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wegster 
Re: Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors
Posted on 17-Jan-2006 23:38:25
#501 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 29-Nov-2004
Posts: 8554
From: RTP, NC USA

@umisef

Quote:
t should be noted, however, that SheepShaver is only a PPC *usermode* emulator. Most significantly, it doesn't support the PPC MMU; This would make its code a good choice to run existing PPC apps on a non-PPC OS, but it won't be any good for running any non-obsolete PPC OS on a non-PPC machine.


I didn't realize that but will be the first to admit I looked briefly, and was looking for relative performance data. Thanks for the clarification!

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TrebleSix 
Re: Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors
Posted on 17-Jan-2006 23:39:25
#502 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 6-Sep-2004
Posts: 3747
From: Pembrokeshire, Wales

@hazydave

I'm regretting posting your original quote now Dave, wasting a lot of your time, when you surely have a lot better things to do.

Btw, weird, but my partner had a shopping list on the fridge the other week, and I was suprised to see your name on it, just me i guess, as it said hair dye ( could have sworn it was your name that popped off the page when i first read it)

Anywayz, Rock on dude,

Btw, did u see Floyd on Live8? Man they kicked ass!

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Samwel 
Re: Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors
Posted on 18-Jan-2006 1:09:12
#503 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 7-Apr-2004
Posts: 3404
From: Sweden

@hazydave

Don't know if you know this but I think Hyperion's OS4 team is made of 3-4
internal programmers that does most of the OS4 stuff on their spare time.
Also 20-30 hobby programmers help to finish different parts of the OS.
These people can't be controlled as they get no pay. They work when they
feel like it or when they have time.

To my understanding they have had several problems along the way mostly
concerning money but also personal problems making the development
halt. Sometimes they even had to drop OS4 for months to earn some real
money. And yes, inexperience in doing/porting an OS certainly also had
something to do with it.

But I suppose it goes alot faster now with all their experience. So a future
port to x86 would be alot easier.


Btw thanks for all the historic comments, really interresting to read.

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T_Bone 
Re: Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors
Posted on 18-Jan-2006 1:31:01
#504 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 11-Sep-2003
Posts: 3043
From: here To: there

@Samwel

My BIG fear is that they'll start to consider an x86 port, but then they'll look at how much time they've spent so far for little pay, and just get jobs. (Or just forget about the desktop and work on embedded projects only)

Last edited by T_Bone on 18-Jan-2006 at 01:38 AM.

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Samwel 
Re: Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors
Posted on 18-Jan-2006 1:52:06
#505 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 7-Apr-2004
Posts: 3404
From: Sweden

@T_Bone

Well I don't think so.. Rogue has said a desktop system is needed for developers
and also for his own preference
Who would want to program and use a OS through a PDA???

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Seehund 
Re: Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors
Posted on 18-Jan-2006 2:12:43
#506 ]
Regular Member
Joined: 12-Jan-2006
Posts: 416
From: Dar al-Harb

@Samwel

Quote:

Samwel wrote:
@T_Bone

Who would want to program and use a OS through a PDA???


Ben Hermans? :)
Also, I remember that Garry Hare seemed to be utterly confused on what AmigaOS really is in that Q&A session.

(I presume you were talking about a "desktop" OS such as AmigaOS? I could imagine using something like PalmOS or PocketPC on a PDA... ;))

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Seehund 
Re: Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors
Posted on 18-Jan-2006 2:23:28
#507 ]
Regular Member
Joined: 12-Jan-2006
Posts: 416
From: Dar al-Harb

@hazydave

Quote:

hazydave wrote:

And I'm really not here to jump down your throat.. but I am from Jersey, we call it as we see it, and in the long run, you'll benefit from honesty more than P.C. nonesense.



Thanks for an interesting read, and thanks for actually speaking your mind here. Posting self-reassuring P.C. nonsense sometimes seems to be the preferred discourse here and elsewhere in the community! The signs of an oncoming Glasnost are becoming increasingly evident. :)

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Hammer 
Re: Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors
Posted on 18-Jan-2006 2:59:55
#508 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 9-Mar-2003
Posts: 5246
From: Australia

@umisef

Quote:
It should be noted, however, that SheepShaver is only a PPC *usermode* emulator. Most significantly, it doesn't support the PPC MMU; This would make its code a good choice to run existing PPC apps on a non-PPC OS, but it won't be any good for running any non-obsolete PPC OS on a non-PPC machine.

Well, Rosetta doesn't emulate the entire PPC machine e.g. it doesn't support any kernal level extensions.

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hazydave 
Re: Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors
Posted on 18-Jan-2006 6:25:03
#509 ]
Member
Joined: 8-Sep-2004
Posts: 65
From: Unknown

Quote:

I'm agree with you. I have bougth an A1 at 1300 Euros and is too much for a modern pc. but it is our market today. And how about a Mac at 1800 Euro? today i buy 3-4 PC at this price. but there are many users that bought it.

Here we have $500 Macs, too. They boosted the Mac's popularity a little, but it's still a tiny, tiny segment of the market. Apple has kept it interesting and financially worthwhile by taking over much of the Mac software market themselves. This gets more money from each user for Apple, and ensures such applications will contiune to exist. However, it also makes the Mac market a dangerous one for any developer -- the investment you make in building a Mac product is at risk if, at any time, Apple can come along and clobber you with their own, in that small market. I'm not sure Apple had a real choice here; I know Hyperion and Amiga, Inc. don't have similar resources.
Quote:

I like to see OS4 on a x86 platform but today we cannot do this because we haven't a company like Apple that with IPOD market can do all they want. We have only a bunch of companies that try to keep our platform alive. nothing else.

Unfortunately, a market that doesn't attract users isn't one being kept alive. We'll see... assuming the product is ever officially in general release.
Quote:

Yes. but we have used our amigas or many years. Today the GHZ growth is a fashion nothing else. What do you have in your DVD to play an high definition HD-MP4? a dual athlon x86? guess not.

The DVD player has a Sigma Designs EM8620 video processor, which plays MPEG-4/DivX, Windows Media 9, and MPEG-2 in high definition. That's the way you get such players cheap enough -- throwing general purpose computing at a relative simple display device would be overkill.
Quote:

However i'm very pleased to speak with you. hope you can become a regular user of this forum first and maybe a POWER user in the future.. how about a new motherboard??

My next motherboard will certainly be for the 64-bit Athlon... or perhaps two of them.

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hazydave 
Re: Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors
Posted on 18-Jan-2006 7:49:35
#510 ]
Member
Joined: 8-Sep-2004
Posts: 65
From: Unknown

Quote:

Quote:

Look at the current example of the X-BOX. MS's box builder used almost standard x86 PC parts for the X-BOX. Hackers broke the protection (customers) which allowed pirating of S/W and the Linux (opposing market segments) crowed bought the H/W to run Linux at MS's expense and in direct opposition to MS.


How do they run Linux "at MS's expense"?

He's technically right about that. Microsoft sold the X-Box at a substantial loss (the estimated retail, if sold for-profit, runs over $700, according to at least one detailed estimate I read, once you factor in advertising , retail markups, etc). The claim is, you have to buy at least 5 games for MS to break even (without knowing anything more about Microsoft's licensing deals, or how they got this, I'm just passing it on).

So clearly, if you buy an X-Box and just run Linux, Microsoft's footing part of the bill for you. This is, however, standard in the console market: you "give away" the razor, to sell blades. Sony makes a substantial chunk (>40%, last time I saw it accounted) of their profit selling Playstation games... and think about how many, many markets Sony's in.

Quote:

And what's any of this got to do with the totally different AmigaOS situation?

Nothing. Personal computers are a different kind of market. Unless I missed something, neither Hyperion nor Amiga, Inc. get royalties on the sales of other folks' AmigaOS programs. The Amiga-labelled computers are not being sold at a loss. The rules of gaming consoles do not apply in any way.

Quote:

Quote:

I believe MS has learned from this and that is the reason they are using the PPC in the X-BOX 360. Better protection on the M/B and better "lock in" due to the obscurity of the PPC.


I'll restrain myself, and just say that I think you might want to review the reasoning that led you to such an odd conclusion. ;)

I think it's more the obscurity of a so-far undocumented new hardware platform, rather than simply "repackaged PC" that gets Microsoft some proof against such hacks. The PowerPC itself isn't obscure enough to matter. Of course, they may just be raising the bar for the system hackers -- with the right tools, someone fill figure out the X-Box360 and put Linux on it, too. Because of the challenge, and probably becau

Quote:

Quote:

If Amiga wishes to enter the desktop market in the FUTURE it must have protection in the form of H/W "lock in", and as Apple has just stepped out of the PPC arena, this could be an uncontested market segment.


Your XBox example confused me. When you talk about "lock-in", you're really referring to the chosen CPU?

Apple will leave PPC because they and what they think is a sufficiently large part of their market believe that PPC is and will no longer be attractive and competitive, they see a better future elsewhere. I think your "uncontested" might be a euphemism for "unattractive and abandoned by the major player".

I took his "lock-in" to mean that the OS and the hardware are locked-together: you can't run the OS elsewhere, you can't run anything else on the hardware. Basically, what Jobs always wanted in the Mac market. That's certainly not something done in the user's best interest. Jobs was, in the day, worried about BeOS taking over from MacOS on the Macs. But Apple's tolerated Linux, so even they've been fickle on the idea.

As for "PPC uncontested", that's a non-sequiter, far as I can tell. No one, with the possible exception of a tiny segment of the Amiga Community's "Religious Caste" would choose a personal computer entirely based on the instruction set architecture it's running. There will be no flood of Mac users buying up Amiga-labelled computers. The only real question in the Mac market was whether going x86 would drive even more users to the PC or make the existing users more comfortable with Apple's future. Well, that and the possibility of Osborne Syndrome on the current stock of Macs.

We'll see, but I think they timed it well. With the huge surge of iPod sales in the Christmas season, Apple doesn't really suffer from the drop in Mac sales yet. If they get the x86 version out the door (which they will, since they announced it at CES, that means it's ready to ship), that'll show everyone what the real differences are, and let the market decide if they wait for new machines or simply don't worry about the CPU.

Quote:

Quote:

To those who run duel or triple boot systems, this might be good and fun for you and I, but to the companies providing OS's this is bad business and dilutes profits unless they are the company providing ALL of those Os's.


This doesn't make sense to me. A sold copy of AmigaOS is a sold copy. Whatever people do with their hardware is irrelevant. I'm not sure what you mean by "diluting profits" here?

Are you perhaps hinting at the old "running on PPC will protect us from competition" myth?

I do believe he's citing that particular myth. That logic only prevails in a world where each person is allowed only one computer. Otherwise, locking hardware and OS together in both directions simply makes both less appealing, resulting in fewer sales. Whether that's significant or not (eg, is it many fewer sales, or negligable) has lots to do with the usefulness of that locked OS and the attractiveness of the hardware.

In this case, locking the OS to the hardware pretty much guarantees that substantially fewer people will be running AmigaOS, than were the OS available on an existing hardware platform. Or even a new commodity priced hardware platform that would also run other existing OSs (eg, the tack that Apple's taken).

Quote:

Quote:

Firstly Hyperion's AmigaOS4.0 needs to make some money in OTHER markets before the desktop, then when they deem it safe and viable, enter the desktop market with a platform that provides "lock in" and protection.


What other market than the enthusiast's desktop do you think AmigaOS is suitable for? (If you say "embedded" I'll scream! ;))

"Embedded" has been the AmigaOS fallback since the days of Commodore trying to sell itself to HP, "The Chinese", and anyone else who would look. Unfortunately, most of these attempts have been by people who know next to nothing about the real embedded markets. Many of these markets are effectively closed to competition, others built around specific CPUs or OS with specific middleware available.

I'm not suggesting that Hyperion doesn't understand these issues -- I hope they do. But for any real embedded success, you'd structure your OS fundamentally differently than for a desktop. For one, there are a handful of applications that matter (those "applications" that run on the embedded device), and nothing much else does, application-wise. Your customers are likely to be your only developers: they're hosting their application(s) on your OS, possibly dealing with a middleware vendor as well. You make very little money on embedded software, per copy: think $10 or less for something like a complex set top box, think "flat fee per product" for anything much smaller than that.

And for embedded, the design starts around the CPU. The OS you run is the one that fits on that CPU. So Hyperion would have to have purely portable code, and at the very least have it running on the major architectures in the embedded world (ARM, MIPS, x86, PowerPC would be a good start). They also have to supply the kernel either with a very good HAL, or in source form, since every piece of hardware you support is going to be application-specific.

Be, Inc. screwed themselves over by entering the embedded market without really understand it. Funny thing is, several years earlier, I wanted to use BeOS on the first generation Metabox STB (which was based on an embedded x86 chip from Cyrix), and they were wholly clueless about the kind of support we would need. So we talked to IBM, and they understood completely... so we used OS/2. That, and some experience with more typical embedded OSs, led us to develop CAoS, the AmigaOS-alike OS that powered the next-generation STB.

Quote:

Quote:

Logically to be viable in ANY market the price must be {reasonably} competitive and performance adequate, but preferably market leading.


Hear, hear!
No matter how much WE love it, AmigaOS is not market leading by any stretch of the imagination, and it's probably not going to make lots of people quit using Windows/Linux/MacOS...

That's back to my point -- there's nothing about the current system that would attract a new user. I believe (and sure, this has yet to be tested) you're going to have enough trouble selling these to the few, the proud, the remaining die-hard Amiga fans. No one's leaving Windows, Linux, or MacOS for one of these new and expensive-for-what-you-get systems.
Quote:

[quote]Ignoring the "lock in" issue, if x86 was used, price might match the competition, but performance will NEVER have the POSSIBILITY of besting the competition. (Apple will have to hire a new PR team)

With PowerPC, you will never have the possibility of even close parity to the x86-based systems. This is precisely why Apple is switching. Even with all of their development money, IBM hasn't kept the PowerPC competitive. And as nice a job as they did on the PPC970, it only just caught up, and only for a moment. But it's just that one chip.

In the x86 market, you have your choice of embedded, desktop, laptop, palmtop, server, etc. CPUs... And it's not going to cost you millions of extra cash, on top of the CPU price itself, to help develop any of them. Or the system chips to go along with them. Apple was simply not big enough to compete with what's essentially the rest of the PC industry.

And really, as far as computer companies go, they had the least actual need for different platform hardware. After all, they have always sold the Mac based on cool (at least for the day) industrial design, their proprietary OS, and this whole idea of being "different". That "difference" has largely been sold as being versus Windows anyway; Apple's barely acknowledged the existence of other hardware companies.

That's worked, but increasingly, they couldn't compete on performance, and unfortunately for them, Apple's chosen niche in multimedia content creation is the one place CPU power really matters these days. Now with x86, nothing else changes in Apple's presentation to the customer: they're still "different", they're still "cool", they still run MacOS X. But also Windows, fast, if you want it (rather than turtling along in the emulators). And dramatically lower cost of development for Apple, while at the same time, not worries in keeping up with other hardware vendors on performance.

So study this well: Apple can't afford to keep the PowerPC competitve. IBM has no actual motive -- they don't even sell PCs anymore, and their Power/PowerPC hardware is in entirely different markets. In what bizarro world does anyone really imagine that anyone in the Amiga ecosystem will?

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hazydave 
Re: Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors
Posted on 18-Jan-2006 8:24:41
#511 ]
Member
Joined: 8-Sep-2004
Posts: 65
From: Unknown

@redfox

Quote:


Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors

Everyone is entitled to his opinion, but it is, after all, *just one man's opinion*. Although I agree with some of the points he made, in my opinion, it is easy to use 20/20 hindsight to see how things could have been done differently.

And that is worth reiterating -- this was only my opinion. In the Freakx interview, somewhere around a year or two ago, I was asked, and I answered. I've been saying similar things since the end of Commodore: Amiga IS the OS. Given that, I want the hardware to be as affordable and cool as possible. If that's not possible, at least make it no less so than anyone else's.

I may well have a different prespective on Amiga than some/many/most here, too. For example, in the 8-something years I worked on the Amiga, as well as developing it, I was nearly always using Amigas, and probably very leading-edge stuff, compared to what most people had. I mean, when there were just two 16MB memory boards at Commodore (late 80s), they were both my prototypes. I had '020 and '030 before most people, I had the full size "Headly Hires" monitor at work, an A2024 at home, etc. So I'm used to "Amiga" being on the leading edge of things, 'cause that's where we all tried to put it.

Obviously, if you've been using A1200s or A3000s for awhile, you're already used to being, well, nowhere near that leading edge. Not that that's a problem, if you don't see it as one. There's no question that the A-One (I'm using that generically; any "Amiga labelled" new system) will be a performance increase for you. The problem I saw, and still see, is that this is a tiny niche; not enough to justify serious OS or application development. And the fact you're still waiting for an official consumer release of AmigaOS + Anything is clear evidence of this. A well funded OS port would have taken a year or so... that was the plan at Amiga Technologies.

Quote:

As for the discussion about PPC vs X86, we have been down this road before. Amiga passed through many hands. If I remember correctly, the Gateway guys decided to go with X86. There was alot of squawking from the Amiga users about that decision.

The Collas Years, er, Year. I remeber the time well. I actually liked some of what they had to say, but had a big problem with their initial plan to run Linux and call it Amiga. In fact, I wrote a detailed article about why Linux couldn't do what Amigas did well. Ironically, much of those issues have actually been solved by the Linux community (they're not done), while 8+ years later, we still have no off-the-shelf Amiga computer.

Quote:

The present owners (Amiga, Inc./KMOS??), along with Hyperion and Eyetech decided to port Amiga OS4 to PPC rather than X86. This would allow them to support more existing PPC users.

The initial annoucement wasn't related to supporting "existing" Amiga/PPC users, since the new OS would only run on new hardware, not any of the various Amiga + PPC kludge jobs. Maybe that's changed, I don't know. At Amiga Technologies, we had no plans to support such hardware ourselves, but it should have been possible for Phase V or whoever to port our HAL to their hardware, and thus run the OS.

On the other hand, years later, there's a certain logic in not supporting any of that old hardware. For one, no souped-up Amigas are going to meet modern standards of performance, memory capacity, etc. Do you really want to set the bar on new applications that low? None of those older systems were particularly great PowerPC machines anyway -- living with the need to interface to the Amiga's local bus (68K or '020/'030) itself compromised performance.

And the usual marketing question: can I win trying to support a group of users with a history of not spending money? As a platform vendor, you want to sell the OS and the hardware as a unit, and that would mean specifically not supporting old hardware. As an OS vendor, you want as many possible folks running your OS, which is the only way to get applications support. These two are generally at odds... one of the big problem's Apple's had is not always knowing which of these they were.

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hazydave 
Re: Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors
Posted on 18-Jan-2006 8:32:39
#512 ]
Member
Joined: 8-Sep-2004
Posts: 65
From: Unknown

@tomazkid

Quote:
The rest of the board isn't too bad, really.


Agree, I'd like to add one more thing on the "improvement list" though:

An ability to handle any kind of PC-133 memory-dimms, in pairs.
[/quote]

PC-133?!? That's a memory module not terribly long for this world. I was supporting 64-bit single data rate SDRAM back in the late 80s on the Metabox stuff. Still available, but the prices are on the rise, as no new systems use these modules. Even DDR is being replaced, slowly, with DDR2 (which, along with speed improvements, eases power requirements).

I know there's probably not much choice in the PPC world today; most of the chips only talk to SDR memory systems directly (last I checked, some of the Freescale embedded chips could do DDR). But it's something to certainly be aware of.

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olegil 
Re: Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors
Posted on 18-Jan-2006 8:44:48
#513 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 22-Aug-2003
Posts: 5895
From: Work

@hazydave

Quote:

hazydave wrote:
Quote:

How do they run Linux "at MS's expense"?

He's technically right about that. Microsoft sold the X-Box at a substantial loss (the estimated retail, if sold for-profit, runs over $700, according to at least one detailed estimate I read, once you factor in advertising , retail markups, etc). The claim is, you have to buy at least 5 games for MS to break even (without knowing anything more about Microsoft's licensing deals, or how they got this, I'm just passing it on).

So clearly, if you buy an X-Box and just run Linux, Microsoft's footing part of the bill for you. This is, however, standard in the console market: you "give away" the razor, to sell blades. Sony makes a substantial chunk (>40%, last time I saw it accounted) of their profit selling Playstation games... and think about how many, many markets Sony's in.



This has been refuted by Sony, who claim to actually not loost ANY money on the hardware sales.

And for Microsoft, it's even worse. The "Home and entertainment" segment of Microsoft Corporation had an operating loss of 1191 million in 2003, 1220 million in 2004, "only" 391 million in 2005.

"Home and entertainment" means "Xbox, Learning and Productivity, PC Games, Office Mac, Hardware", but Xbox and PC Games are pretty big in that category...

Last edited by olegil on 18-Jan-2006 at 08:46 AM.
Last edited by olegil on 18-Jan-2006 at 08:45 AM.

_________________
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Using "voltage" instead of "potential", which leads to inventing new words like "amperage" instead of "current" (I, measured in A) or possible "charge" (amperehours, Ah or Coulomb, C). Sometimes I don't even know what people mean.

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COBRA 
Re: Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors
Posted on 18-Jan-2006 8:48:00
#514 ]
Super Member
Joined: 26-Apr-2004
Posts: 1809
From: Auckland, New Zealand

@Colin_Camper

Quote:
PPC died as a usable, high performance, general purpose desktop platform the moment Apple switched. If you can't accept this then you can delude yourself!


The whole range of PPC processors is general purpose, just because apple switched architectures, there still are and will be PPC chips suitable for desktop. High performance is not only required in desktop, but also in servers and workstations (even more than for the desktop!). Altivec/VMX is important for desktop as well to improve multimedia performance, in fact multimedia performance is the most important thing now on desktop. Altivec/VMX is also important for embedded (digital signal processing, etc.) which is a considerable market for PPC and also important for the game consoles which is also going to be a huge market for IBM in the coming years. Apple were an insignificant part of IBM/Freescale's market and their switch won't change much, they'll keep producing PPC chips suitable for desktop. If you can't accept this then you can delude yourself

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hazydave 
Re: Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors
Posted on 18-Jan-2006 9:12:47
#515 ]
Member
Joined: 8-Sep-2004
Posts: 65
From: Unknown

Quote:

BigBentheAussie wrote:
@ppc4me

Quote:
XBox360 triple core CPU AltiVec monster is said to be less than $150.


Why is the chip in the XBox360 even mentioned as an OS4 candidate?
It's owned by MS and it's highly unlikely that anyone on the outside could buy one.

Well, I think the "how about all those game boxes" was in response to the observation (not initially mine, but I agree) that the exit of Apple puts the last nail in the coffin of desktop-class PowerPC.

These various chips do illustrate that IBM's happy to take your money, just as they took Apple's, and spin out a nice new chip. But don't get confused -- these are cool processors, fast I'm sure, but also much simpler than desktop class CPUs, like the PPC970. Which is, for one, why you can put them inside a livingroom-destined console and not have to worry about plastic melting, or the room temperature rising noticably.

My addition to the question: these may well be the best you're going to get, and hey, they are interesting CPUs. You certainly don't need a full blown Athlon64 or Pentium-whatever to run Web browsers, email, Office Automation, etc. For specific multimedia jobs, the sometimes-specialize SMP inherent in this kind of CPU may deliver better-than-PC performance. At least for a little while: PCs are a moving target. CPUs for consoles, on the other hand, will not change for the next 3-5 years, depending on how aggressive they all are on the next generation.

Quote:

And MS are hardly going to let you put OS4 on their XBox360 when they can have some cut down version of Windows(like CE) on there.

And of course, that's the real issue. IBM does these custom processors for their clients, using their clients' NRE charges for the initial development. They are not allowed to sell them on the merchant semiconductor market, unless the company involved specifically wants that to happen.

As for AmigaOS running on an X-Box or whatever, sure, it might be possible. It won't be so easy this time around; Microsoft really hated all the hacking of the original X-Box. This new one's certain to be more difficult. As well, it would be some serious work to get AmigaOS working on a multithreaded SMP system like the X-Box.

Sony's approach would be more like the A3000+: regular code runs on one CPU, the other processing units work via some additional subsystem, like the DSP3210 did in the A3000+ (well, the two units I hacked into working, anyway, as Porter and I struggled to keep the project alive in the face of morons being put into Engineering Management positions). Sony's is potentially faster for some multimedia work; X-Box would scale based on normal OS threads, but this would require a real SMP version of AmigaOS. Both would take substantial new OS architecture and implementation work to get off the ground.. assuming the new AmigaOS isn't already SMP-friendly.

Quote:

In fact, why is there all this discussion about PPC in next gen consoles affecting the general PPC market beneficially for OS4? It's not like any of these chips, apart from Sony's, is going to be purchasable by any other company.

Same reason, I guess, that someone else pointed to one of Freescale's SoC or Network processors and said "see, PPC's not dead" or some-such. The issue isn't PPC being dead; IBM's whole merchant semiconductor business began with those little "replace your 68K" PPC chips. PPC is Freescale's flagship. But neither of these companies sells a desktop chip. Freescale's using ARM for PDA-level, since ARM basically won the PDA contest (I haven't looked lately to see if they're actually being competitive, or if TI and Intel have essentially won this segment).

Quote:

Sony/IBM are the only ones going to let companies buy and use Cell chips, and that's the only one we could possibly get our hands on. It's cell or bust methinks.

At the right price, Cell would be pretty cool. It's a nearly perfect processor to put into an advanced set-top box: cheaper (in theory) and cooler (also in theory) than an x86, more power, potentially eliminating any need for video acceleration chips (eg, if I can do H.264 HD in something reprogrammable, no need to buy a dedicated decoder; the power I'm paying for can be used for other purposes when not playing back next-gen video, and there's the ability to issue software upgrades, as new audio/video formats come along).

For a PC, it's a question: you're always in competition with Windows/PC, simply because everyone knows The PC. For a "personal computing device", you'd have to come up with something that's interestingly different than a PC. For example, put AmigaOS, Cell, a DVD drive, and a fast network interface in a DVD/CDTV style box, and if you support the various multimedia stuff popular in today's advanced networked DVD players, you might also effectively sneak that Amiga personal computer functionality along with it. This is a very large niche that Microsoft's been gunning for, from above with their MediaPC idea, from below with the X-Box. Sony, too, puts the PS3 right there, designed as well to advance the new Blu-Ray format.

But that's a big, big project (for Amiga-industry). You would need 30-something people, and a year or more. And in the end, you wind up in competition with the PS3 and X-Box, unless you're careful.

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hazydave 
Re: Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors
Posted on 18-Jan-2006 9:28:19
#516 ]
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Joined: 8-Sep-2004
Posts: 65
From: Unknown

Quote:

ppc4me wrote:
@hazydave

>Even as an Engineer, it took me awhile to really accept that x86 was the only remaining architecture that made sense

So...in your opinion IA64 will go away?

AMD's been doing a fine job of killing it. Intel's even helping, in that it's pretty difficult to keep up with AMD on one hand, and yet not cannibalize from IA64 on the other.

Part of the problem is that, while Intel spent like crazy on IA64, finally getting it decent. Though last I checked, Integer performance was still lackluster compared to modern x86, and of course, with real x86 at 64-bit today, some of the non-CPU-speed issues of the IA64, like large address space, is well served in true commodity hardware.

Intel's sticking with the archaic shared bus architecture, on IA32 and IA64, is also certainly part of the problem. Particularly in SMP systems, even if the IA64 FPUs are fast enough, you just can't keep them fed off that congested single bus. AMD, meanwhile, did it right, even if that meant abandoning pure SMP for NUMA. And yet, that's the architecture that Cray wanted, and as well, perfect for the kind of huge, loosely coupled showcase machines Intel's been making all these years.

Now, will IA64 vanish entirely? That's up to Intel; they're rich enough to keep it going, even if it keeps losing money. The real question is, can Intel ever make it profitable, and then, sustainably profitable. To do that, they need a pretty big market for the chip, or they'll have the same problems that IBM, Sun, and HP have had with proprietary, high-end-only chip architectures. Or, worse yet, SGI.

Intel's already behind; they are supposed to go to an AMD-like link architecture for both IA32 and IA64, which would be very wise, eliminating the duplication of effort on system chips, for one, and meeting AMD head to head. However, that's now "2007" (eg, not soon) on their roadmap. AMD will be hitting the road with Coherent Hypertransport in 2006, in all likelihood, and they'll be pushing to license that far and wide in the server and networking world.

I can't count IA64 out: Intel's currently taking home something like 40% of all of the profits made in the semiconductor industry. They can keep IA64 going as long as they like, no problem. The only question is, how deep does that rabbit hole go before they decide to stop digging.

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hazydave 
Re: Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors
Posted on 18-Jan-2006 9:43:38
#517 ]
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Joined: 8-Sep-2004
Posts: 65
From: Unknown

@Colin_Camper

Quote:

Colin_Camper wrote:
@hazydave
First; It has got to be a tribute to your work that there is currently a ten year old A4000T on Ebay threatening to sell for £1000! It's amazing how much A1200s and A600s sell for - not just to 'crazys' like us but to ordinary people who remember the glory days of the Amiga.

Well, we tried to make them good systems, as much as C= allowed. Pretty early on, on the Amiga, I was convinced that Commodore would NEVER allow us to match the pace of companies like IBM and Apple (well, they were the target back there in the mid-to-late 80s). So I wanted platforms to build on -- your main system should last you 5+ years (eg, ttwo PC-world generations), while you build on it with add-ons. The plans for beyond the A4000 did this even better -- I expected to switch from 68K to RISC and from AA to AAA to Hombre during the lifetime of that architecture.

So in a sense, these were built to last, not disposable as some PCs clearly are. Though I didn't expect an A3000 to still be a high-end Amiga 15 years later (April 24th will be the 15-year anniversary of the A3000 introduction).

Quote:

Second; (Sorry it's just as OT as the First) Have you checked out Dennis from the Hollands' minimig over on Amiga.org. Basically this guy has in one year, learned verilog, studied the commodore books and UAE/Fellow and has produced a working OCS A500 (+scandoubler) on a XILINX FPGA (Sans 68K!).

Whoa! No, I didn't know abotu this. He's the Jeri Ellsworth of the Amiga, eh? Sounds very cool, I will check it out. Just did... this is great. No question the state of FPGAs is up to this kind of stuff: rapid development way beyond what was possible back in the day.

Curiously, in 1992 or thereabouts, they did the 8520 in an FPGA, in preparation for integrating into the CDTV gate array. This was a very expensive (over $100) FPGA in a "tower" board that plugged in place of the CIA itself. So that's a measure of how far this has come: the whole chipset in a $30 (single quantity) part.

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hazydave 
Re: Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors
Posted on 18-Jan-2006 9:51:36
#518 ]
Member
Joined: 8-Sep-2004
Posts: 65
From: Unknown

@TrebleSix

Quote:

Btw, did u see Floyd on Live8? Man they kicked ass!


No, I didn't! Well, I've seen clips. I was AT the Philly show -- I actually made it to where I could see the stage (well, particularly well through a Canon 300mm IS lens). Based on the layout of the Ben Franklin Parkway, the Art Museum, and the momument, I'd estimate 95%+ of the nearly 1,000,000 who showed up couldn't see the stage. But I did get some good photos: Dave Matthews, Linkin Park, Stevie Wonder, and others.

They were supposed to televise the Floyd segment over the monitors, but didn't. We did get a bit of Green Day from Berlin, another one I would have liked to see. I'm pretty sure the Philly show was running late almost from the get-go; Alica Keys only played one song, then had to be wisked off, presumably to a prior engagement. I think it ended an hour or two after schedule. A fun time, but the UK definitely got the best show.

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MrX 
Re: Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors
Posted on 18-Jan-2006 9:56:12
#519 ]
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Joined: 1-Jun-2004
Posts: 8
From: Unknown

@hazydave

Hey dave, if Hyperion asked you to do a port of AOS4 from PPC to X86 today, would you help them out ? (and at what cost ?)





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hazydave 
Re: Dave Haynie (lead engineer of C= Amiga) opinion on Amiga Successors
Posted on 18-Jan-2006 10:03:12
#520 ]
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Joined: 8-Sep-2004
Posts: 65
From: Unknown

Quote:

Quote:

Haynie sez:
So clearly, if you buy an X-Box and just run Linux, Microsoft's footing part of the bill for you. This is, however, standard in the console market: you "give away" the razor, to sell blades. Sony makes a substantial chunk (>40%, last time I saw it accounted) of their profit selling Playstation games... and think about how many, many markets Sony's in.


This has been refuted by Sony, who claim to actually not loost ANY money on the hardware sales.

Well, you're not supposed to lose money forever, only at the beginning. Microsoft had the most expensive box, too, with the hard drive and all.

Sony's also got to show, on paper anyway, they're not losing money, since if they are, a US competitor... oh, say, Microsoft, might call in the Customs Office on them, accusing them of "dumping". It certainly worked when Micron went after the foreign DRAM manufacturers for selling below cost.

This is not that difficult to do: you can offset per unit costs with huge NREs, particularly if you buy chips from someone else. And the usual bit of creative bookkeeping, that kind of thing. But really, no one's making money on console hardware (add-ons, you betcha, just not the box), at least not when the system is new. They have to sell as cheap as possible, and in most cases, it would actually be worth it to just give them away, they stand to make so much on game sales over time (or lose so much, if the competitor wins the marketplace). Gaming is big business: it brings in more money than the movie industry.

Quote:

And for Microsoft, it's even worse. The "Home and entertainment" segment of Microsoft Corporation had an operating loss of 1191 million in 2003, 1220 million in 2004, "only" 391 million in 2005.

Well, there you go... the X-Box is losing money on every unit. A billion dollars in loss would have some companies questioning their business model. They probably lose less each year, though -- MS had enough volume to get Commodore pricing on components, possibly better (if there is a "10,000,000" unit tier). Of course, they have to cut the price on a regular basis, too, to keep up with Sony and Nintendo.

And of course, they're making money on game sales, more every year. Weird to see "Mac Office" in that group.. do you run Word on the Mac with a joypad or something? I guess anything beats a one-button mouse

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