Evangelion said:
And the ST had dedicated chips too. It wasn't like an x86 POS back in the day. It had a separate graphics chip, a separate MMU, a sound chip, and also gained a Blitter with the STe line. You forget that the ST was created by many of the same engineers who created the Commodore64, while the Amiga was created by the same guy responsible for the Atari 400/800's custom chips. Strange twist of fate. Point is, both teams were very strong in the custom chip design department. I wish(ed) Atari would've simply slapped the AMY sound chip into the ST line standard, but once the Tramiels took over, the people who designed the chip were fired and apparently nobody from the Tramiel team could figure out how it worked. Throwing in the 7800's Maria chip would've also been interesting.
What both lines failed to do was making the 68881 math coprocessor standard fare. That would've helped out immensely. Same goes for the Mac, but then again, Apple would've raised the price of each machine by $300 with the inclusion of that.
RISC vs. CISC hasn't mattered in years, as all x86 processors are essentially RISC inside. Furthermore, where's even one shred of evidence that these apps "take advantage" of it? AltiVec, maybe, but Intel has their own roughly equivalent functionality in SSE3. Not an issue.
