News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Why does the Commodore C128 perform poorly when running C... by icedchai on Friday December 09, 2022 @06:33PM (#33927939)
How much of Sun wanting to use the A3000 is an over-exaggeration? I've read this before and never understood it. Sun was more than capable of producing their own 68K workstations. They had done so since the early 80's.

680x0 Unix machines were pretty long-in-the-tooth by the time the Amiga 3000 was available. Sun themselves had moved on to Sparc. NeXT was about to give up on hardware. SGI would move on to MIPS CPUs... etc

Re:Why does the Commodore C128 perform poorly when running C... by hakfoo on Friday December 09, 2022 @07:52PM (#33928534)
I'm guessing it could have been a risk-management strategy.

If the 680x0 product is a failure, they've saved the cost of designing a custom machine and stocking inventory.

If it's a wild success, they have a partner which can scale up on demand. I suspect even in the Amiga's mid-life, Commodore was shipping an order of magnitude more machines than Sun was.

Re:Why does the Commodore C128 perform poorly when running C... by icedchai on Saturday December 10, 2022 @11:14AM (#33933794)
I suppose it could've been a lower-cost alternative to the Sun 3/80 ("Sun 3x", their 68030 arch), launched in 1989?

Also, Sun had launched a 386 system (Sun 386i) a year or two before that, so they were already on Intel. I think if they wanted to go the lower cost "consumer" route, they could've found a random PC clone vendor to help them scale up faster than Commodore.