Amiga ISO Collection/AmigaDemoCD2.iso/ASCII/TEXTE/SCENE/AMIGA/cbm$news.txt

Text File | 1994-03-26 | 15.7 KB | 351 lines

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      INTERVIEW WITH CHRIS LUDWIG,
       FORMER COMMODORE ENGINEERS.
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From   : Dennis Predovnik
To: All
Subject: INTEVIEW WITH CHRIS (PART 1)
Date   : 21 Jan 95  11:18

Ok I have just got my hands on a interview with Chris Ludwig one of the
former C= engineers which was in the French Amiga Mag AmigaNews for
you to chew on. It is quite interesting so I hope you like it.. Remember
to keep the faith.

===========================================================================
==                        Interview: Chris Ludwig                        ==
===========================================================================

An interview with Amiga software engineer Chris Ludwig at the World of
Amiga Show in London on December 11, two days after he and the other
members of the surviving Amiga development team finally left their jobs.

AN: You're probably the last person to work for what was once called
Commodore Business Machines?

CL: Actually there's one person still working there, that Jeff Frank, head
of hardware engineering and his job at the moment is to liquidate any of
the hardware that's left at Norristown.  That may have changed since
Friday.   Friday was the last day at Commodore for myself and for a lot of
other people as well.  There were 16 of us, engineering staff.

AN: You were continuing work on a new system?

CL: There was not a lot of development going on, mainly because the
resource wasnt there, there was not a lot of money to be spent.  We didnt
have quite the number pf people we needed.  There were some software ideas
being toyed with, there were some hardware ideas being toyed with, but
there was no steady development goal...

AN: We were here last month at the Future Entertainment Show and we were
told that the HP Risc chip had been chosen as the basis for future Amiga
development.

CL: That is correct.

AN: Mr Pleasance told us this morning that the fact that work has now
stopped means that some new agreement will have to be drawn up with HP in
order to re-start development.

CL: Yes, but having said that, the deal that we had with HP was a solid
one, and I don't think there going to be a problem there.  They've got
every reason in the world to want that to go through with whoever
continues the Amiga.

AN: Was Lew Eggebrecht still working with you?

CL: Towards the very end he wasn't there full time, he was just consulting
to us, but when we needed him we could just call him.

AN: He knows the HP architecture really well?

CL: Somewhat well.  We did have a resident expert, Dr Edward Heppler, the
guy who designed the RISC 3D system, and he was there to the end.  And
he's committed to it so I'm sure that if something happened we'd get him
back on board.

AN: Did the Amiga design team take that decision to go to HP RISC or was
it a Commodore decision?

CL: It was a Commodore decision.  We spent a lot of time looking at
available processers and trying to decide which one best met the needs
that we had in mind for the future of the platform.  We chose it based on
a number of different concerns: - first of all, compatibility with
existing products.  HP, because of their having bought out Apollo
(constructeur de stations graphiques) have an iardware?

CL: Its both, basically.  The instruction architecture is similiar to
68000 imware emulation tricks that can be
done as well, ing that work themselves?

CL: That's correct.

AN: So that will make it a lot easier to create something resembling
AmigaDOS portable onto the HP RISC?

CL: Exactly.  That was autrement dit un
fabricant qui prends un produit de base d'un autre fabricant et l'utilise
pour crieer un autre produit) the PowerPC core, which is a little square
portion of the die and then they give you the L-shape around the rest work on
the same die as the HP-RISC.
With the PA-RISC, unlike the PowerPC, we're actually allowed to have a
free rein over the whole die, so that we can take a HP-RISC core and
basically put in pieces that we want, take out pieces that weally creating a
custom PA-RISC
chip based on the PA-150, the latest one, that would allow us to have
really fantastic performance.

AN: How far have you got with that work?

CL: We've got software simulations of the chipset running.  We did
software simulations ofelend obviously the
CPU port there as well.  You'd still need a digital/analog converter at
the end that does the colour tables for the back end of the vit's not
something tle, thsdhavhip y jusprocesser
that's dois work and another PA-RISC is doing the!  major
computation, so you've now doubled the through-put of the s Does that go as
far as controlling transputers?

CL: It's not quite the same as transputers, it's not infinitely scalable.
Transputers obviously give you a lot more scalability in that direction.
But its a more tight integration as well.  From a software perspective
it's easier to code for because you're basically spawning 'Go forward' and the
money's there it'll take about 18
months.  It's the whole chip design that needs to be done and software
support has to be done...  it'll take some time.

AN: And that's not variable depending on the resources that you put behind it?

CL: e anything away
that would prevent that.


CL: Sure, Windows NT runs on PA-RISC and we're not taking anything away
that would prevent that.

AN: So tell us what AmigaDos would look like on such a machine.  In what
way would it be able to retain the AmigaDos that we know.

CL: The plan is simply to port AmigaDos to the chip.  So Exec will be
ported, graphics will be ported, Intuition will be ported, all portions of
AmigaDos that currently exist will be ported, the idea being that the
system will be wholly an Amiga, with the capability of running Windows NT
as well.  Because it's a PA-RISC there will already be native compiled
versions of NT.  You're basically talking about a box that can run two
OS's.  Three if you count HP's system.

AN: The new AmigaDos would not be compatible with existing software.

CL: That's correct, people would have to re-compile their existing
software.  But, again, because of the chips degree of compatibility with
the 68000 line that shouldn't be a gargantuan effort.  It should be about
as straightforward as it is for Apple people to recompile in order to get
their current 68000-based applications to run on PowerPC.

AN: Is all this something that can realistically be done now if someone
ends up buying the Amiga?

CL: Absolutely.  It's a matter of ensuring that there's some vision at the
top of the company in order to let something like this go through.
Commodore has too often in the past been in the situation of having
designed very cool products which just at the very end of the life cycle
after we've spent all the money on them don't actually make it to market
because the people at the top have a lack of vision and when they see the
finished product say "Oh no, they wouldn't wanna buy that." But I don't
think we'll see that with the potential buyers.

AN: This work you've been doing is one of the major assets of Commodore
and we suppose that's why the liquidator kept it going.  That means that
anybody who buys Commodore will be able to continue this project.

CL: Absolutely.  It really depends on how the buy-out happens.  Anyone
who's buying the whole company will get the rights to build this computer.
But there's been talk that the liquidator may be deciding to sell off the
company piecemeal which would mean that if someone wanted to pick up just
this technology they could come in with a smaller figure than the full
value of the company, and somebody else could buy the right to use the
names Amiga, etc.

AN: Do you think that people who have been working on this will be able to
come back if the sale happens fairly quickly?

CL: If it happens fairly quickly I feel personally quite certain that
people who were involved would be interested in coming back.  It depends
on how long it takes.  In six months from now if nothing's happened I'm
sure they'll all have jobs and they'll probably be quite happy with them.
Its maybe not going to be the same spark that we had with Commodore, but
you never know.  If the money's good, you've got wives and children...

AN: Mr Amor said on Portal the other day that he wasn't sure which RISC
chip to go for.  He said the Mac and the PC were pulling towards the
PowerPC, but talks had already gone on with HP.  He didn't seem to be
firmly fixed on this idea of an HP-RISC chip.

CL: The truth is that he's had very little contact with the engi: You've had
more contact with oher teams?

CL: Yes, definitely.  We've had more contact with teams that have gone
away now.  At one point Samsung were a potent:that was a long time ago.

AN: Philips?

CL: Correct.

AN: All these people lost interest before may be more
interested n.N: We heard some months ago that Samsung were not reallrested in
continuing the Amiga computer line.

CL: It's difficult to say.  They were obv w that werdes
that we had.  Whether or not they were interested in contsance wn the same
room during part of this interview but was
talking with ew and other people).

CL: All I can really say is, whoever takes over thy
have a driving instinct and vision to bring forth the best that the
plto offer.  I worry that people may have a short-term view o to do with t
yolude CEI and the English Commodore team?

CL: Yeah...

AN: You're not very sure.

CL: It's difficult to say.  I think that the UK team have a real  of where
they want to go, and that' Amiga has done very well in the sense of its
technological
specialities.  How end version of the chipset iso top boxes, and low cost
multimedia presentation devices like a cheap television set-top bo, so
it's gotta have video compatibility.  The blitt  There's somades.

AN: Sprilw
games programmers write games today, very few of thdeal with the sprite issue.
 It just
makes more sense to dispose with it altogether and use the real estate
that we gain to enhance the 3D abilities.

AN: Is the AAA chipset definitely out?

CL: I don't know that it's definitely out.  Dave (Haynie) s better off
trying to leapfrog the featt entirely so that we have somethingive, and tht's
why we focused on the RISC-3D stuff.

CL: I don't know that it's definitely out.  Dave (Haynie) spent a lot of
time getting a system out that would, at least from a hardware
perspective, work I think the ig problem with it is that from a
feature-set standpoint it really doesn't buy us enpough in the short-term
to be useful in the short-term and in the long-term we're better off
trying to leapfrog the feature-set entirely so that we have something new
and innovative, and that's why we focused on the RISC-3D stuff.

AN: The specifications of the AAA seemed pretty impressive from the
average Amiga user's point of view, and now you're talking about
leapfrogging.  Is the Custom RISC really that much better than AAA?

CL: Oh yes, definitely.  From what we know reading IEEE magazine and
playing with them our system will beat the pants off a Saturn (Sega's
coming console).  We've designed it around being a really fantastic
system, exercising the best of the resources that Commodore's always had,
basically designing our own chips rather than going out to someone else
and just using an off-the-shelf chip.  We've got some really good stuff
planned.

AN: So you can envisage having a wide range of Amiga products, from the
games player to the professional user, in the real tradition of the Amiga
which has been so hard to market...

CL: Yes it has been hard to market.  That's it.  It's one of our assets,
and getting rid of it by just concentrating on one end or the other would
be a mistake.

AN: So you've got built in there all sorts of texture mapping and other
capabilities?

CL: Yes.  Basically the blitter has grown features that allow it to do
texture mapping, that allow it to do shading like the new consoles, but
faster and with higher quality video modes, so that we've got a greater
resolution than the consoles have, because at the high end we're going to
need that resolution.  We've got completely programmable pixel rates, as
you know that's basically a feature that started with AA, that AAA grew
some, and this basically continues that growth path so that we'll be able
to do a large number of graphic modes.  We have true colour modes
(24-bit), we have some fairly innovative colour reduction modes, similar
to HAM but a bit different, we have YUV modes so it'll be much more simple
for us to do PhotoCD support, we've also got some 32-bit modes where we've
got a transparency channel as well.

AN: 24-bit colour on screen in high resolution?

CL: Yes, sure.  Obviously that's not the kind of mode you'd want to use
for a games system, because it takes too much bandwith, the graphics take
up too much space, but it's there because the same chipset could be used
in a high-end system to provide a true-colour, high-resolution desktop
interface.

AN: How much of that system is in this one central chip that you're
talking about.  Is there an external graphics sub-system?

CL: It's all in the one chip.  Everything is in there except RAM, ROM, and
the RAMDAC for the colour tables.

AN: What is the cache situation?

CL: There's an internal cache for the PA-RISC and then there's some
external cache space as well.

AN: One of the big problems of the Amiga is the lack of memory protection.
One programme crash can bring down the whole system.  Will that be
eliminated?

CL: Obviously if we're going to go to the trouble of porting the OS to
another chip then we have the opportunity at that point to get rid of all
the problems that
ill be one of the advantages of losing compatibixe a port because it's written
entirely in assembly
code but it's a small, tig core soshoo difficult.

AN: What sort of a clock speed would this tung at as a likely prospect would
be OEM'ing
somebody else's add-on CPU cagn anen blding those into the
box, just as a short-term solution.  It'sly true thams us a
quick way of doing that.

AN: What was your function the Comm anevelop our own standards where there
weren't already stathen get developers to adopt the
standards.  Unfortunately as usual in Commodore there was very little
resourdrk a host of ople ended up with
another library called Real Time Dat Library which provides the
synchronisation and timing informati oing to be lost when you change the CPU?

CL: No, the plan is to bring it all over.  That's one of the reasons it's
going to take 18 months.  A good thing is that having picked an already
existing RISC core, even while the hare used.  It's going to be completely
different because what
we have in our own hardware is obviously going to be much faster, but from
our perspective, developing system software, that doesn't matter much and
we'll be able to programme a signtng it will be before somebody's
hardware is released, but if you're a software developer, as you well
know, 18 months doesn't seem like much at all in order to learn a whole
new system and to come out with sino
have to learn all overt if you're doing system programming then
I don't think you've got anythiung to worry about.  You should be able, at
the end, wuchmor than simply recompiling your software,
have something that workantages over the Mac and the PC?

CL: I think that one important point is that the machine will come as a
base with outstanding graphics performance.  As a system to do 3D
rendering, a as system to do commercial video work, you're going to find
that our system will be able to compete just as well as Amigas compete
today.  In 18 months to two years time, when the PCs are coming to where
we are today, we'll have gone forward another generation.

(c) NewsEdition SARL 1995.


Catch yer l8tr
Dennis