Yes, we realize the Screamer isn't really available, but he doesn't. -JC] The macs use the 6800x0 motorola chips as their cpu. The powermacs use a risc chip as their cpu, they run most of the old software as well as the new specially written applications. The ¶²Amiga uses the motorola 6800x0 chips as well, does it not follow that the Amiga risc could 'borrow' the powermac cpu for use in 'the next generation' or perhaps to help in the design of the AmigaRisc. The AmigaRisc in my opinion (for what its worth) is a good idea but I feel that the custom chip setup which gives us the flexibity (unless youve got wb 1.3 ;) )we 'enjoy' is still appropriate so rather than designing a super quick cpu which has to do it all ala the powermac/pc or pentium (boooo hisssssss) that the ARC (amiga risc chip) should consist of a modularised unit, with Denise/Gary/Paula/Agnus et all being built into the ARC which would allow the power/speed of the cpu to be used for the processing and not being slowed down by having to generate beeps and throw memory around, compare a 286 pc to a 500, to see what I mean, the pcs chip has to do all the work and thus is sluggish (the chips are similarly aged) whereas the 500 although slower (in clock speeds) can keep up and unlike the pc has windows (1.3 heheh) and can multitask, no please wait printing garbage..... I hope you can see what Im getting at here.........