@hazydave

Hi, I'm glad you pop in and give your point of view, I think it is needed.

In my opiniom you make a lot of sense, best god damn read I've had
in a long time.

Bought Amiga Forever 2006 only to get to see your video.
I don't feel disappointed, every Amiga fan should see all
those videos. Great interesting stuff.

_________________
AmigaOS or MorphOS on x86 would sell orders of magnitude more than the current,
hardware-intensive solutions. And they'd go faster.-- D.Haynie

@hazydave

Quote:

Well, to some degree that's true today. For example, I have a DVD player in my livingroom here that plays regular DVDs, but also DVDs with high-definition video (your choice of MPEG-2 TS, MPEG-2 PS, MPEG-4 Advance Simple Profile, Divx, or Windows Media 9... most of these formats will have issues on a PC, particular at 1080i resolutions).

My MSI 635 laptop (AMD Turion 64 MT-34, ATI core logic, ATI Radeon X700 128MB, Cat 5.13) can play back DIVX HD, WMV-HD @1080p (e.g. "step into liquid") and MPEG-2 TS (HD p1080) without problems.

In AMD's project Yamato i.e. cite link (Japanese)
http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2005/1215/amd.htm

The picture from http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2005/1215/amd13.jpg
shows a dual core Turion 64's processor load while playing H.264 @1080p without problems. This also shows NVIDIA's next mobile nForce chipset.

_________________
Ryzen 9 7900X, DDR5-6000 64 GB RAM, GeForce RTX 4080 16 GB
Amiga 1200 (Rev 1D1, KS 3.2, PiStorm32lite/RPi 4B 4GB/Emu68)
Amiga 500 (Rev 6A, KS 3.2, PiStorm/RPi 3a/Emu68)

Warning: OT post ahead

@Manu

Quote:

Manu wrote: @hazydave I don't feel disappointed, every Amiga fan should see all those videos. Great interesting stuff.

Except the part where they bust up the keyboards under the wheels of the 4wd and under the hammer. Do you know how much some of those keyboards are worth on Ebay? If they weren't busted up, we'd have a glut in the market today

_________________

@Steff

Quote:

Steff wrote: @A1200 Quote: Oh and dual 64bit Xeon machines! That would be like having a super computer in your house compared with anything the Amiga user has now... That's just stupid.

Maybe... but also true. Nothing called "Amiga" is running on remotely fast hardware, even by the standards of a year or two ago, when I gave that interview.

Does speed matter? Well, maybe. I mean, if you're just running a web browser, you need enough juice to run Firefox or something else decent, but that's no problem on 800MHz G4s. But when you call it an Amiga, I'm going to demand that it lead the pack, not trail it horribly. Other than gamers, you probably don't run into lots of people pushing the envelope these days, but I'm one of them. I'm working on a video right now, and just the editing would challenge one of these "Amiga" machines, even if the software were there. What happens when I need to render it. My Athlon XP 2500+ took a good 28 hours to render 45 minutes of 8000Kb/s 1080i MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile video. On one of those "Amiga" machines, we'd be talking days if not weeks.

Again, what does "Amiga" mean to you. Other than "my job for 9.5 out of 11.5 years at Commodore", and by extension, most of my life in those days, it was a certain kind of excellence. Amigas never did that render, but in their day, they did video things of those days better than any other personal computer. A real Amiga today would do my render for me much faster than a PC, not slower than any PC you can still buy.

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If Hyperion had started porting to a x86 32bit machine when they started with the ppc port they wouldn't be any nearer a port to a 64bit AMD than they are today to a 64bit ppc, probably farther away.

Let's put this in prespective -- they're getting close to taking longer with the port than Amiga did to create it all from scratch. You can't rationally defend that. Also, they've complained repeatedly about hardware issues with the PC machines. They wouldn't have had any with the PC -- problems with one PC, use a different one. Trouble with one company, another's waiting to take over. I don't think you know a damn thing about computer development, adopting that attitude.

And 64-bit isn't even the issue... how about a general 32-bit release of this system?

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The only question here is getting this platform off the ground and getting amiga developers back on board ti wasn't going to happen in a bang and it wouldn't have on any other platform either.

You're correct -- there was no magic bullet to get developers back, new or previous. The only thing that gets developers is installed base -- hoe many people use it. The best way to get installed base is to lower as many barriers to entry as possible. I don't see any evidence that anyone involved understands these things.

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The great Dave Haynie will have to excuse me but I didn't read anything revolutionary or especially new in his statement.

Dude... I didn't say anything I hadn't said before. I wasn't trying to be profound, I was simply stating the obvious. Tamas asked me questions, I answered honestly and in some detail. I had been saying as much for years: to Gateway, to Amiga, Inc. I don't have any vested interest in any of it, only in that I'd love to see Amiga rise again. When the plan looks like it's done by a bunch of fan-boys, I need to speak out. You'll notice that most of the folks from my era have entirely moved on, and haven't spent a night speaking to you all, or telling Amiga, Inc. they're misguided.

Quote:

In this heated diatribe he seems overly negative for some reason, could it be jealous envy?

What could possibly fathom I'm jealous of? Old hardware running old software? You're so jaded for some reason you can't possibly accept that this was all attempted to be pure constructive criticism. Well, review this after this next attempt fails (assuming it ever launches), or the one after that, or whatever.

Quote:

He claims "they're barely a blip on the radar" which shouldn't cause anyone such an emotional response but he goes on to say "What really bothers me is the business case." almost as though it was his business!

Do you remember a little billion dollar company called Commodore. I used to work there, and like MANY of us, working there was somewhere been "life" and "religion" -- Commodore was 80% of what I did, and I did (and do) more than most people; I do 20 hour days, every day. So I have a huge bit of emotional capital invested in Amiga, and it's been painful to see it die, time after time.

If you follow these boards, you'll know I tried to resurrect it.. twice. I spent all my vacation time, and nights, and weekends, for some months (along with Andy Finkel) trying to get a new Amiga project launched at Amiga Technologies. They came to us. I tried again at PIOS, the startup we formed out of the ashed of AT, but we couldn't get anyone to agree on doing anything with the assets. Too much time passes, and I had other interests.

So no, it's not my business. But when I see a kid on a train track, and the train's coming, it doesn't have to be my kid -- I'd like to rescue that child. It's not out of envy for that child, it's out of human decency and respect for life, which is similar to the way I feel about Amiga. But I suppose you're just another caveman, and you won't understand any of this. There was a time when Amiga boards attracted only the best and brightest...

-Dave

@Maczilla

Quote:

@Hammer and Dave H. I don't want to use any X86 commodity HW. I'd like to use different hardware than all the other Windoz and X86 drones.

Why? You want to be different just to be different -- not better, not even as good, just different? If this were about people, you'd be branded a racist.

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Is there no reason, no justification argument against the de facto HW monoculture now being erected (thanks in part to Apples switch to Intel chips ) that you could accept as valid?

Sure: give me a viable senario for being different to be better, not worse. Give me a cogent business case, or a VHDL model, or anything that would lead a person of my intelligence and experience to believe there's any RATIONAL reason to reinvent all these wheels. Tell why, now that the PC architecture is so fixed, at least some of it's better than anything else, why something so unimportant as an ISA will lead to revolution. Or even something measureably and sustainably better.

See, I understand the difference between religion and science. Computer design is science; engineering, actually, but that's only the place where art and science meet. Faith has no place here -- everything is provable.

Prove me a reason.

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I can't help but wonder if it is possible to target HW/ chipsets/firmware/bios, etc. with malicious code in addition to security flaws in OS software (isn't that sort of how Sony's root kit worked)

Sony's root kit installed a standard but not well know low-level OS patch to Windows. Stupid, on all parts: Sony for doing it, MS for allowing it. But that's a software problem, and it couldn't really be solved in hardware... too abstract. Also not a BIOS thing --- BIOS isn't alive under any modern OS... the PC BIOS is a 16-bit real mode application, it's only used at boot time.

-Dave

@Legion

Quote:

That said, I think we're forgetting why we even have ANY hardware to begin with: x86 is a) too hot, and b) uses too much juice.

Define TDP profile. Note that, 7447A and 970FX is an easy target from a mobile X86 view point.

Note that AMD/MIT's 100 dollar Geode laptop is powered by a hand crank generator.

Quote:

Eyetech were trying to market a low power consumption linux board to the chinese, who are going face some serious issues regarding power usage in the near future.

Good luck to Eyetech since the competition would come from AMD/MIT/RedHat/Google/News Corp/BrightStar group and chinese (via Taiwan) own VIA and SIS.

Machine and Linux (who's the distro backer?) alone wouldn't win the war i.e. AMD/MIT has RedHat/Google/News Corp support it's case.

The India's "Deepak Phatak of the Indian Institute of Technology" and Chinese government has licensed X86 ISA and IP from AMD.

Last edited by Hammer on 13-Jan-2006 at 11:17 AM.
Last edited by Hammer on 13-Jan-2006 at 10:26 AM.

_________________
Ryzen 9 7900X, DDR5-6000 64 GB RAM, GeForce RTX 4080 16 GB
Amiga 1200 (Rev 1D1, KS 3.2, PiStorm32lite/RPi 4B 4GB/Emu68)
Amiga 500 (Rev 6A, KS 3.2, PiStorm/RPi 3a/Emu68)

@d4m0n

Quote:

I think there has to be a business case for OS4 to "take off". After all, would the A500 have taken off if all the big games companies had decided only to support the Atari ST? And you can be sure that they were mainly in it for the money when it all boils down to it, not because the Amiga architecture was superior (although the games designers would have had the technial interest of course...)

Of course not. But keep on that theme... would the A500 have taken off at, say, $3000? Or if the graphics only did 4 colors, compared to the ST's 16? Or if we ran the CPU at 1MHz?

Well, that's kind of what we're talking about, A-One compared to "plain old everyday 2006 PC". And that's the PC that runs you $400 or less. What you can do for $1000... I'd upgrade today, if I hadn't just bought a new laptop and camcorder.

-Dave

@hazydave

Quote:

But I suppose you're just another caveman, and you won't understand any of this. There was a time when Amiga boards attracted only the best and brightest...

Hi and welcome Mr. Haynie

Please don't let this guy make you generalise about the strenght of this community. And please acknowledge that we've been here waiting for 10-12 years, which makes us the toughest bunch of freaks you've ever seen. Of course we're happy just to get a new "modern" arcitecture for our beloved OS. Don't come down so hard on us, because one caveman are trolling.

Some of us are clever and bright ya know

_________________
On Planet Boing Trevor is God

Great..

_________________
http://www.amigasoft.net

@afxgroup

I don't get it.

And people, let's all lay off a little with the personal insults please.

_________________

@Maczilla

Quote:

It's the Reality Distortion Field (RDF)TM all over again. Jobs big news at Macworld is that a dual core Intel chip is 2-3 times faster than a single core G5, and 4-5x faster than a one core G4. Why isn't anyone asking why he is comparing a dual core X86 architecture to single core PPCs?

It's obvious, that's why. First of all, he's introducing his new x86 Mac, which runs a dual core Intel chip. Secondly, it's going to sell at the price point of the old single-CPU G5. If you don't follow Intel, they've been very cheap, versus past introductions, on the new dual-core. At least part of that's based on the lack of real world performance -- the Intels are still somewhat hamstrung by their old-fashioned shared bus. As well, they seem to have rushed this out (my guess -- but there's an explanation somewhere), so it's not anywhere near as efficient as the AMD x2s. I assume they guessed that no one was looking that close, and they felt they had to compete with AMD on the dual-core front.

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It's not as though they can't be compared to the recently introduced dual core and quad core G5 Powermacs.

On price, certainly. Also, the dual core Pentium M is undoubtedly targeted for a PowerBook, an area G5 can't touch.

Quote:

I think the real advantage Apple gains is with dual core laptop proccessors that can run at lower power/less heat.

Given that, some time back, Apple was selling as many laptops as desktops, they've been in pain over the hot G5s. And, as you'd expect in the small industry for that, Apple didn't have time or cash to order a custom low-power G5-revamp for laptops, even if it could have been done in a reasonable timeframe. The Intel (and of course, AMDs) already existed.

-Dave

@hazydave
Hi Dave. A definite thanks for dropping by, the thread has since become very interesting.

You've commented a few times about a business model. Given the fact that:
- low production run, low spec hardware is not going to break into the desktop market without a pretty amazing and unlikely 'killer app' that doesn't seem to exist
- virtually zero funding exists as far as anyone is aware of.
- the current incarnation is not running on x86, regardless of why....

What would you consider a reasonable path to get....somewhere?
Hyperion continues to bring up embedded, and I suppose a Nostalgia oriented STB of some sort could work, maybe, yet there's no hardware or financing for it known of. Even if there was, it would take some work to 'even' equal something like MythTv..

I've got a (failed) startup hardware project behind me, and while not an OS or chipset guy, have seen good products fail, lousy products succeed (hello marketing), and keep trying to determine any path to even limited success, whereby 'success' is deemed as a growing user base, and allowing the OS development to continue while people get paid. At some point, grow from a solid base, but build that base first.

The only thing I can thinkingg of is to mimic Zeta on the hardware that 'fits closest' and will be available. As you've said, PS3's PPE and the XBox360 use stripped versions of PPC970 cores, so seems at least an easier short term goal than going to x86 or other arch, and there _will_ be tens of millions of units sold.

If AmigaOS4 were sold as an 'application' for one or both of these, hell, even a trial version of it, making it sort of a combination of AmigaForever and MythTV- slick frontend interface, package a nostaglia pack of classic games, as well as WorkBench...many would IMO pick it up at a reasonable cost if just for the nostalgia factor..and like the A500s, probably 90% of them would use it simply as it seems, a gateway back to yesterday. But add to that the abillity to install to HD, and a set of updated SDK docs, RKRMs, and you _might_ manage to get enough people wondering enough to actually do some development on it to relive the bedroom coder days..

On other words, learn from Zeta and sell the hell out of it through any means possible, and get 'back in' via the games/nostalgia route, on a system that may not be 'great' as a desktop, but IS available, and start from there.

Comments/thoughts/flames? All are certainly welcome, but it's simply the only possibility for any growth and $$ I can think of.

_________________
Are we not done with the same silly arguments and flames yet??!

@hazydave

Quote:

Apple's doing "reasonably OK" in much the same way that Bill Gates is "somewhat rich", George Bush is "slightly stupid", and Angelina Jolie is "a little bit hot".

Depends on the context and relative to what benchmark (which I haven't disclose).
PS; Angelina Jolie has zero effect on me.

I'm well aware of Apple’s financials.

Quote:

Apple did better this year, thanks to cheaper Macs, but the iPod success is primarily non-Mac. But Apple knows the value of being proprietary. iPod rips from CD in AAC will play on a few other things: some Panasonic MP3 players, my DVD player (IOData), but not many. Downloads from iTunes only play on iPods. Apple bundles it as an ecosystem: you run iTunes on the computer, it links you to iTunes Store, buys instantly (your purchase info is logged in), etc.

I'm aware of Apple’s biz models.

_________________
Ryzen 9 7900X, DDR5-6000 64 GB RAM, GeForce RTX 4080 16 GB
Amiga 1200 (Rev 1D1, KS 3.2, PiStorm32lite/RPi 4B 4GB/Emu68)
Amiga 500 (Rev 6A, KS 3.2, PiStorm/RPi 3a/Emu68)

@Bodie_CI5

Quote:

And people, let's all lay off a little with the personal insults please.

No, let's lay off a lot. Given Dave's quite 'personal' history with the Amiga, I'm amazed he even wants to hear the word ever again, yet he's given his time over and again online, as well as to the new Commodore book and recent C= shows. You certainly don't have to agree with him, but you do need to show him some respect.

_________________
Are we not done with the same silly arguments and flames yet??!

@hazydave

Hi, I'm a bit overexcited learning that I'm going to write to the father of Amiga, but I thing I have to add my opinion to all this.

Well, you (with the other people you were working with in the '80es) did not just create a piece of hardware driven by an OS.
You, with the help of the fanatic users created a philosophy, a way if seeing the Informatic world that for the time was totally astonishingly revolutionary and indipendent from the rest of the informatic world, leaded by just commercial manouvres.
Ok, I know that those commercial manouvres are what kept the rest alive and made us quite dead with the time, but follow my words:

We (And I think I'm speaking the toughts of most of us), love the Philosophy that Amiga is.
We do not mind faster hardware, as we didn't when the 68000 was surclassed by the 386.
We do mind that the hardware/software combination we are using follows certain philosophy.
We see the PPC being the evolution of the 68K family (again, philosophically speaking), so we followed that route (again, I'm trying to interprete and put down in words the toughts of who created the first PPC accelerators and the A1/OS4 combo).

We are not caveman, we are still smart and brilliant people, we just do not want to follow the other 'x86 sheeps' (no offence intended here ), and I think nothnig more than OS4 demonstrates this.
Oh, yes, OS4 is not innovative, yes, if you look at the mere functions and you count the things it supports. But I think it is still innovative if you look at the cleverness and smartness of the solutions it contains.
Who told innovation must mean more functinos? It can mean same functions in a smarter way, but it takes to be a black sheep to appreciate it, and I'm proud of being one.

Yes, you can call us idealists. And you are true, I know most of us are.
I know this is a grim world for Idealist people, we are suffering and we are going to suffer,
but you can't command your heart. Can you?

With all the respect I can give to a living myth , Luca Giudice

_________________
God created Paula so that Allister Brimble and Dave Whittaker could do music

Check my Amiga gameplays (ITA)!

@ErikBauer

Well spoken young Jedi

_________________
On Planet Boing Trevor is God

@hazydave

Quote:

hat happens when I need to render it. My Athlon XP 2500+ took a good 28 hours to render 45 minutes of 8000Kb/s 1080i MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile video

The issue with AMD K7 Athlon XP and video encoding is that; it doesn’t quite support 128bit (for SSE) data type i.e. the bandwidth between L1 to L2 cache is only 64bits wide. This issue was fixed with the K8.

I basically dumped my K7 (all three of them e.g. one them was 2.2Ghz AXP) for my Sony Vegas 4.0 work (this is not my day job). I think Vegas 5.0 has a cluster mode encoding (I may recycle K7s for cluster boxes). It too bad the G4 was not on an EV6 bus i.e. G4’s Altivec would have been nice.

Last edited by Hammer on 13-Jan-2006 at 10:53 AM.

_________________
Ryzen 9 7900X, DDR5-6000 64 GB RAM, GeForce RTX 4080 16 GB
Amiga 1200 (Rev 1D1, KS 3.2, PiStorm32lite/RPi 4B 4GB/Emu68)
Amiga 500 (Rev 6A, KS 3.2, PiStorm/RPi 3a/Emu68)

@ErikBauer

Quote:

Hi, I'm a bit overexcited learning that I'm going to write to the father of Amiga, (...)

Wasn't that Jay Miner? May he rest in peace.

@Dave

Glad to have you commenting here! */me goes away looking for an oblation*

_________________
This signature is in the middle of a much needed facelift!

@hazydave

Quote:

My point about the new Amiga, other than the business stuff, is really, what IS compelling? Difference just for difference sake, even if it's way slower and way more expensive than commodity hardware? If that's your answer, fine, but I really don't get it.

Never difference for difference sake - otherwise we'll end up like the Mac. The real difference for the original Amiga was the fact that it was superior in every way possible for the price-point. It was the best - period.

Now - to get back to that may well be impossible - but the road to getting back is to release the Amiga as it is now - nothing superior except the OS.

Claw our way back... Unless of course you know of someone who wants to invest a few hundred million?

_________________
Sam

@polka.

OOpps! Made my usual mistake again. I must have some mnemonic problem tied to personal names...
Well, his importance in Amiga hisory is great anyway... (Ok, glass climbing here...)

_________________
God created Paula so that Allister Brimble and Dave Whittaker could do music

Check my Amiga gameplays (ITA)!