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mikeymike

not always the case.

you can compare any chip to any chip so long as you note what market your comparing them in.

apples to oranges is a dodge of the real issue wich is price/performance/viability ratio ... if a chip does a job 1% better but costs 10 times as much... it's not worth it..


@JetRacer

No worries man... we all get confused sometimes.

mikeymike wrote:
... or maybe people buy PlayStations because they want a console, to play games on, so therefore not a computer. What percentage of PlayStation owners do you honestly think are interested in Linux even slightly?

I seem to remember "game machine" that had an OS too, a nice small easy to use OS. A small OS that could be apart of what gaming is. Not Linux, nessesarily. Sorta like Amiga DE, which I believe runs on a Linux kernal.

And AmigaOS 4 will soon run on PPC only. Is 18 months work for a load of developers really worth it to get very slim pickings of potential PS2/AOS converts? I think Hyperion will need a bit of good fortune to break any profit on AOS4, let alone deciding to port it to another platform after that... and wouldn't porting x86 be a far wiser choice, from a business point of view?

So what is the installed userbase?
I'd love one myself, but the cost is prohibitive and availablily is slim.

[Dagon]

I vote for Amiga GameCube maybe with Aros if not with AmigaOS 4.0

I vote for Amiga XBox... at least it's make Amiga.inc's friends (Microsoft) happy.

I liked the way sony srank the massive 1000 series ps board which fills the whole footprint of the case except the psu tray section into the 9000's that were no bigger then a classic gameboy ( not in thickness ) and still managed to supply the shi*test reader mech. of any cd based console to date.

Here's the Sony OS offering for an OS, http://www.us.playstation.com/hardware/more/SCPH-97047.asp actually not bad for $199.00 USD. Wonder if Amiga Anywhere runs on it...

[Karlos]

JetRacer wrote:
Lando: I don't think there's a single accurate statement in your post.

Hang on, isn't the guy (Lando) actually working on developing stuff for PS2? Ok, so maybe not the PS1 but I think he aught to know his stuff. If he says PS2 is no big deal compared to A1 then it's not a great leap of intuition to say that the PS1 isnt :-)

I've programmed on MIPS, 68K and PPC. The R3000 is no big deal, believe me. True, it's a pipelined architecture that breaks instructions into stages. That's nothing special. Even the 68030 does that ;-)

Simplifying slightly..

First instruction is fetched. It's passed to the execution unit, the fetcher is immediately free again to get the second.

The execution unit passes the result of the first to the retirement stage, the execution unit is immediately free to process the second instruction.

etc...

So, an instruciton passing through X stages, at say one cycle per stage can achieve an overall throughput of one instruction/cycle.

That's pretty much all there is to pipelining.

If you have several execution units you can achieve an overall throughput of several instructions per cycle, the exact number depending on the dependencies between adjacent instructions.

This is not unique to MIPS, most RISC (and even CISC, eg 68060) processors do this.

For example, a PPC 603e can retire 3 instructions per cycle and have up to 5 in execution at any given moment.

A G3 600 outperforms your basic MIPS R3000 / 33 by a silly amount...

[xeron]

Lando is a games programmer for Warthog, who make games on the GBA, Playstation 2, XBox, Gamecube and PC. Racer is some guy who has opened up his Playstation.

Guess who is most likely to know his stuff? :-D

[Lando]

JetRacer wrote:
Lando: I don't think there's a single accurate statement in your post. I've actually opened and checked the contense of my PS1. And read information from both MIPS and Sony. Where did you get that faulty information from?

I'm a professional games coder. I've worked on two commercial Playstation games, one XBox game, and am working on my third Playstation 2 game. I've also attended the last three Sony developer conferences.

JetRacer wrote:
There's just one tiny'ish problem...

The old PS1 had about the same performance we can expect from the A1.

Erm, no.
i have to disagree with you on that.
an a1200 with 030 has about the same performance as the 2mb 33mhz ps1.
the amigaone is about on equal par with an xbox.

[Karlos]

I just noticed JetRacer's more recent post admitting he got it mixed up with some other technology...

Maybe we can all stop correcting him about it now :-D

-edit-

@Tickly...
Reminds me of that whole 32/64-bit PPC register thing ;-)

[Agafaster]

[qoute]
Reminds me of that whole 32/64-bit PPC register thing ;-)
[/quote]

NNOOOOOOooooooooo......!!!!! :-o :-P :-D

[xeron]

@Tickly...
Reminds me of that whole 32/64-bit PPC register thing ;-)

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargghh! /me runs away

[Crumpster]

@Lando

Ever so slightly OT (read lots)

Just out of curiosity what games have you worked on?

Cheers,

Graham C