@OlafS25

Trevor is having complex large motherboards developed by professional HW R&D firm, to be sold as expensive HIGH end "Amiga".

Efika PPC is perhaps the best example of low cost small volume HW.
So, very doable. "Just" replace the PPC.

IIRC, Genesi even said they are also getting back some of their R&D costs???
I would not try to do that when the priority nbr1 is to make affordable system to gain more users & developers.


I'm very poor in BOM calculations. But to me it seems components + production cost of 1.4Ghz quad core PPC SYSTEM with RadeonHD is below EUR200 per unit in small runs.

Then I look what is the price of the cheapest x86 desktop I can buy from local shop.
EUR269 with Win8 & quad core 2Ghz & 4Gb & 500GbHDD (one needs to get a supported GPU for sane 3D on that, depending on what OS one uses)
So... below EUR300 end user price with OS would not seem absolutely insane when trying to sell to some Amiga/RETRO interested. Even when the PPC CPU is not as powerfull.

Last edited by KimmoK on 17-Aug-2015 at 02:59 PM.
Last edited by KimmoK on 17-Aug-2015 at 02:49 PM.

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// For freedom, for honor, for AMIGA
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// Thing that I should find more time for: CC64 - 64bit Community Computer?

@number6

Quote:

number6 wrote: @damocles Quote: I could have sworn HyperionMP said that was not a factor for OS4. Semantics again? He was speaking about the freedom to port to any h/w they wish to, as a result of the settlement agreement with Amiga Inc.. Regardless of whether you believe that, I was referring to a different contract. Based on A-Eon V1 out of Belgium, my question would be whether Hyperion could arbitrarily compete with current A-Eon by porting to this existing h/w of which we speak. Secondarily if even that was the case, would there still be a priority contractually to current A-Eon h/w. Frankly, we have no idea what might be in the paperwork after A-Eon re-organized without HyperionMP, so it's just conjecture. By Hyperion saying publically they would not support winuae PPC, you could argue there is such a clause. Although those who take all company statements at their face value would still claim it's due to inability to support such a project, as stated. Source #6

Interesting thoughts, I'd assumed your oblique references on this subject related to the practicality of relicensing components from individual (unpaid/disgruntled) developers, assuming that such renegotiation would be required with an architecture shift.

I'd assumed that Hyperion's position wrt WinUAE was due to emulation requiring the piracy of the CSPPC Rom, Ralph Schmidt's IP (where no CSPPC is owned by the user), and the hilarity that would ensue if Hyperion implicitly condoned such piracy by listing it as a supported platform.

Last edited by Boot_WB on 17-Aug-2015 at 02:44 PM.

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@KimmoK

Quote:

KimmoK wrote: @damocles >First I never said it had to be x86. There is no other sane option than x64. MorphOS team know it.

There are decent ARM boards out there that would work just fine.

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@olegil

"3. AOS. I want a minimal T1020 + SB820M setup. And some extra PCIe. There's very little a T1020 + SB820m combo actually misses. Apart from USB3, which would require an FCH which we don't know how to use. If noone else does this soon imma gonna do it ma friggin self."

"For a 100-200EUR target price, doing batches of about 200 is probably the most sane option. This enables some savings in prices even on the first batch, and gives you headroom to shrink cost quickly. Sell a batch of those a week and you'll be a hero for sure "

Since you have a good knowledge of processor/bus/memory, why you don't statrt a simple design to propose to the community A-eon/Acube or whatever?

There are company that print's out boards (even small amount) if you send them schematics.

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retired

@damocles

>There are decent ARM boards out there that would work just fine.

1*PCIe v2.0 x4 + 1* PCIex1 would be the absolute minimum.
I have not seen that kind of board sold anywhere.

Do you have a link?

_________________
- KimmoK
// For freedom, for honor, for AMIGA
//
// Thing that I should find more time for: CC64 - 64bit Community Computer?

@Boot_WB

Quote:

I'd assumed that Hyperion's position wrt WinUAE was due to emulation requiring the piracy of the CSPPC Rom, Ralph Schmidt's IP (where no CSPPC is owned by the user)

Agree, that is yet another possible reason, if not the principle reason.

Now let's consider it has been stated that classic (ignore the term if you hate it) has been their "biggest seller". Plus we have Costel's podcast on behalf of Hyperion stating basically that FE sales showed a noticeable increase as a result of winuae ppc. I'll let you debate what this all means.

#6

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@KimmoK

Quote:

KimmoK wrote: @cdimauro >Why do you care about motherboards? Because every motherboard is different. For example MorphOS team plans to support only one x64 motherboard. It's telling.

The motherboard has components, which usually are standard ones: SATA, Audio (AC'97 or the newest HDAudio), USB. And of course some I/O stuff which is part of PCs from the beginning (DMA, timer, interrupts), and some of them even part of PowerPCs computers.

That's why if you chose a single motherboard you fix a precise set of components, but that does NOT mean that your o.s. can only run on that motherboard. In fact, it runs on other boards which have the same or even similar components. That's what happens with AROS...
Quote:

>There are STANDARDS to handle hard disks, mouses, keyboards (peripherals in general), audio, video. So, no drivers needed any more.

Drivers implement the above standards, but you have NOT zillions of different implementations for the same USB stack...
Quote:

GPU & motherboard manufacturers are idiots because they ship drivers for their video

Video is different because there's no standard defined for GPUs: any vendor implements them in a proper/proprietary way, and usually they do NOT expose any information about the internals (GPU registers and how to use them) and how to generate "optimal" (internal) instructions when compiling a shader.

But here you can use some work done by others in several years, like the famous Gallium.
Quote:

and mb offerings.

See above. However some chipset (read: chipset. NOT motherboard!) can have some bug, and a proper driver can identify and fix it.

Recently on AROS-Exec a developer talked about some issue with a VIA chipset, regarding the SATA (if I remember correctly). You don't have two different drivers in this case, but the unique one is able to intercept which chipset is being using by the system, and provide an internal fix for it.

@KimmoK

Quote:

KimmoK wrote: @damocles I would try spending on developing a PPC system that does not cost more than low end x64.

A low-end x64 costs even less than 99$, and you have all that you need. Take a look at Intel's Compute Stick, for example.
Quote:

I would like to see existing SW issues taken care of before ISA change. EUR200 PPC computer system can be made. 64bit, Gallium3D, SMP/AMP, MP etc can be done on that.

All that stuff means completely breaking compatibility with the existing software. It's a new o.s..

And since for adding multicore (not even SMP) is taking YEARS, you can imagine how long it takes for having everything.
Quote:

C) -run hosted but doubt it's high quality experience since I have not seen nice Win/Linux "host" ever.

It seems that Hyperion will not, or is not allowed to, support emulation, and without that the host experience is always very limited, because it seems that no experienced OS4 developer wants to help here, at least to fix the problem with the memory.
Quote:

But as said ... as long as users do not control NG OSs one can only try via PPC route or go AROS or WinUAE.

Another solution could be an Amithon-like platform, better supported by a set of system libraries which are mostly "hosted", so offloading as much as API calls possible to the host o.s., for maximum performance.

It can applied to both 68K and PowerPC applications, and such offloading can be used by other o.ses (AROS, MorphOS/x64) too.

@olegil

Quote:

Now, if the person who keeps popping up to insist on A70M would just sit the heck down and design a PCIe A70M plugin board that we could get cracking on drivers for, plus an SB820m (heck, even SB600) board for "legacy" drivers (X1000, remember?), I would get cracking on the CPU / PCIe mainboard.

That would be awesome!

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@Boot_WB

Quote:

I'd assumed that Hyperion's position wrt WinUAE was due to emulation requiring the piracy of the CSPPC Rom, Ralph Schmidt's IP

Laire's IP is irrelevant if HYPE wanted to distribute an OS4 for emulated PPC on x86.

The only reason it's needed for the PPC part of WinUAE is that every AmigaPPC SW is build in a way that starts on top of laire's IP.

Adapting WinUAE so that it would just start an OS4boot.img on a blank PPC isn't rocket science (but 100% pointless as there is no OS4boot.img and most likely won't be).

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@AmigaBlitter

Frankly, I would prefer a T1024, but I am glad to see that others have noticed Freescale's lower cost e5500 cored cpus.
I have mentioned these to Trevor, but they are frankly below the range his company aims for.
However, since my first MorphOS system was only 933KHz (later updated to 1.4GHz), I am sure a 1.4KHz processor would be more than adequate.

And a Radeon HD card for OS4 or an X1950XT for MorphOS would work great with such a board for accelerated video.

Last edited by iggy on 23-Aug-2015 at 09:05 PM.

@Kronos

Quote:

Laire's IP is irrelevant if HYPE wanted to distribute an OS4 for emulated PPC on x86.

Exactly. Direct "port" to QEMU would make much more sense.

@pavlor

I'd love to se qemu get either an a1xe or peg2 config option. heck, even sam440 or sam460. Qemu supports 440 if i remember, I couldn't tell if 460 is supported or not.

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