Author: replicant (a80-126-77-62.adsl.xs4all.nl)
Date: 06-09-2003 02:39
I'm not sure whether a coldfire base atari can compete with a PC, comercially speaking.
Of course I know a custom designed computer isn't s cheap a a wintel PC, but when you design a coldfirebased clone and want to sel them for a price of let's say €500 (wild guess of me) who is going to buy it if the aranym solution is simpler and way more powerfull? What lacks here is a coldfire @let's say 1,5 GHz. The effords to design a 400MHz based coldfire are the same as designing a 1,5GHz or 3GHz one, the big prob: there aren't any GHZ coldfires...
As I said before: One need to sell quite a few of those newly designed atarís. The atari market has to grow again. Otherwise NO up to date software anymore, so what's the point of having a new atari then? Being alternative is good, but havind a compuer without anything to play with is way to far alternative.
So: Sorry for the coldfire team, but I think the market is too small for a 400MHz coldfire.
Still I would like to help them, but picture this: I just graduated (Ba in computerelectronics) , can't find a job, (economic ressession here in the Netherlands), I don't have much experience and above all: not any resources to samples of chips, evalution boards, VHDL FPGA starterkits etc. Let alone I have the equipment needed (logic analyser, scope etc.) and the money to design and moreover to manufacture multilayer PCB's (or have it manufactured). You tell me what I should do now.
I'm wondering why it got so quiet around the ACP. I hate it that motorola decided to not longer see the consumer-computer-processor industry as a core-business. What can we do if we don't have a compelling motorola processor? I think the only ressonable way to design a new atari is to get some funding from infogrames an pursuade IBM to design and fabricate a motherboard based on their new PPC970 (including some features like a supervidel like graphiccard among with a nvidia like 3d accelarator chip with some good technical documentation, firewire for video editing along with midi, USB2.0 although I consider that a wintel standard, <+whatever feature you would like just put it here>). As the OS it shoud run a adapted version of aranym with jit compiler for the ppc and the ability to execute native ppc code. It also would include a steem version ported to mint -> running games in a GEM window would be possible... Why running an emulator in an emulator? Well, correctly written programs shoud run at 80% of the native PPC speed with aranym, and al the nostalgic games run on steem, so figure it out... Hec, even trough in a amiga emulator running in a gem window so they know were they stand...
Ahh.. you've got to keep dreaming...
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