mroussel@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca (Marc Roussel) (05/02/91)
Recently, I posted a message to comp.sys.cbm indicating my
disappointment with Commodore's marketing effort. I have a second
anecdote to relay, this one with a happy conclusion.
In Algorithm, no. 2.2 (March 1991), Walter Stricker mentions the
Amiga's hardware "blitter". The following is a quote from his letter to
the editor:
A blit is a rapid transfer of blocks of memory from one
place to another. [...]
Because it can combine up to three blocks of memory using
any one of the 256 possible logical functions, it is
(conceptually) a massively parallel universal one bit computer.
This makes it quite well suited to computing CA's. [...]
PopLife written by Olaf Siebert computes 13 generations per
second of Conway's Life CA on a 320 by 200 cell field.
The good news is, I now know what I can do with an Amiga that I couldn't
do with most other microcomputers. The bad news is, this department
(which does a lot of CA work) doesn't have an Amiga and as far as I
know, no one's looking at them. We are looking at far more expensive
hardware which may give us this sort of performance on CA's (and will
blow the Amiga out of the water in other areas, I'm sure). Given the
numbers quoted above however, the Amiga would have an excellent
price/performance ratio on certain types of problems.
What I'd like to know from Commodore is why didn't we find out
about things like this when we were trying to decide what hardware to
buy? Do those guys even know that this sort of thing is hot current
research and that numbers like those described above are significant to
people like us? Where are your sales reps, Commodore?
On a more technical side, does anyone know if these blitter operations are
available on lower end Amiga's? This would make the Amiga's even more
respectable since we could then use A1000's (or whatever) as development
workstations and use the higher end machines for production work. Are
these blitter operations accessible from a high-level language
(preferably some form of Fortran)?
I realize that the cross-post to comp.sys.cbm is probably not
entirely appropriate, but in view of the recent discussion there, I
thought it might be interesting to some of the people there. In any
event, I have redirected followups to comp.sys.amiga.misc. As I don't know
much about the Amiga newsgroups, I trust someone will redirect the
conversation to a more appropriate group if I've messed up. Just be
clear about where you're sending it if you do so I can subscribe to the
appropriate newsgroups and thus keep abreast of this discussion.
Marc R. Roussel
mroussel@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca