#Market Survey
Now; the Atari machines run a little bit faster, CPUclock wise, than the AMiga
does. 7.16 MHZ for us, about 8.0 MHZ for them (I think). Ok. In their machine,
their CPU does ALL the work. In our machine, The CPU, the Blitter, and the
other custom chips work together (without getting in each others way – we'll
get to that in a minute) to provide much MORE overall horsepower than the ST
has. Working together. An important concept in a multitasking machine (And
that's something the ST doesn't need to worry about – it doesn't multitask)
Now, when WE run OUR blitter, normally it doesn't need to get in the way of the
CPU. That means the blitter does it's thing, the CPU does seomthing else, and
lots of work is being accomplished. In the ST, their Hyundai, ooops, blitter,
smacks the CPU in the head with a rolling pin, says, go the heck to sleep, and
does it's thing. Then, after a while, the blitter relinquishes control and
hands control back to the CPU. Which wake up, does some work, and promptly gets
smacked in the head again, back to sleep. The upshot of this is that the ST's
blitter and CPU do NOT work together – they alternate total control of the
machine. Not us. We share tha machine all the time, getting twice as much done.
Aside from THAT, our blitter can do about a zillion differnt logic operations;
theirs is vastly inferior, allowing only a small subset of these to occur. Now
let's rake the sounds over the coals. The Amiga has what is really pretty good
sound – not studio quality, but still, very enjoyable and VERY flexible. Notice
the speech synthesis? Ever notice you can run Sonix playing a tune while your
machine is doing a directory of a disk? Well, we have our sound hardware going,
the CPU cranking away sorting the directory, the Blitter beating the disk to
death, Blitter ALSO running sounds, CPU ALSO calculating sound stuff for
Blitter to hum at the sound output circuitry; Not the St. No, sir. <continued>