@WolfToTheMoon

Quote:

WolfToTheMoon wrote: @klx300r PPC is still around, so is 68K, so is 650x... But they're not a tool for desktop computing anymore.

Actually PPC have enough horsepower for desktop purposes, but simply not being used in high quantities that could lower prices so to generate enough sellings thus being not a valuable choice for market...

And this is not even a culprit for PPC architecture fault, but it is due to Apple propaganda that switched to Intel insinuating the message "PPC is bad" and whole bovine masses of Apple users were buying this innuendo, passively adequating to dictates from the famous fancy fashion computers maker firm in Cupertino.

To be a valuable choice to attract market I suppose PPC machines should sell at least 1 million per year in desktop segment.

But who would buy a PPC computer now that Holy Saint Seat of Apple Church decreed that "PPC are the bad and the evil"?

And remember that at this point, choice to switch to Intel (even for us Amigans) it is just a mere matter of economics in order to save as many as money possible compared to CPU performance...

Last edited by Raffaele on 05-Aug-2016 at 06:43 AM.
Last edited by Raffaele on 05-Aug-2016 at 06:37 AM.

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"When the Amiga came out, everyone [at Apple] was scared as hell." (J.L. Gassée, former CEO of Apple France and chief of devs of Mac II-fx, interviewed by Amazing Computing, Nov 1996).

@Raffaele

Quote:

Choice to switch to Intel, even for us Amigans it is just a mere matter of economics in order to save as many as money possible compared to CPU performance...

No, it's not just a question of money.

Why would anyone continue to invest in OS development tied to a dead CPU? There is no cost/performance consideration.

Readily available, inexpensive hardware means more users.

Quote:

ne_one wrote: @Raffaele Quote: Choice to switch to Intel, even for us Amigans it is just a mere matter of economics in order to save as many as money possible compared to CPU performance... No, it's not just a question of money. Why would anyone continue to invest in OS development tied to a dead CPU? There is no cost/performance consideration. Readily available, inexpensive hardware means more users.

and here we go yet again

so for the sake of beating that long ago dead horse, if x86 & cheap hardware was the answer THEN we'd all be using only AROS right now and problem all solved right.

& dammit where's that beating horse emoji lol

Last edited by klx300r on 05-Aug-2016 at 06:48 AM.

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@ne_one

Quote:

ne_one wrote: @Raffaele Quote: Choice to switch to Intel, even for us Amigans it is just a mere matter of economics in order to save as many as money possible compared to CPU performance... No, it's not just a question of money. Why would anyone continue to invest in OS development tied to a dead CPU? There is no cost/performance consideration. Readily available, inexpensive hardware means more users.

Actually whole question IS MONEY as PPC is not a dead architecture, but market discriminated it as it was dead.
The development of desktop machines is stopped and not economically profitable, and mainly millions bovine users got buying this enormous lieball "PPC is bad", preventing any raise again of the PPC platform.

If you want PPC becaming again mainstream you should put in the arena enough money and hire colossal counter-propaganda campaign, in order to disrupt perception of users that PPC is bad, at same time with starting selling performant low cost PPC desktop computers, and this is not a matter for our actual finance resources...

So better for ourselves to switch to intel too...

Last edited by Raffaele on 05-Aug-2016 at 07:04 AM.
Last edited by Raffaele on 05-Aug-2016 at 07:02 AM.
Last edited by Raffaele on 05-Aug-2016 at 07:01 AM.

_________________
"When the Amiga came out, everyone [at Apple] was scared as hell." (J.L. Gassée, former CEO of Apple France and chief of devs of Mac II-fx, interviewed by Amazing Computing, Nov 1996).

@Raffaele

Fair play. You make Helgis' brainfarts look pretty tame.

@thread

Reading this thread I realised that it's been a whole year since Amiga 30 where Trevor had on show an X5000 running a beta release of AmigaOS 4.1x, and at that same event Solie talked about how their immediate focus was on porting AmigaOS 4.1 to X5000.

That's some focus. So much so they had time to release that Fundraising Edition, right around the time when there was that non-bankruptcy stuff going on at Hyperion.

Could any of us honestly blame Trevor if he decided to move away from AmigaOS?

P.S. When we label something as "dead" it doesn't mean all traces of it's existence have been erased. Many things are dead even though there are still people around the world that use them, i.e. Print is dead, cash is dead, CDs and DVDs are dead, letter writing is dead, postcards are dead, and yes, when it comes to personal computing, 68k and PPC (Power ISA) are dead.

It's about business and consumer trends. We want the power to record and edit 4k video on something that fits in our pocket, and within our budget. We want to be entertained with movies, TV, and music wherever we are on the planet, and on any screen from smartphone, tablet, laptop, desktop, smart TV. We want to be able to work from anywhere and have access to important information at any hour of the day, and communicate with anyone instantaneously not matter where they are in the world. Personal computing has always been about freedom. Anything that makes personal computing have less freedom is dead.

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All the way, with 68k

@klx300r

good idea

but for that you would need to overcome the stubborness of the remaining amigans

and to get new users outside you need new competitive unique software and services

even more hard

it is a illusion by many here that magically (if f.e. AmigaOS would be up to date) plenty of users and developers would jump on board. What is true that if something would run f.e. on Raspberry people perhaps would test it for curiosity but most (if not all) would drop it without useful software. In this sense a-eon is right with investing more in software development, where I disagree is the focus on 4.X there, priority should be 3.X with MUI (that would make it much easier to port) and not using reaction but that are strategical decisions. And priority should be to integrate the OS in current world supporting existing clouds and other services people use today, updating old software to a competitive level is almost impossible.

Regarding Aros, there are different reasons propably why it failed, some were caused by decisions and priority of Aros devs, some are caused by the attitudes in community. Aros is no prove of anything here, just that different hardware without sufficient software will make no difference either.

Last edited by OlafS25 on 05-Aug-2016 at 09:58 AM.
Last edited by OlafS25 on 05-Aug-2016 at 09:36 AM.

@agami

I can't argue with what you have written agami, you make a lot of sense...

Q!

I was a big a critic of Amiga not going x86 but when you consider Amiga was a Big Endian system, reversing that for a Little Endian CPU makes the source so far removed from the original, you may as well have an Amiga looking desktop theme for Windows and call it OS4/OS5.

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@agami

+1

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@klx300r

Quote:

klx300r wrote: ah Helgis, the original Franko

No, Franko is a wonderful guy with wits and great humour.

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@Hammer

So... MIPS it is then, right-endian and all.

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@OlafS25

Quote:

.... where I disagree is the focus on 4.X there, priority should be 3.X with MUI .....

I do disagree with that. OS4 has removed so many bugs from OS3 and it is foundation for renewing AmigaOS. Frankly, I would not put many resources to OS3 at all.. But I guess "old amigans" got so frustrated about the OS4 situation that they prefer to in invest in Software for the classic machines. So choosing to have the "enhancer package" and subsequent Apps released for OS3 at least gets some money in. At least I hope so for them. I'll remain on the OS4 boat, it's like tug-of-war, wouldn't it be nice to tug all in the same direction?

@Amigo1

then we agree to disagree there

@thread

I have had a few polite interactions with Helge. I understand why he, and for that matter anybody would leave the Amiga scene. I'm not going to beat the dead horse.

I sold my SAM460ex lite. I liked OS4.1, even FE. I liked some of the new software (CANDI, Tunenet, Liveforit mPlayer). However, I found that I used 68k software on it more than OS4.x specific software (ImageFX, Aladdin4D, etc.) In addition, without a faster processor or JIT, Odyssey was too slow for Facebook and Yahoo mail. I know updates for ImageFX, Aladdin4d, and Odyssey are in the works. Yet, impatience got the better of me. I also needed money to hire contractors to dig up the side of my house to deal with a drainage situation.

I may get a X5000, but considering I mainly use 68k software, the Vampire and an Amiga Reloaded may just meet my computing needs. I don't know. I do have some hope for both PPC and 68k/Vampire platforms. In the month that I have not had an Amiga experience, I am suffering a little from withdrawal. I need my fix man!

The funny thing is the fact that I just bought a Blackberry Q10 because I heard it ran on QNX. After getting it, I found out that Blackberry was ditching the OS for Android. Blackberry itself may go out of business. Does the Amiga curse extend to distant cousins?

Last edited by PhantomInterrogative on 05-Aug-2016 at 12:57 PM.

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I sold my SAM460ex lite... waiting for money to buy a Raspberry Pi... or a Classic A1000 with Buffee... or an A1222... and OS4.3 FE update 11

@Raffaele

Quote:

Actually PPC have enough horsepower for desktop purposes, but simply not being used in high quantities that could lower prices so to generate enough sellings thus being not a valuable choice for market...

Perhaps the reason for the PowerPC demise is not only Apple but also Motorola/Freescale as well. From its POWER start at IBM it appears as a top down performer. To which PowerPC is derived. And also embedded forms. So it is getting popular across the board. Somewhere along the line the so called smart phones start penetrating the market as well as tablets soon after. However, PowerPC seems to have missed the boat. And early on it doesn't look like IBM, Apple or Motorola thought to promote a scaled down version to suit. Perhaps because it was too hard to scale down to a miniature size in its class of architecture.

I see no mention below of Power ISA in this article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablet_computer

Instead we see ARM being built up. And Apple using using it early on. And also what's interesting. Apple Mac goes 64-bit in the G5 in 2003, support is looking good, then barely a few years later they dump it for Intel. There is a brief with P.A.Semi only to bought up by Apple to further develop ARM chips. The ARM ISA also used in the iPod. Ignoring early 8-bit Apples, we see a major shift from big endian to little endian. Yes, ARMs also do big endian and are somewhat bi-endian like PowerPC, but who runs them in big endian mode these days?

Quote:

And remember that at this point, choice to switch to Intel (even for us Amigans) it is just a mere matter of economics in order to save as many as money possible compared to CPU performance...

Now we may wonder what direction the original Amiga should have gone in. And what ISA should have been chosen. We see Alpha, PowerPC and [choke... gasp] x86. What should it have been? Well sir, none of the above! It should have been this and I only discovered it tonight! The Motorola 88000. Or as it could have been the 88K. Did they even show to to Commodore?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_88000

Side note:
The ARM today would be a good choice to go from 68K. If one wanted to go load/store RISC. And an equal amount of registers. However, when comparing PowerPC and ARM, PowerPC looks more advanced and has double the register count. Which makes my idea for running an OS4 ARM kernel and converting OS4 PPC apps into ARM code on the fly a bit hard.

However, ARM-64 has almost 32 registers, and so looks very similar to PowerPC now. Load/Store. SIMD. 32-bit instruction length, though there doesn't look to be a 16-bit opcode/data split like on PowerPC.

But. OS4 ARM kernel. PPC to ARM translator. Load PPC code. Convert to ARM. Translate PPC ABI to ARM ABI. Done!

Last edited by Hypex on 05-Aug-2016 at 04:41 PM.

Quote:

OlafS25 wrote: @klx300r good idea but for that you would need to overcome the stubborness of the remaining amigans and to get new users outside you need new competitive unique software and services even more hard .... Regarding Aros, there are different reasons propably why it failed, some were caused by decisions and priority of Aros devs, some are caused by the attitudes in community. Aros is no prove of anything here, just that different hardware without sufficient software will make no difference either.

I know we've been through this many times & I'm just as dumbfounded as ever when this talk of x86 & cheap available hardware comes up every time s if it's the miracle cure for our community
All amigans could have supported AROS from the start if this was truly the case & we'd be all in Amiga utopia with ONE OS rather than 4 camps like now

_________________
____________________________
c64-2sids, A1000, A1200T-060@50(finally working!),A4000-CSMKIII
! My Master Miggies- Amiga 1000 & AmigaOne X1000 !
mancave-ramblings
X1000 I BELIEVE

We just need to have money to pay experienced developers and they'll deliver.
Look at what Hans & Daniel can do. That being said only AEON seems to have that kind of money so they should buy the OS entirely even code from third party.
Kamelito

Last edited by kamelit0 on 05-Aug-2016 at 04:21 PM.

We just need to have money to pay experienced developers and they'll deliver.
Look at what Hans & Daniel can do. The being said only AEON seems to have that kind of money so they should buy the OS entirely even code from third party.
Kamelito

@klx300r

Quote:

so for the sake of beating that long ago dead horse, if x86 & cheap hardware was the answer THEN we'd all be using only AROS right now and problem all solved right.

It's easy to be dismissive but the reality is that the OS has to become platform agnostic.

PPC is hitting its end-of-life - it's not a question of choice.