From: gt6758b@prism.gatech.EDU (Michael Maverick Kopack)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy,comp.sys.amiga.hardware
Subject: Re: Power-up for AGA Machines! rumour.
Date: 23 Dec 92 15:45:04 GMT
Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Organization: Georgia Institute of Technology


I work at a research facility which does a god amount of bussiness with DEC. 
Last week a couple of their reps came in and gave a demo of an Alpha system
and gave a presentation on both the hardware and the new OFS1 Unix operating
system that they are making for it. 

One of the first things that I noticed was the fact that the demo machine they
had was running a couple of Eric Swartz (sp?) anims in one window! On another
window they had the Icohedron ball thingy demo found on most Xworkstations. 
In still another window they had an MPEG animation running from a CD-Rom
drive. It was running at full speed with no lags whatsoever. This was on one
of the lower models, and it wasn't even one of the production series. The 
reps said that this was one of the test/seed units, and that the engineers 
had tweeked somewhat better performance out of the production models.

After the demo and presentation, I spent some time talking to one of the reps.
I mentioned to him about all the rumors of C= and DEC getting together and
putting the Alpha in the Amiga etc. He said that he used to teach at a local
community college and that he used to have an Amiga. He was very fond of 
their graphics and sound capabilities. I began to tell him about the  new AGA
series systems and the upcoming High-end and Low-end chipsets. We both 
agreed that if the Amiga could put Alphas into their systems, it would make
for an unstoppable machine. The Alpha chip is capable of running at 200
specmarks (currently) and will be continually upgraded by DEC towards the 400
specmark area in the future. Consider that is you used the AGA chipset in
conjunction with it, the Alpha would be nearly unhampered in it's processing
times and could use it's full potential for number crunching etc...

The DEC reps also said that thier company was making Alphas pretty much 
available to any company that wanted them, including competetors for their
systems. Heck, they said they'd even help the other company with the e
engineering and software integration. DEC has set up software conversion sites
where you bring them the program, and they run it through their Alpha 
compilers to produce Alpha machine language code.

If we're gonna get a RISC processor for the Amiga, I REALLY think C= should
highly consider the Alpha as a prime candidate. Especially since DEC said they
would be releasing a low-end Alpha machine sometime in April-May for a list
price of $5000 running WindowsNT. This would have dire effects on the Amiga
market if PC users started to really go to the Alphas in PC's and we're left
behind in the 32 bit world.......

Just me rambing.....

--Mike Kopack

-- 
Michael Maverick Kopack                | Sex, drugs, rock and roll  
Internet: gt6758b@prism.gatech.edu     |and my Amiga, what else could
          kopack@vortex.erda.rl.af.mil |one ever want?     
          kopackm@lonex.rl.af.mil      \---------------------------------------