News??? is real project??

@amitv

Hi

The X3500 lives in silicon but we only have a few units for internal testing.

We have been concentrating all efforts on the X5000 and X1000 in the last year.

The "Cyrus" motherboard, which the X5000 is based on, is a completely bespoke high quality motherboard. It was designed from the very outset to run AmigaOS.

As you may have seen from recent Amiwest photos, we have been developing a custom firmware with the familar grey/blue colour scheme and most of the efforts are now concentrated on ensuring that AmigaOS runs well. Customers told me that they wanted it to be "familiar" to their older classic systems but provide the power that they require for modern day to day tasks.

All this work takes considerable amount of time with such a small team behind it.

Of course, as most semi-technical people realise the X5000 is a completely different ISA to the X1000. The X5000 is a e5500 core so a lot of work has gone into adapting AmigaOS for the new ISA.

Plus the X5000 has many functions in the SOC like USB, SATA and Ethernet so drivers have to be produced for each function. This is all very time intensive as you can imagine.

The X5000 has a few firsts for AmigaOS hardware such as SATA2, DDR3, 16GB memory +, a 4GB ROM and faster PCIe. Its also the first system to break through the 2Ghz barrier which is exciting. Of course it was designed to take AmigaOS to the next step from the inception.

Last edited by amigakit on 03-Nov-2014 at 11:45 PM.

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@amigakit

Love the idea of the firmware mimicking the Kickstart ROM

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Sam

@-Sam-

Me too :) I could not stand that black/white PC-esque Uboot screen personally.

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@amigakit

Will the X1000 eventually get a verson of the new custom firmware ?

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- BCP
AmigaOne X1000 & Amiga 4000

Amiga Response Crew Users Group
Indianapolis, IN USA

@BCP

We would need to look into the practicalities of it. The X5000 has a mammoth 4GB ROM space so it can accommodate graphic firmware and animated power on screens etc. the CFE on the x1000 is stored in a much smaller space.

Of course the X1000 has had a lot of development in graphics performance the last month. Users will really see the difference when playing 1080p :)

Last edited by amigakit on 04-Nov-2014 at 12:45 AM.

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@amigakit

Do you really mean 4GB? or 4MB?

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AlexC's free OS4 software collection

AmigaOne XE/X1000/X5000/UAE-PPC OS4 laptop/X-10 Home Automation

@AlexC

Yes 4GB

TrevorD

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No, I don't need no reason, I'm just breezin'

@TrevorDick

Quote:

TrevorDick wrote: @AlexC Yes 4GB TrevorD

That is kind of mind boggling when you really think about it (and I had not thought about it before now).

You could probably fit most (if not all) of the available software that runs natively on AmigaOS4.1.6, plus all of the Amiga 68k software that will run on the X5000, when the port of AmigaOS4.1.x is finished, without UAE emulation, and a huge chunk of other Amiga 68k software that requires UAE to run, all inside of that 4gb space that I assume is only being used for the BIOS, or what ever you want to call the equivalent on the X5000 to get AmigaOS4.1.6 to boot from the hard drive. Can the entire AmigaOS4.1.6 be placed in that ROM, or would that not be a desirable place to run the OS from (give me some slack if this is a stupid question, I am heavily self medicated tonight due to too much pain earlier).

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Amiga! The computer that inspired so many, to accomplish so much, but has ended up in the hands of . . . . . . . . . .

@TrevorDick

Is it a 4 GB ROM?
Or boots it from a SD-Card insert in the SD-Card connector nearby the powersuplly connector?

@Rudi

Yes the firmware is stored on a Micro SD card rather than in a ROM.

@TrevorDick

Will this 4GB boot ROM finally be able to boot the poor Amiga in less than a minute? 'm sooo disappointed with the X1000 taking such a veeery long time to boot. First spending an eternity making absolutely sure that all disks spin and are connected (even if there are solid, or already spinning), then it loads, in PIO-0 mode

I'm convinced the slow development of OS4 itself is influenced by the slow booting of all AmigaOnes. I mean, the core developers surely has to reboot the machines many many times a day when testing kickstart modules and kernel. 30 reboots, is half an hour wasted. With a real Amiga cold boot time of 10-15 seconds development of all software could be speed up a lot IMO.

Boot speed should be prioritized, especially considering the instable nature of AmigaOS.The AmigaOnes really does no feel like an Amiga when it has to be rebooted. (Warm reboot is irrelevant, because if the machine can be warm rebooted, it runs so well that it does not need to be rebooted.)

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> Amiga Classic and OS4 developer for OnyxSoft.

@Deniil715

Is it posible to make The 4 GB in raid mode to speed it up

@Deniil715

" then it loads, in PIO-0 mode!

Not sure I understand. My X1000 loads from my sata HDD device in DMA mode.

Initialization of some of the RadeonHD cards does take a little longer and sometimes it's down to the card and monitor combination as well.

BTW, many developers never turn off theie machines (don't they Lyle?).

TrevorD

Last edited by TrevorDick on 04-Nov-2014 at 09:59 AM.

_________________
No, I don't need no reason, I'm just breezin'

@retro

@retro

Ør The Rom in an image file or maby something with a swap file ør an i rampling agen

@Deniil715

Quote:

Will this 4GB boot ROM finally be able to boot the poor Amiga in less than a minute? 'm sooo disappointed with the X1000 taking such a veeery long time to boot.

You are not the only one, the X1000 is an excellent machine once it has started up but getting there takes *far* too long.

Quote:

Boot speed should be prioritized, especially considering the instable nature of AmigaOS.

I agree 100% but all such suggestions have always fallen on deaf ears. When testing software it is not uncommon to get a lockup requiring a herd reset. The time wasted on the cold reboot is a real pain.

I am sure the firmware could be updated to have the CPU running at full speed at switch on which should help somewhat.

Most of the time seems taken checking the graphics card which really only needs doing when inserting a new one, not every time the machine is reset.

@a-eon

Have you considered of using P5010 on the low end instead of P3041?

IMO, building support for e500mc core is futile when e5500 will be supported and also e6500 is becoming available. ( lets be 64bit from now on, pleeeaaaseee )


( other than that, please start aiming at 3s warm bootup time & 5s for cold boot )

Last edited by KimmoK on 04-Nov-2014 at 10:32 AM.
Last edited by KimmoK on 04-Nov-2014 at 10:31 AM.

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

The Micro SD card ROM is not a conventional removable SDcard. There is no file system. It is a raw data ROM.

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@TrevorDick

Quote:

TrevorDick wrote: @Deniil715 " then it loads, in PIO-0 mode! Not sure I understand. My X1000 loads from my sata HDD device in DMA mode.

The kickstart is 15 MB. If it loaded using DMA it would load in 0.3 seconds, but it takes several seconds to load. Calculations show it loads at about 2MB/s, not 150MB/s which it potentially could on SATA DMA. PIO-mode is fine, if it was just configured to run at the highest PIO mode PIO-5. One or two bytes has to be written to the disk to enable this. Trivially simple.

Only after waiting halv a minute on CFE and SLB, AmigaOS starts booting and then it flies of course.

Quote:

Initialization of some of the RadeonHD cards does take a little longer and sometimes it's down to the card and monitor combination as well.

I find a long delay (couple of seconds) showing the CFE boot image (which means the Radeon is running) until it shows the kickstart boot selection, i.e. before even loading kickstart. This is on warm cold reboot so the disks are already spinning.

Quote:

BTW, many developers never turn off theie machines (don't they Lyle?).

Well, neither do I But I have to reboot it fairly often when developing since it locks up so easily. And when it locks up the USB keyboard cannot warm reset the machine (PS/2 often could on the XE), so the button and cold reboot and coffee break is inevitable.


I want to amaze my windows friend with fast Amiga boot speeds, not be amazed myself how fast Windows 7 boots compared to the fastest Amiga ever built...

Last edited by Deniil715 on 05-Nov-2014 at 10:18 AM.

_________________
- Don't get fooled by my avatar, I'm not like that (anymore, mostly... maybe only sometimes)
> Amiga Classic and OS4 developer for OnyxSoft.

@BillE

Quote:

I agree 100% but all such suggestions have always fallen on deaf ears. When testing software it is not uncommon to get a lockup requiring a herd reset. The time wasted on the cold reboot is a real pain. I am sure the firmware could be updated to have the CPU running at full speed at switch on which should help somewhat.

Totally deaf, which I find rather wierd, considering the OS developers must have irritated themselves to death over this since the first AmigaOne was released. And especially regarding the PIO mode which is so simple to fix. The Sam440 loads the kickstart in DMA or a higher PIO mode I believe. Takes less than a second. Not so with any AmigaOne model.

Not sure the CPU speed has that much to say during init unless it "counts" the RAM or something. Slow Radeons also require a lot more work to fix, like saving the state to CFE or parallel init and stuff. More difficult.

_________________
- Don't get fooled by my avatar, I'm not like that (anymore, mostly... maybe only sometimes)
> Amiga Classic and OS4 developer for OnyxSoft.