Path: menudo.uh.edu!menudo.uh.edu!usenet From: swithing@ic.sunysb.edu (Scott Withington) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: World of Commodore-Amiga, Toronto, December 1992 Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.misc Date: 21 Dec 1992 17:49:39 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 249 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <1h503jINNl38@menudo.uh.edu> Reply-To: swithing@ic.sunysb.edu (Scott Withington) NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Keywords: trade show, commercial NAME World of Commodore-Amiga, Toronto The International Centre Mississauga, Ontario Friday, December 4 to Sunday, December 6, 1992 BRIEF DESCRIPTION This is a review a recent World of Commodore-Amiga show held in Toronto, Canada. It features demonstrations by Commodore and various 3rd-party vendors. REVIEW The World of Commodore Toronto was fascinating on Saturday (the only day I was there). First, Commodore's booth was large, with a big front area split between displays showing the A4000 & A1200 quite effectively. You then walked through a doorway to their "interactive multi-media" display. On the right were two Virtuality Cyber 1000 stand-up units linked together and two virtual reality studio environments from Mandala (one from Star Trek that caused your image on the screen to appear to go through a transporter sequence, and the other one a game that used themes similar to Nickelodeon's Nick Arcade show). Continuing on through the booth you went to the back, which had a history of Commodore presentation being run by several Amigas, each using a display generated by Scala to show a different phase of system development in C='s history: founding - 1970, 1970's, 1980's, and the Amiga. They also had on display several products from each period. These included: a Commodore manual typewriter (they started off as a typewriter repair shop and office supply store in Toronto, then bought their supplier), Commodore adding machines, hand-held calculators, digital watches, and other electronic gadgets. The next phase surrounded the purchase of companies manufacturing LCD screens and circuit boards. After Texas instruments (their supplier of integrated circuits) started manufacturing calculators (and raising their prices to competitors), they bought up a small IC manufacturing company, MOS Technologies. The next display began with the production of the first hobbyist micro computer (beginning the 6502 computer craze that created Apple and Atari computers in the garages of their respective founders) and then the first consumer microcomputer, the Personal Electronic Transactor (or PET) which grew in sales so fast that it caused CBM to cease production on almost all other products at the time. The next monitor covered the VIC-20, the Commodore 64, 16, +4 (yeah I know, enormously successful, but did you know that, except for RAM the 16 was superior to the 64 - more colours, higher resolution better sound, and so on?). On display were prototypes of the VIC-20 (painted silver) and the C= 64 (painted gold), as well as the SX-64, the Plus-4, and the C= PC-10, Commodore's entry in the IBM PC compatible market. The final monitor told the story of a little company called the Amiga Corporation and the exciting computer they were developing, C='s acquisition of it, and the history to this date. On display here... well you can guess, can't you? The final section was a TV set playing all of the TV ads from the late 70's and early to mid 80's which helped sell 13,000,000 + C= 64's (this laser disk should be mandatory viewing for C= marketing people) including hard-hitting ads showing what you would need to ad to an Apple II or an IBM PC to equal the 64 which retailed for a fifth the price. If you continued to the right, you passed C='s MS-DOS compatible systems, including a colour 486-DX laptop (grrrr......). You then went on to a small section with A500s, A3000s and CDTVs. On the other side was a DPAINT IV art contest on A4000's. SEMINARS I went to two seminars at the show, one on Amigavision Pro and a public session with Lewis Eggebrecht (VP of Engineering). I'll cover Lewis Eggebrecht's talk first. Mr. Eggebrecht began his talk telling us a little about his past experiences. Starting off at IBM, he led the team in Boca Raton which was responsible for developing the original IBM PC. He then moved to Franklin Computers where he helped to develop the 1st Apple II clone chips. After a period of serving as an independent consultant, he then moved to C= where he took over as VP in charge of the the MS-DOS clones. While there he became interested in the Amiga, and when position of VP of engineering opened up, he took it. He then covered the anatomy of C= engineering (only 200 full time employees) the Largest being CATS, followed by VLSI design (23 people), also System Hardware, System Architecture, Software Development, Product Planning, Agency Certification (FCC, etc), Publications, Product Assurance, Test Engineering, Mechanical Design (cases, etc), Component Quality, and Engineering Services. Next was an AmigaVision slideshow and address concerning engineering goals. Objectives included: - enhancing and extend the Amiga architecture - improving development tools and design methods. This will allow for faster development of new systems - producing a family of state of the art Amiga systems, from the low (sub $500) home & family systems, to high-end systems to compete with the most powerful graphics and sound workstations He then covered the VLSI chipset development strategy. Key points included: - this area is the key to new product development and therefore a top priority of the engineering department - aimed at providing a quick response to industry developments, so that C= can be the one of the first companies out with a platform incorporating new technology, This includes new processors such as the forthcoming Motorola 68060. - upgraded development methodologies, including going to an all CMOS-based system, and using the most powerful development tools available - low-end systems will be cost-effective, and retain backward compatibility as much as possible - high-end systems will cater to markets which require significant performance and extensive graphics capabilities Next he covered the current AGA chipset: - this development marked the first use of new development tools and procedures (took less time to develop than ECS) - Lisa manufactured by third party (NCR (AT&T) and HP) - 4x video bandwidth of ECS - 25 bit palette (24 bitplane colour + 1 genlock bit) - 8 bit display - sprites useable in screen border (overscan) - 2, 4-bit play fields useable in all resolutions - Scroll with 35 ns granularity - 16, 32, and 64 bit wide sprites supported independent of screen resolution FUTURE VLSI CHIP SETS CONSUMER AND LOW END SYSTEMS - 2 chips each with >100k transistors - synchronous to video clock - 160 - 280 pin packages - 32 bit DRAM or VRAM - 57 MHz pixel clock - ECS & AGA downwardly compatible. Ensuring this is one of the things that slows development - Support for 1, 2, & 4 MB floppy drives using standard technology - support for ALL 32 bit Motorola CPUs (including 680x0, and 880x0) - 8x memory bandwidth over AGA, 2x (at least) blitter performance - 800 x 600 72 hz resolution, higher at lower refresh rates. - 1 - 24 bit colour at any resolution (this was decided the week before WOCA, at Pasedena he said 16 bit) - FIFO serial port with large buffer to support very high baud rates - 8 meg chip RAM, all but unlimited fast RAM HIGH END SYSTEMS - 4 chips (750k - 1M transistors) - 32/64 bit VRAM - 57 - 114 Mhz pixel clock (asynchronous design) - chunky pixel mode (commonly used in IBM PC systems) which will be supported by the blitter (bit instead of word) - CD-ROM with 100 Mbit/sec transfer rate - frame buffer/grabber built in - screen promotion - 1k x 1k x 24 bit 72 hz screens (more at lower refresh) - 8 voice 16 bit >100Khz sound - on-demand DMA - 12 - 20 x memory bandwidth (32-64 bit memory) - 32 bit blitter (8x performance of AGA) - 24 bit true colour mode - will support multiple simultaneous chip sets working together, allowing separate displays, or drastically higher resolutions (multiprocessing) - enhanced hardware compress/decompress including JPEG/MPEG - video upgrade modularity - 100 Khz - 32 bit processor independent bus for new CPU's (multiprocessing) including RISC chips (they should announce a choice for RISC chip in less than 1 year) - asynchronous design - 1 downside is that it may not be 100% ECS/AGA compatible Immediate, and near (less than 1 year) plans - AGA and above across entire product line - modularity of all new systems to ease upgrade path (slots/motherboard swaps) - all surface mount chips - timely introduction of new processors and upgrades - Add DSP support (040-DSP board almost ready, using AT&T 25 MHz DSP & "personality" slot built in) - SCSI II 32-bit fast & wide controller, with >10 MB/s transfer rates (mid-January 1993 delivery) - move CD-ROM (CDTV) across product line. - add full-motion, full-screen video (MPEG, & better) to Amiga family - cost reduce & enhance CDTV (including upgrade (MB-swap) to existing users) - upgrade Amiga software & multimedia capabilities - accelerate deployment of VLSI - become active partnerships with other companies AmigaDOS, "THE TRUE MULTITASKING OS" Ongoing development in terms of: - compatibility - stability - flexibility - localization (international - 18 languages and growing) - retargetability - increased performance - multimedia extensions Future AmigaOS releases: - 3.1 - API networking extensions, file exchange, printershare, DSP support - 4.0 - retargetability, full postscript support (including display) Additional details from Q&A session: - intend to move high-density floppy across line - new family of monitors forthcoming (QuadSync) - new third-party bridgeboards for 4000 & 1200 (386 DX, 486) - laptop will have to wait until they finish converting from HMOS to CMOS (the models they've prototyped are < 1 hr life and HEAVY), they have not done anything to hinder 3rd parties from developing them - totally programmable resolutions at high end - full design kit for A-1200/4000 is available through CATS Amigavision Professional Well, what can I say its 100% improved, full support for AGA, CDTV, and several new formats. Much better editing and debugging tools and a freely distributable player. Price - for AV owners - $90, list $299. -Scott, the Amigavangelist --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu General discussion: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu