@hazydave

Hi Dave...

I`m glad that finally someone who belonged to the story, but from the other side of the mirror, showed to the crowd where do they belong. There is a huge flame thing around
the PPC/x86/ARM and only on mentioning of anything except PPC you get crucified
around this place. So called , self named "Amiga Elitist" are not thinking on a real
way of thinking. Why would you pay +2000¤ for something that is overpriced
and not even completely supported by AOS4 (XMOS).

What do you suggest as a real course for prolonging the life of the AOS into
the future. Which way to go? The way things are standing now, it is doomed
because the new hardware is highly overpriced and by raw power in the range
of the low entry x86 boards + CPU that cost under 120¤..

Please, as a person that is a reference in the current Amiga "World" give us a
hint...what would be a best way to continue in a further development.

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@hazydave
Quote:

That's the end, and there's really nothing in PPC land to replace that PA Semi dual-core.

Freescale PR went on record stating their customers have asked for more powerful cores (not necesarily "more" weak ones) and as a result, their latest 5020 offers more powerful figures in both int and floats departments.
The next series (60x0) will see the introduction of Altivec and possibly additional gains in the int department. Up to 8 core designs are planned (and there will be a 70x0 series after that).
So they are not from PASemi but they could be good chips (60x0 in particular).

Quote:

I read the specs on the XMOS chip, and that's one of the problems. It's not a terribly interesting chip.

On its own it might not, although it might still be used in unconventional ways (for geek fun), check the specs of THIS 2D engine for example (they are in the description "show more" flap) considering only 2 threads of a single 400 mips core (the X1000 will have 2 500 mips ones directly connected to the CPU) it's not bad

But the interesting part for me is the Xorro slot and the possibility of using NG chips there. Basically a cluster of more powerful 2nd generation chips migh be fitted there and interact with the CPU at PCI-E speed.
Assuming these new chips will have the right specs it could open some interesting possibilities.
I don't know, some kind of cell like operation where the SPUs are on an external board (assuming 2nd G chips will have an FPU or simd unit) might be a nice "proof-of -concept" to be further developed/improved on an eventual X2000 (mass produced at low prices? ).
Or people could find other creative uses, sound fun nontheless...

Last edited by DAX on 16-Apr-2011 at 11:12 AM.

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@hazydave

Quote:

I can see some potential use in some embedded applications, but only if it actually saved power over using, say, one far more powerful $10 ARM chip. It's not programmable silicon, it's a CPU array with a bunch of pretty uninteresting little tiny processors. If you really want to make things go fast on these machines, you need OpenCL ported, so you can use that Radeon GPU.

It misses the point. XMOS is not about performance, but about low latency and predictability without the complexity of a FPGA. You don't get the kind of low latency hard realtime guarantees that the XMOS chips provide out of a $10 ARM chip. You would get it out of an FPGA, but not many people have the skills to program one.

The XMOS on the other hand can be programmed in plain C with a small library, or in XC - mostly C with a few tiny extensions. It provides a lot of the same benefits of an FPGA but for software developers like me who are absolutely clueless about things like VHDL or the considerations needed to get a hardware design to work.

If the

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@hazydave

Therefore condemning AmigaOS 4.x PPC to be a relatively expensive hobby platform.
But rewarding for those who enjoy it.

Quote:

Sure, there are plenty of things that don't need that kind of performance, but then again, 80% of what I do works just dandy on a $200 netbook or Android tablet

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(oops, pressed submit again by accident after going back... edit to delete duplicate content)

Last edited by vidarh on 16-Apr-2011 at 02:21 PM.

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@hazydave

Quote:

The best strategy for an actual resurrection of the AmigaOS was AmigaOS on commodity hardware. With a team that could actually keep evolving the AmigaOS in a modern direction

You see I was favouring the X1000 route as it was 'more standard' than something like NatAmi and therefore could be faster and upgraded easier. But really - what you are saying is that it is still obscure PPC - it is still woefully underpowered compared to - say - this i7 laptop I am using right now.

So from your point of view you would see the only way AmigaOS could have 'come back' would have been to go x86 or use some cheap ARM CPU?

Your comments about the history of Amiga in your other posts here are fascinating by the way. My nerdy Amiga side loves this stuff.

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@hazydave

Quote:

there is an absolutely finite number of these that can ever exist -- the CPU is out of production.

This is true but A-Eon have stated that it won't be a problem as they can move to the new multi-core CPUs being developed by Freescale, in particular the 64-bit dual core, 2.2 GHz P5020 and the 8-core, 1.5GHz P4080.

I'm not saying this will happen but just for your own info - and no - I don't think these things will be cheap either which lends to your argument about it all getting too expensive and still not quick enough to compete against a common x86.

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@hazydave

Quote:

One of other top SW guys, Carsten Scholte, had started developing an Amiga-like OS on his own, and that eventually became CaOS. The OS was very much an updated AmigaOS-like OS... you'll find this has happened a bunch of times in the power-Commodore world (in fact, the multitasking OS that runs on the React and Sensor digital R/C controllers I developed at Nomadio run a very Amiga-like OS, designed by Scott Drysdale and Frank Sczerba). In fact, it was so Amiga-like, we were hiring Amiga developers to port their stuff. The "desktop" was again primarily via the browser, but it was Voyager... we funded the upgrade of V to a "version 4" class browser,,, there were even custom HTML tags for things like video overlay. The main UI was via MUI, etc. This was, in fact, the only thing I did at Metabox or anywhere else I'd claim is essentially Amiga-like as a whole.

So your team created an enhanced amigaos without the amigaos licence and yet you criticize the morphos team for doing the same? And some of the morphos team are those amiga devs you hired? please explain

Last edited by cheesegrate on 17-Apr-2011 at 07:36 AM.

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