So this article is now completely redundant now the Amiga International have announced PowerPC as the future for the Amiga! Oh well, have a read of it anyway, and see how things are now much better than they were because of this...
What will it be? PowerPC, Pentium, Alpha, Super-680x0, MIPS, HP PA RISC or even ARM, who can tell? Place your bets, please.
As detailed in an article last issue, PowerPC is no longer the happy option that it used to be, despite the fact the Amiga PowerPC is gathering momentum. But then Intel have bought the Alpha processor from Digital, making its future very uncertain (and they also bought the ARM, too).
The biggest problem though is that Amiga International have not stated what the future is. Talking about 200MHz 68080s will not help anyone. The PowerPC cards are bringing a much needed lease of life to the Amiga; we can have Pentium beating machines at decent prices, software is being ported to Amiga PPC, and there are rumours of big companies taking an interest in the Amiga because of PPC.
But all this could end in disaster if AI do not act quickly. Very few people will buy a PPC card if they fear the next day, AI will announce the new Amiga with the MIPS processor, or whatever. And so games requiring PPC will not sell very well, and then such games will no longer be produced. Do we want to see companies like ClickBOOM heading to PC land?
Worse, at a later time when a new processor is announced (be it PPC or otherwise) it will be even harder trying to get companies to produce software for it, if PPC has flopped already.
Sure, PPC may be used in Amigas for things like high end 3D rendering (but even then, only with a PPC port of Lightwave), but making it to mainstream Amiga users has no chance with this situation.
One question is if AI will have a say. PowerUP has already gone so far; imagine a situation where reasonable numbers of PPC cards are sold, and plenty of software (games and serious) is produced for PowerAmiga. If AI decide on an alternative processor, will they expect everyone to ditch their PPC cards and buy another card? Will they expect companies to stop producing PowerAmiga software and switch happily to the new processor? Will they expect Phase 5 to mutter quietly, before working on a new set of cards, all because AI say so?
AI have talked about the need to avoid a split in the Amiga community, but if this happened, there would be a very dangerous split indeed, of the sort the Amiga could do without right now. I only hope AI have the sense to avoid such a predicament.
Mark