22AN AMIGA DREAM COME TRUE 11For years 2only privileged few 1could enjoy (and afford) the exclusive world of powerful 32-bit computers. Now you too can join them and discover what makes people pay 2900 pounds for the Commodore Amiga 3000 (Model 16-40) by transforming your Amiga 500, 2000 or 1500 into a 2dream machine1, but at a price you can afford. 2THE ADVANTAGES FOR A5000 & B5000 USERS 2IF YOU ARE A GRAPHICS PACKAGE USER... 1If you're ray-tracing an image that takes 24 hours on a standard Amiga, an A5000 at just 16.7 MHz (without the maths compressor) will do it in approximately 5 h 30', and with a maths coprocessor (68881-20) it will do it in approximately 1 h 30'. The B5000-25 with a maths coprocessor will do the same job in just 1 h. That's over 23 weeks solid work in one day1! 2IF YOU ARE A D.T.P. USER... 1You don't need to be reminded how torturously slow D.T.P. packages are, but with the A5000 or B5000 all that is gone, now you have access to 4-32 of Super-Fast-RAM which is outside the normal 9 Mb limit. And you have a speed incresed between 3500-1000% 1over the standard Amiga! It makes D.T.P. a dream! 2IF YOU ARE A VIDEO ANIMATION USER... 1Now, instead of slow repetitive soft or hard disk access to save your animated sequences, now you can animate an entire sequence of frames (approximately 1Mb = 1 sec) all stored in 32-bit Super-Fast-RAM. Now that's not only a speed increase on the video animation software, but an additional increase in through-put due to less frequent disk accesses. Using "Sculpt Animate 4D" with the A5000 or A5000 will bring a smile to your face! 2IF YOU ARE A SOFTWARE DEVELOPER... 1For software developers the A5000 or B5000 is a must. It speeds up compilation times by 3500-1000% 1and makes 2multi-tasking a pleasure1. Now with the A5000 or B5000, instead of your harddisk waiting for your C compiler, your C compiler waits for your harddisk. Using a recoverable RAM Disk (RAD:) enables you to have your complete programming environment resident in 32-bit Super-Fast-RAM, thereby out performing the fastest harddisk drives available for the Amiga, and with Kickstart 1.3, when your code gives a Guru Message there's no more waiting around for the Amiga to boot, it's instant! 2IF YOU ARE AN ASSEMBLY PROGRAMMER... 1Then the 68020 and 68030 will be of particular interest to you. It has some new addressing modes for you to make advantage of, such as full displacements, true memory indirection, and scaled indexing. The 68020 and 68030 also have new instructions such as bit-field operators, BCD data compression and expansion, double-ended bounds checking, module support, and enhanced system calling functions. 2IF YOU ARE A LECTURER OR STUDENT... 1Then there's a wealth of software available that takes full advantage of the A5000 and B5000. In the field of scientific applications programming all languages have floating point libraries which when included automatically make use of the 68881/82 IEEE 80-bit floating point maths coprocessor, also some languages, for example Absoft's A/C Fortran/020 is specifically for the 68020 and 68881 combination. The A5000 happily cruises along at 2-3 MIPS, the B5000-25 MHz at 5-6 MIPS, and the B5000-40 MHz at 8-9 MIPS. Using software properly optimised for the 68020-68030 and 68881-68882 combination, using the on-chip cache the B5000-40 MHz can burst up to 18 MIPS. Also using software specifically optimised for the 68882 maths cocompressor it can crunch upto an incredible 31 MFLOPS1, that's over 3 months worth of number crunching on a standard Amiga 500 or 2000 in 1 day. 2IF YOU ARE A SERIOUS ENTHOUSIAST... 1Also as an enthousiast you gain from features which I have not yet mentioned (due to the fact that a lot of the above are harddisk users), for example with Kickstart in 32-bit Super-Fast-RAM floppy disk routines run at the new speed of 3500% 1faster, and so floppy disk accesses are considerably faster, almost from when you switch the Amiga on. In addition to faster floppy disk access, vector based simulations benefit tremendously from the A5000 and B5000, so much so that some games have to be placed in slow RAM on purpose to the A5000 or B5000 from ripping through the code like 2there was no tomorrow1! Well, my little article is over. 2Don't you ever think that I'm selling any A5000 or B50001. I just wanted to give some informations about these fabulous machines... See you in another article!