Talk:Advanced Amiga Architecture chipset

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"PC technology eventually moved so far beyond the AAA specification that even in draft form, AAA was legacy technology"

Technically this may be the case, but reading about those specs still makes me drool :/ They sound highly competitive to me, even in today's market, and running on an Amiga I suspect they would probably still be running rings around PC technology in some respects. Gatoclass 09:15, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

That would have been true only in raw, isolated stats. Most PCs didn't have blitter until years later, and VGA graphics access is exceedingly clumsy via hardware VGA registers or the VESA "standard". Consider that an eight times faster blitter and memory access would have made AAA as fast as AGA (or faster) at 8 bit than AGA was at single-bit (which nobody used, due to it's ugly monochrome nature, but was very, very fast). Consider then that AAA was spec'd to be 12-20x faster than AGA... Linear video memory access and effective bus mastering wasn't a PC reality until late into the PCI/AGP era, and still lacked the "synergy" that AAA could have brought to the entire system.

Remember how Windows 98 systems would freeze up while formatting floppy disks? That's because they're outportb()ing bytes one at a time from the FDC in real mode. Paula's successor would be DMA-transferring that data a track at a time into/out of that 12-20x faster CHIP ram. Directly. In 32-bit mode.

I think the real problem lay with the fact that a full-on AAA system would have been like $3600 while PC prices were plummeting. People don't seem to care that they're buying junk that will be obsolete in a year when they can save $2400.

I miss those days. Commodore's CATS program made the system look like a FOSS one. The engineers were friendly and accessible (I even have an email response from Mr. Haynie saved somewhere here). The system did what you wanted it to do almost all of the time, and then few times you encountered problems, you could work around them permanently. No random component-object-model-binding breakage or DLL hell making the system suddenly stop or start working, no svchost forcing your apps into swap after bloating out to half a gig, etcetc..but I digress. A AAA system might only be the equal of a PC of that era in raw stats, but the actual effective performance would be much higher. Renegrade (talk) 14:48, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

Sources needed

Hi @Hazydave. What is bit-skiggling?! Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 16:48, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

@Barnards.tar.gz: I don't think that's a word. Perhaps we should use something like (un)scrambling or bit-mixing. --Zac67 (talk) 17:23, 3 November 2023 (UTC)