I had no idea that Eben was helping out in the AMIGA Pi scene.
His personal experience is mentioned towards the bottom. Enjoy!

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/raspberry-pi-founder-interview,38585.html

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@SHADES

Your link is broken; try this one:

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/raspberry-pi-founder-interview,38585.html

The punctuation has been slightly altered in the following quote so the forum software doesn't choke on it.

Quote:

In fact, there are some brand new programs being written for the Amiga, and Upton is the one writing the code. "One of the challenges of running Pi is that I was an engineer once, but now mostly I've got a business to look after so I have to get my engineering kicks in my spare time," Upton told us. "Usually I get them from retro development, and the availability of retro Amiga on the Pi has been great so I've been able to do that [and] it's kind of fun."

Last edited by bison on 12-Feb-2019 at 08:08 PM.
Last edited by bison on 12-Feb-2019 at 03:39 AM.

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"Unix is supposed to fix that." -- Jay Miner

Quote:

Price is More Important than Performance The original Raspberry Pi had an MSRP of $35 when it came out in 2012, and, in 2019, the highest-end Pi, the 3B+, also goes for $35. Upton said he learned an important lesson when he showed a prototype of a more-expensive Raspberry Pi 2 to then-Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt. "I had 50 seconds with Eric Schmidt," Upton explained. "And he said, 'hey, what are you doing?' and I’m like ‘we’re going to do a more expensive Raspberry Pi 2,' and he said, 'You’re an idiot. If you’ve got a choice between making a more-capable, more-expensive product and a less-capable, cheaper product, make the less-capable, cheaper product because that’s what people actually want.’ And so I went home and cancelled all the work we had going on the Raspberry Pi 2 and went back to the drawing board."

I believe this quote is relevant to the Amiga scene as well, albeit indirectly.

Last edited by Turrican3 on 12-Feb-2019 at 10:51 AM.

Amiga Mini confirmed, perhaps
?

@Turrican3

Quote:

I believe this quote is relevant to the Amiga scene as well, albeit indirectly.

I agree. Though in our case it would be:
Price is More than Performance

Last edited by Hypex on 12-Feb-2019 at 03:04 PM.

@Hypex

That's correct I guess... :-\

Quote:

Turrican3 wrote: I believe this quote is relevant to the Amiga scene as well, albeit indirectly.

I've been saying in another thread that it is more important to compete with price than to be competitive in performance and energy efficiency for low performance CPUs. Moore's Law coming to an end and making die shrinks more and more expensive gives an opportunity to use much cheaper older underutilized fabs to undercut the competition's price where they moved to a more expensive process. A more efficient CPU and OS for low performance hardware could make the older hardware feel on par with newer more expensive hardware.

People don't want "less capable" hardware but cheap hardware attracts customers and turns heads. Value and features are probably more important for retaining customers.

Last edited by matthey on 12-Feb-2019 at 04:15 PM.

@Hypex

Quote:

Hypex wrote: @Turrican3 Quote: I believe this quote is relevant to the Amiga scene as well, albeit indirectly. I agree. Though in our case it would be: Price is More than Performance

That was Schmidt's point to Upton. He'd sell more and have deeper market penetration with sticking to the cheaper $35 price point. Which has resulted in the proliferation of the platform even in smaller cheaper sizes and larger more powerful featurefull third party Pi boards Now there is a Hat market that came out of the early addon sensor boards

Kind of like the original Amiga market Sure the computers could have been more powerful and had additional features, but the addon market made up for some of that and actually helped with the platform survival after Commodore's demise

An affordable modern motherboard with the basics is what is needed with the ability for addons to expand it's features

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@Argo

Oh! You do remember when computers were FUN.

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Tinkering with computers.

@Argo

I agree.
The most modern "Amiga like" platform is RPi, due efficiency and hw modularity, just like Amiga custom chips.
In next version, on the RPi4 there will be a powerfull cpu and more ram, so I really hope for an OS4 port on it.

..We could come back to be fun with Amiga for really few bucks!

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Pegasos II G4@1GHz 2GB Radeon 9250 256MB
AmigaOS4.1 fe - MorphOS - Debian 9 Jessie

@Fl@sh

Aros is getting ported to RPi

https://www.patreon.com/michal_schulz/

I am very excited about it

@OlafS25

If aros will get full OS4 API compatibility I’ll swap to it.
OS3 programs are ok for retro computing and I’m not interested on such things.

However I’ll get it a try next days.

_________________
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AmigaOS4.1 fe - MorphOS - Debian 9 Jessie

Quote:

Fl@sh wrote: The most modern "Amiga like" platform is RPi, due efficiency and hw modularity, just like Amiga custom chips.

"hw modularity" used to be called "hw expandability" and the Pi is really not that great in this area. I suppose the Pi is ok for the price and size though. The Pi "custom chips" are a SoC bought from and dependent on Broadcom. C= owned the Amiga custom chips and controlled their own destiny.

Quote:

In next version, on the RPi4 there will be a powerfull cpu and more ram, so I really hope for an OS4 port on it.

ARM has replaced the Cortex-A53 with the Cortex-A55 (18 percent performance improvement claimed) but the Pi Foundation is again dependent on Broadcom to make any changes to the SoC, keep it compatible or even keep it available.

Last edited by matthey on 13-Feb-2019 at 03:51 PM.

@matthey

Quote:

People don't want "less capable" hardware but cheap hardware attracts customers and turns heads.

Oh, absolutely, I've been arguing for years that the only chance for the Amiga to survive is leveraging the low end.

Which, by the way, is what made it successful even back then.
I really don't understand how it would be possible to believe otherwise especially during this time where non-Amiga hardware has been both extremely powerful AND cheaper.

Personally speaking, I'd buy a 99/149$ RaspberryPi-like Amiga with a native OS and decent applications in a heartbeat. And I'm sure this is something that could be done, even resorting to a barebone purchase option (i.e. no keyboard no mouse, like a Mac Mini) if needed.

From there it would still be difficult of course, but definitely easier to rebuild a platform compared to expensive, hi-end solutions IMHO.

Last edited by Turrican3 on 13-Feb-2019 at 09:11 AM.

@matthey
Quote:

The Cortex-A53 has been replaced by the Cortex-A55

What is your source? I assume the Pi4 will use the Cortex-A55, since it's the logical successor, but I haven't seen anything to confirm this yet.

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@Turrican3

Quote:

Personally speaking, I'd buy a 99/149$ RaspberryPi-like Amiga with a native OS and decent applications in a heartbeat.

So would I. RPi4 + 4 GB RAM + SATA + a nice case with a power switch would do it for me. I'd pay at least $200 for that.

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@Turrican3
Quote:

From there it would still be difficult of course, but definitely easier to rebuild a platform compared to expensive, hi-end solutions IMHO.

There should be room for both. I do like the idea of AmigaOS on the RPi. I would also like to see a path forward for those that would want more powerful, expandable systems.

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Tinkering with computers.

Quote:

bison wrote: What is your source? I assume the Pi4 will use the Cortex-A55, since it's the logical successor, but I haven't seen anything to confirm this yet.

ARM has replace the Cortex-A53 with the Cortex-A55. Sorry if my post sounded like the Broadcom SoC and Pi4 would receive it (edited for clarification). Yes, it is the logical successor. The performance claims and info are available at the following links.

https://developer.arm.com/products/processors/cortex-a/cortex-a55
http://www.androidauthority.com/arm-cortex-a75-cortex-a55-breakdown-770380/

Quote:

bison wrote: So would I. RPi4 + 4 GB RAM + SATA + a nice case with a power switch would do it for me. I'd pay at least $200 for that.

I can't think of a situation where my 68060 Amiga would need more than 256MiB of memory for a single program. Has modern computer bloat reached the point where entry level computers need 4 GiB of memory? Eben Upton mentioned that he is not worried about competition yet the Pi has moved to a 64 bit CPU with a barely better than average code density and footprint. Hmmm.

Last edited by matthey on 13-Feb-2019 at 04:30 PM.

Quote:

matthey wrote: I can't think of a situation where my 68060 Amiga would need more than 256MiB of memory for a single program. Has modern computer bloat reached the point where entry level computers need 4 GiB of memory? Eben Upton mentioned that he is not worried about competition yet the Pi has moved to a 64 bit CPU with a barely better than average code density and footprint. Hmmm.

That might be because your Amiga cannot run modern software?

I cannot even imagine trying to use a (modern) computer with less than 4GB, it would be too limiting.

@matthey

Quote:

ARM has replace the Cortex-A53 with the Cortex-A55. Sorry if my post sounded like the Broadcom SoC and Pi4 would receive it (edited for clarification).

Got it. I misunderstood what you said.

Quote:

Has modern computer bloat reached the point where entry level computers need 4 GiB of memory?

Web browsers have for certain. I switched from Basilisk (forked from Firefox) to Falkon (formerly Qupzilla) very recently, and the reduction in memory use is apparent and appreciated.

_________________
"Unix is supposed to fix that." -- Jay Miner