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      /  What is XMOS on the X1000 good for?
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vidarh 
Re: What is XMOS on the X1000 good for?
Posted on 25-Feb-2010 14:21:40
#101 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 4-Jan-2010
Posts: 580
From: London, UK (ex-pat; originally from Norway)

@koft

Quote:
What?! The tools won't run on AOS4. The best you're going to get on AOS4 is the c compiler (which by the way won't support any of the threading, so you'll be limited to one thread) and xgdb on the console for debugging. The XC language compiler which makes or breaks using this chip in projects is proprietary and not open sourced. If you want to actually make use of this thing, you're going to have to run the tools on an intel machine running Windows, Linux or OS X.


The instruction set is well documented (yes, I've read the manuals) - writing a small runtime support lib to do all that you can achieve with xc would/will be fairly trivial if XMOS isn't forthcoming with the XC compiler. XC is just thin veneer around C, with some extra syntax for port IO and to start threads - nothing you can't achieve (in terms of functionality) with a handful of lines of assembly in a link lib.

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koft 
Re: What is XMOS on the X1000 good for?
Posted on 25-Feb-2010 14:33:35
#102 ]
Regular Member
Joined: 15-Mar-2007
Posts: 493
From: USA, TN, Memphis

@Mechanic

Quote:

Mechanic wrote:
@koft

Quote:

koft wrote:

What?! The tools won't run on AOS4. The best you're going to get on AOS4


Wow! I didn't know that. Wait-a-minute..........You're one of those 'inside' people
aren't you?


http://xcore.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=246

Quote:

The C compiler is currently open source the XC compiler is unfortunately not. Once there is any change to this the community will certainly be informed but there is currently no fixed date for an open source XC compiler.


user '___' who wrote that is an engineer at XMOS. User jonathan was an employee at XMOS, he left the company some time this year.

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ChrisH 
Re: What is XMOS on the X1000 good for?
Posted on 25-Feb-2010 14:36:55
#103 ]
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Joined: 30-Jan-2005
Posts: 6679
From: Unknown

@koft
Any why would Hyperion *require* the XC compiler to be open source? Ever heard of an NDA? (And that's without mentioning vidarh's post above.)

Last edited by ChrisH on 25-Feb-2010 at 02:37 PM.

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koft 
Re: What is XMOS on the X1000 good for?
Posted on 25-Feb-2010 14:40:14
#104 ]
Regular Member
Joined: 15-Mar-2007
Posts: 493
From: USA, TN, Memphis

@vidarh

Quote:

vidarh wrote:
@koft

Quote:
What?! The tools won't run on AOS4. The best you're going to get on AOS4 is the c compiler (which by the way won't support any of the threading, so you'll be limited to one thread) and xgdb on the console for debugging. The XC language compiler which makes or breaks using this chip in projects is proprietary and not open sourced. If you want to actually make use of this thing, you're going to have to run the tools on an intel machine running Windows, Linux or OS X.


The instruction set is well documented (yes, I've read the manuals) - writing a small runtime support lib to do all that you can achieve with xc would/will be fairly trivial if XMOS isn't forthcoming with the XC compiler. XC is just thin veneer around C, with some extra syntax for port IO and to start threads - nothing you can't achieve (in terms of functionality) with a handful of lines of assembly in a link lib.


Sure, everything is pie conceptually but it's a crap ton of work to properly design and support a set of libraries for such a thing and nobody is going to do it for free just to support perhaps 300 users, only a dozen or so would even bother to peek at it. Any sane person would just use the tools on a supported platform.

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koft 
Re: What is XMOS on the X1000 good for?
Posted on 25-Feb-2010 14:54:48
#105 ]
Regular Member
Joined: 15-Mar-2007
Posts: 493
From: USA, TN, Memphis

@ChrisH

Quote:

ChrisH wrote:
@koft
Any why would Hyperion *require* the XC compiler to be open source? Ever heard of an NDA? (And that's without mentioning vidarh's post above.)


Yea, but the fact is, the guys at XMOS didn't hear about A-Eon until after everybody in the Amiga community did. The folks at XMOS don't know who the hell the guys are at A-Eon. There is no business relationship there. One of the marketing guys at XMOS has been scouring around trying to find out who they are, his name is Jason.

Do you really think A-Eon or Hyperion have the money to pay XMOS to port tools? Do you really think either one of those companies have the time to do the porting themselves if by some hypothetical and unlikely event they actually forged an agreement to XMOS's work in progress XC compiler? Hyperion can't even fix minor issues in their own software.

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Mechanic 
Re: What is XMOS on the X1000 good for?
Posted on 25-Feb-2010 14:55:33
#106 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 27-Jul-2003
Posts: 2007
From: Unknown

@koft
Quote:

user '___' who wrote that is an engineer at XMOS. User jonathan was an employee at XMOS, he left the company some time this year.


And further down in the same forum link you supplied jonathan stated...
Quote:

We are currently investigating the best way to provide an full open source tool chain, LLVM for XC is part of that investigation but as I said we do not currently have a date for availability of this as it is still at an early stage.


koft said
Quote:

Any sane person would just use the tools on a supported platform.


So 'will' the X1000 be a supported platform?

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vidarh 
Re: What is XMOS on the X1000 good for?
Posted on 25-Feb-2010 15:07:16
#107 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 4-Jan-2010
Posts: 580
From: London, UK (ex-pat; originally from Norway)

@koft

Quote:
Sure, everything is pie conceptually but it's a crap ton of work to properly design and support a set of libraries for such a thing


Nonsense. The API for the ports accesses is already defacto defined by the XC constructs - creating a decent API for C for it is mostly just a matter of defining a simple mapping to a set of function calls to a small asm library. Judging from the asm manual and the XC examples, the majority of the functionality can be had in a few hundred lines of asm at most.

Port io, for example, is in many cases a single asm instruction (there's a handful of instruction dedicated to IO). Hardly very hard to wrap in a C function (or macro w/inline asm)

Quote:
and nobody is going to do it for free just to support perhaps 300 users, only a dozen or so would even bother to peek at it. Any sane person would just use the tools on a supported platform.


I'll happily do it when I get hold of an X1000 - it'd be a fun weekend project, because I want to play with it myself.

We could all just switch to Windows and not have to deal with pesky unsupported stuff, but where would the fun be in that?

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Mechanic 
Re: What is XMOS on the X1000 good for?
Posted on 25-Feb-2010 15:17:11
#108 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 27-Jul-2003
Posts: 2007
From: Unknown

@koft

Quote:

vidarh wrote:

Nonsense. The API for the ports accesses is already defacto defined by the XC constructs - creating a decent API for C for it is mostly just a matter of defining a simple mapping to a set of function calls to a small asm library. Judging from the asm manual and the XC examples, the majority of the functionality can be had in a few hundred lines of asm at most.


I'll happily do it when I get hold of an X1000 - it'd be a fun weekend project, because I want to play with it myself.


See, it's a party

P.S.
Quote:

vidarh wrote:
because I want to play with it myself.


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koft 
Re: What is XMOS on the X1000 good for?
Posted on 25-Feb-2010 15:17:22
#109 ]
Regular Member
Joined: 15-Mar-2007
Posts: 493
From: USA, TN, Memphis

@vidarh

Quote:

vidarh wrote:
@koft

Quote:
Sure, everything is pie conceptually but it's a crap ton of work to properly design and support a set of libraries for such a thing


Nonsense. The API for the ports accesses is already defacto defined by the XC constructs - creating a decent API for C for it is mostly just a matter of defining a simple mapping to a set of function calls to a small asm library. Judging from the asm manual and the XC examples, the majority of the functionality can be had in a few hundred lines of asm at most.

Port io, for example, is in many cases a single asm instruction (there's a handful of instruction dedicated to IO). Hardly very hard to wrap in a C function (or macro w/inline asm)


I didn't say you couldn't access the ports. I said you won't be able to use more than one THREAD. And there are no libs for access the timers or Xlinks and some other crap. In a project you can mix C/C++/and XC but the only way to run c/c++ code on other threads is to launch them from code compiled in XC.

Quote:

Quote:
and nobody is going to do it for free just to support perhaps 300 users, only a dozen or so would even bother to peek at it. Any sane person would just use the tools on a supported platform.


I'll happily do it when I get hold of an X1000 - it'd be a fun weekend project, because I want to play with it myself.

We could all just switch to Windows and not have to deal with pesky unsupported stuff, but where would the fun be in that?


No you wont, because it will take months to do all that work. You obviously don't know jack about this architecture or the tools. I've been using them for months.

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Mechanic 
Re: What is XMOS on the X1000 good for?
Posted on 25-Feb-2010 15:32:46
#110 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 27-Jul-2003
Posts: 2007
From: Unknown

@koft

Quote:

koft wrote:
No you wont, because it will take months to do all that work. You obviously don't know jack about this architecture or the tools. I've been using them for months.


Give us a helping hand.

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vidarh 
Re: What is XMOS on the X1000 good for?
Posted on 25-Feb-2010 15:52:48
#111 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 4-Jan-2010
Posts: 580
From: London, UK (ex-pat; originally from Norway)

@koft

Quote:
didn't say you couldn't access the ports. I said you won't be able to use more than one THREAD.


Yes, you are. This is roughly the ASM sequence required to start a thread

GETR THREAD get thread id
TINITPC s, t set thread pc
TINITSP s, t set thread stack
TINITDP s, t set thread data
TINITCP s, t set thread pool
TINITLR s, t set thread link
TSTART t start the thread

Was that so hard? Do you really think it's hard to wrap that up in a function to spawn new threads?

Quote:

And there are no libs for access the timers or Xlinks and some other crap.


So what? The point is that *writing* such libraries based on the published documentation is easy.

Quote:
In a project you can mix C/C++/and XC but the only way to run c/c++ code on other threads is to launch them from code compiled in XC.


See above.

Quote:
No you wont, because it will take months to do all that work. You obviously don't know jack about this architecture or the tools. I've been using them for months.


Maybe you should actually read the architecture manuals before you start making claims like that. The architecture manuals have short asm examples for most of the low level operations. The rest are easily composable from what is covered. The XC API docs are available, and all of the functions provided by them are easy to implement given the asm examples in the architecture manuals - most of them are just wrapping a handful of asm instructions. The rest (the syntax additions of XC) likewise.

Last edited by vidarh on 25-Feb-2010 at 03:53 PM.

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Zylesea 
Re: What is XMOS on the X1000 good for?
Posted on 25-Feb-2010 15:54:53
#112 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 16-Mar-2004
Posts: 2263
From: Ostwestfalen, FRG

@ChrisH

Quote:

ChrisH wrote:
@Zylesea

In short, the actual figure could easily be 1-2 thousand actual OWB users.

Given that OWB is a 'must have app' your guess is supporting my estimate pretty good.
Unfortunately we don't have precise numbers of how many OS4 capable maschines were produced yet. But the max number of the OS4 community is in the *very* low thousands and I highly doubt OS 4.1 was sold more than 2000 times.
That's not pessimistic, that's realistic.
And with expensive boards with no special benefit it is pretty much unlikely that the user base will significantly grow. I'd like to be proven wrong though.

Last edited by Zylesea on 25-Feb-2010 at 04:19 PM.

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KimmoK 
Re: What is XMOS on the X1000 good for?
Posted on 25-Feb-2010 16:11:12
#113 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 14-Mar-2003
Posts: 5211
From: Ylikiiminki, Finland

@Britelite

Do you mean subscribers+buyers?

At my workplace we have one magazine circulating amongs 50 people. (there must be a few more similar circulations on this site + more on a few othe R&Dr sites of the country) Then it ends up on the company cofeetable. Some of the rest of the 1500 people (of this house) will read it as well (and same goes on allover the our sites).

Sure, 100 000 might be over estimation, but if 9000 is the amount of subscribers, then theres ~ 10x more readers.
(the magazine is also available on every public library of this 6000000 people country)

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vidarh 
Re: What is XMOS on the X1000 good for?
Posted on 25-Feb-2010 16:18:03
#114 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 4-Jan-2010
Posts: 580
From: London, UK (ex-pat; originally from Norway)

@Zylesea

Quote:
But the max number of the OS4 community is in the *very* low thousands and I highly doubt OS 4.1 was sold more than 2000 times.


That's still 10 times higher than the lowest number mentioned earlier in this thread... When I first started pointing out the "bad math" in assuming Hyperion could possibly justify staying afloat, I was reacting to someone claiming it was in the low 3 digits, possibly as little as 100-200, which I'd consider crazy.

Quote:
And with expensive boards with no special benefit it is pretty much unlikely that the user base will significantly grow. I'd like to be proven wrong though.


I agree with you somewhat in that I don't think it'll add a *lot* of new users. But take me for example. I don't currently own any Amiga HW, ignoring the Minimig I'm waiting for delivery of. My last Amiga was a 3000, back in '98. I got interested again because of the X1000. I've known about the SAM - I've been lurking occasionally, but it didn't really interest me. Why? Because it seems too slow (yeah, I know, it's massively faster than my last Amiga, but my standards in terms of performance have increased a bit since then :) )

I don't expect the X1000 to be a speed daemon - it'll likely be slower than my cheap/crappy Acer laptop -, but I expect it to be *fast enough* as a third machine (I have a beast of a Linux server in a case the size of a small fridge sitting in a corner). It'll be my "fun machine". I can always fall back to my Linux laptop or server if I need raw power.

I don't think I'm the only person in this category: Ex-Amiga users that love the Amiga, and are prepared to pay to get their drug again, and for whom the X1000 is finally pushing an Amiga "heir" to sufficient performance to be something they're confident they can enjoy using again. And users that likely have another (fast) machine already, so this is a luxury purchase, not a necessity.

Users like me won't add a huge number of new users, but it'll hopefully add some (at least one ). Hopefully some of them/us will be more developers, and I think there's a chance of that. Certainly to me, what I see it as is a fun machine to program for and tinker with. I already have a bunch of notes for ideas I want to play with.

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Britelite 
Re: What is XMOS on the X1000 good for?
Posted on 25-Feb-2010 16:48:46
#115 ]
Regular Member
Joined: 23-Jun-2005
Posts: 295
From: Finland

@KimmoK

Quote:
Sure, 100 000 might be over estimation, but if 9000 is the amount of subscribers, then theres ~ 10x more readers.


Let's just put it this way, you'll have a hard time finding 100000 geeks in Finland, let alone people who read that magazine. ;)

The 9000 number comes from the amount of readers (levikki in Finnish) that the publisher itself gives out. So of course there might be more actual readers, but nowhere near the amount of 100000.

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ferrels 
Re: What is XMOS on the X1000 good for?
Posted on 25-Feb-2010 19:48:32
#116 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 20-Oct-2005
Posts: 922
From: Arizona

@QuikSanz

I'm not trying to sway you. I hope the X1000 turns out to be everything you and others hope for. I'm just so cynical after all the years of disappointments in the Amiga community.

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TheDaddy 
Re: What is XMOS on the X1000 good for?
Posted on 25-Feb-2010 19:50:22
#117 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 30-Sep-2005
Posts: 4499
From: Quattro Stelle

A bit off topic but...

is the XMOS chip an off the shelf part?

If so how much does it cost?

And can't it be put on a PCI card for the SAM?



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ferrels 
Re: What is XMOS on the X1000 good for?
Posted on 25-Feb-2010 19:53:39
#118 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 20-Oct-2005
Posts: 922
From: Arizona

@NutsAboutAmiga

That's a good point. I'm not here for bleeding edge technology. I go to other forums for that. I'm here because I want a system like Natami or Replay that will let me continue to run my old classic software without emulation. WinUAE and it's variants are great, but nothing beats running my classic software on REAL hardware. My A1200 won't last forever and I never upgraded it past a 68030 and 16MB RAM. The Natami and Replay boards add built-in ff/sd, SuperAGA, huge amounts of RAM and faster processing. These are things that will never happen for my trusty A1200.

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ferrels 
Re: What is XMOS on the X1000 good for?
Posted on 25-Feb-2010 19:55:45
#119 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 20-Oct-2005
Posts: 922
From: Arizona

@NutsAboutAmiga

That's true if your USB ports work to begin with. My USB 2.0 ports on my PegII don't work properly with OS4, but they work great with MorphOS and Linux. There's nothing worse than having to move several gigabytes of data across a USB port that's stuck in USB 1.0 mode.

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ferrels 
Re: What is XMOS on the X1000 good for?
Posted on 25-Feb-2010 19:59:18
#120 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 20-Oct-2005
Posts: 922
From: Arizona

@ChrisH

If all of our posts were in agreement on every issue, what would be the point of even having a forum?

I never said that anyone had to agree with me or even like what I had to say. But alternative points of view are what makes dialog worthwhile.

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