User:Splateagle/sandbox

Released in June 1990, The Commodore Amiga 3000 was the third major release in the Amiga computer family. It revealed a much more focused and sincere attempt to build a high-end professional multimedia computer, boasting improved processing speed, better rendering of graphics, and a revision of the increasingly haggard operating system.

Its predecessors, the Amiga 500,1000 and 2000, shared the same fundamental system architecture and consequently performed without considerable variance in processing speed despite considerable variance in purchase price. The A3000 however, was entirely reworked and rethought as a genuine high-end workstation. The new Motorola 32-bit 68030 CPU, 68882 math co-processor, and 32-bit system memory helped increase the "integer" processing speed by a factor of 5 to 18, and the "floating point" processing speed by a factor of 7 to 200 times. The new 32-bit Zorro III expansion slots provided for faster and more powerful expansion capabilities.

In common with earlier Amigas it ran a 32-bit pre-emptive Operating System, but the "Workbench 2.04" revision resulted in a more ergonomic and attractive interface and access for programmers was hugely simplified. Additionally, Commodore had a licensing agreement with AT&T to include a port of Unix System V (release 4), which was available with the Amiga 3000UX.

Technical specifications

 * Motorola 68030 processor at either 16 MHz or 25 MHz (The 16 MHz models were discontinued soon after).
 * 2 MB of memory (configured as 1 MB chip RAM and 1 MB 32-bit Fast RAM), expandable to a total of 18 MB onboard.
 * 68881 or 68882 FPU coprocessor (The 16 MHz model was shipped with a 68881, the 25 MHz model with a 68882)
 * ECS chip set.
 * SCSI interface and a Quantum LPS40S (40 MB), LPS52S (50 MB) or LPS105S (100 MB) 3.5-inch hard drive.
 * Built-in 'flicker fixer' which enabled the use of a VGA monitor.
 * The A3000, unlike most Amiga models, supported both ROM-based Kickstarts and disk-based Kickstarts (the early "SuperKickstart" model), although not simultaneously. Kickstart V1.4 was actually a special version of Kickstart which loaded the real Kickstart from a ROM-Image file called DEVS:Kickstart (68040 upwards require at least 2.x ROMs).
 * four Zorro III expansion slots on riser board, backwards compatible with Zorro II
 * two passive ISA expansion slots inline with Zorro III
 * one video slot inline with Zorro III
 * a 'CPU fast slot' for processor boards and optionally up to 128 MB RAM

An increase in the amount of "Fast RAM" could be achieved by adding ZIP DRAM chips; these were notoriously difficult to fit - available in two varieties, Page Mode or Static Column.

Other models included the A3000UX bundled with UNIX System V Release 4, and the A3000T tower computer.

An enhanced version, the Amiga 3000+, with the AGA chipset and an AT&T DSP chip was produced to prototype stage but never launched. In its stead Commodore replaced the A3000 with the impoverished A4000.