@ppcamiga1

ppc on desktop is of course dead, And people who want to buy a new hardware of course compare the package (hardware/OS/available software) and there your beloved NG looks poor and overprized. People will always buy a PC or Mac then. The 68k platform is something different, it covers different needs and interests and nobody would seriously try to use it as main system. It is for nostalgy and the idea "what could have been". It is not important than that it is only at the level of PC at late 90s. For old software the new hardware is more than enough and it is even powerful enough for some nice ports of PC games. It is of course not powerful enough for newest games but those will not be ported to amiga anyway.

Last edited by OlafS25 on 28-Apr-2022 at 08:53 AM.

@agami

I do not know what you calculated and how you calculated but to establish a new mainstream platform a modern base (OS and hardware) is only the beginning. You must invest lots of money in attractive new software and games and software developer support. You also have to do a lot of marketing. 10M $ is not much. For example IBM invested about 1 billion $ in OS/2 to establish it as competition to Windows and failed despite being a known company and having the better OS. Microsoft lately failed with establishing a competition on smartphones.

Last edited by OlafS25 on 28-Apr-2022 at 10:00 AM.

@ppcamiga1

PPC is dead. As a doornail. No amount of insistence to the contrary because of emotional investment changes this. I like PPC too, bur it changes nothing. And unlike 68K, it's a ball ache to emulate well on modern mainstream hardware that isn't dead as a doornail.

If you can accept that a bunch of commodity PC hardware installed on some exotic, expensive PPC board that has zero legacy hardware is an Amiga because of the lineage of it's OS, then you have no sensible reason to suggest that a solution like Amithlon running 3.x is any different.

It has taken me time to accept this simple fact: The Amiga and 68K are inseparably linked. It's the core DNA. PPC NG operating systems are fine, AROS is fine. FPGA and ARM based accelerators are fine. The one thing that every offshoot has in common isn't the legacy Amiga custom hardware, or even the OS they run. It's their ability to run "system friendly" 68K binaries.

An improved 68K ecosystem, with some standardisation towards JIT and AOT recompilation would benefit everyone: software that could run as is on hardware 68K or at near native speed on PPC, x64, ARM. Add some standardisation of software interfaces for interoperability between 3.x, 4.x, MorphOS, AROS and you have a baseline platform that is viable. It doesn't prevent people wanting to write exclusive things for their platform of choice but would allow people to develop stuff for everyone without maintaining N different versions of it.

68K may be the past, but it could just as easily be the future as a CLR platform.

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Doing stupid things for fun...

@Karlos

Most likely THE Amiga Mini/Maxi machines are the last hurrah in the mainstream. The Apollo accelerator: IceDrake has had minimal fanfare and the Tabor is MIA. Small batch retro hobbies boards for classic machines and OS3.x updates seem the way things are going.

Has the Apollo Vampire V4 SA been a success sales-wise? Unamiga and Mister seem interesting for people who catch the bug from THE A500 Mini and want to take things further.

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"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@ppcamiga1

Amiga like solutions on ppc compete with linux, mac os x, other BSDs,
It should be as good as linux, mac os x, or BSDs.

Ironically… you know who “owns” PowerPC today?
It’s not anything Amiga related.

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B5D6A1D019D5D45BCC56F4782AC220D8B3E2A6CC

The Apollo products have become what they were supposed to be the solution to - expensive, obscure and unobtainable. Though I doubt they will ever sell for whacko prices on ebay…

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B5D6A1D019D5D45BCC56F4782AC220D8B3E2A6CC

@BigD

The fact that "new" 68K stuff is so niche, coupled with the fact that our legacy hardware is getting so old and fragile is why I think the optimum path forwards is emulation on mainstream hardware. I don't necessarily mean UAE (though that's definitely ideal for casual use), but things like Amithlon (given Amithlon itself is abandoned), emu68 etc.

Adopting the 68K ISA as a target / binary format for software distribution and creating a community led group for defining interoperability standards between target plaforms we could all have our cakes and eat them.

People have a funny concept of emulation. It doesn't even have to be JIT (though I see no real issues with that given once translated, it's native): with the right standards in place, there's no reason 68K binaries couldn't be recompiled ahead of time during installation on non-native targets. This is pretty common for mobile devices when dealing with Java, for example.

People are too entrenched in this retrofuture fantasy that PPC is somehow relevant today. It was an interesting idea in the late 90's with the 68060 the last of the line. It was a gamble. It was attempted. It failed. PPC is more obsolete today than 68K was at the time the first PPC expansions for Amiga appeared. it's been 2 decades since the last "desktop" class PPC part was released. The limited hardware we've had since is based on designs intended for other use cases. This leads to the vicious circle of low production run, high cost hardware.

There's clearly more interest in 68K today. The release of OS 3.1.4 and 3.2 was no accident.

Last edited by Karlos on 28-Apr-2022 at 04:44 PM.

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Doing stupid things for fun...

So the answer for the Amiga is the status quo of noncompetitive emulation? Why stay noncompetitive when a 68k Amiga SoC ASIC is so cheap and working HDL code for it partially done? Do people not think the money can be raised or that the elite blockers will never allow it?

This reminds me of Moses leading the tribes of Israel through the desert and arriving outside the promised land. 12 scouts were sent into the promised land. The naysayers agreed that the promised land "does flow with milk and honey" but complained about the giants who lived there. Joshua and Caleb thought they should enter the land and take it, which they finally did after all the naysayers died in the desert, and slew most of the giants except for a few who fled to Philistine cities setting the stage for another giant killer, David. The tribes of Israel came all the way out of Egypt and crossed the desert just to wander the desert until they perished?

Gunnar told me that an ASIC could not be done. Like Caleb, I said "we can certainly do it" but the naysayer made sure it didn't happen. I personally know people who could write a check from their checking account for an ASIC and I personally know people who have made enough in the stock market this year to pay for an ASIC. I could probably pay for an ASIC myself but I don't want the cheapest ASIC but rather a professionally designed ASIC. I'm not afraid of giants. It's better than wandering the desert until the Amiga community is dead.

Last edited by matthey on 29-Apr-2022 at 12:16 AM.
Last edited by matthey on 29-Apr-2022 at 12:15 AM.

@matthey

Say you got your perfect ASIC. What do you do with it? Put it in a classic machine? Anything not local to your ASIC will be a big bottleneck. Once the novelty of a GHz class 680x0 processor coupled to the legacy hardware wears off you're going to want more connectivity and expansion capabilities. Do you make a new board with the ASIC? With slots for commodity expansions on it?

At what point does this become another expensive exercise in hardware hubris? We'd all be enjoying ludicrously fast AmigaOS installations with affordable commodity hardware now if we'd not gone down that route already with PPC and cancelled what was, with the clarity of hindsight, the ideal way to continue the Amiga legacy: running a low level, high performance 68K emulation stack on PC hardware. If Amithlon had continued development, who knows what it would be like by now.

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Doing stupid things for fun...

If a 68K JIT and AOT really does get to real-native performance, then even a real 68k SoC on raspberry pi levels will be underwhelming if even my 10 year old laptop could beat it. That's why I'm asking, how performant would this 68k SoC be compared to WinUAE JIT on a Top 1 single-threaded CPU(From what I read, WinUAE only use a single-thread to speed up and emulate a 68k CPU)?

@OlafS25

Quote:

... IBM invested about 1 billion $ in OS/2 ... Microsoft lately failed with establishing a competition on smartphones.

Those are cases of poor execution. And don't get me started on IBM in general.
There are many companies that have had greater success in market penetration and lasting impact, with much smaller budgets.

It's like the old joke about one companion stopping to put on sneakers to run away from a bear. Running faster than the bear is not the goal. The goal is simply to outrun the other companion.

My plan includes all things you mention. They're all executed in a lean way, and with a view to create revenue generating opportunities as early as possible.

Start with some simple questions:
- How many total users is required to make a platform sustainable?
- What is the ratio of developer to regular user to make a platform sustainable?
- What do these users need/want in this system to make it their daily driver?

Then you plot the users across the technology adoption distribution bell curve, though of course in the first few cycles a new platform will not have a Late Majority and Laggards contingent.
Execution plan is then mapped to these personas.

@BigD asked a poignant question in the THEA500 Mini is coming thread. What is the ratio of OOTB users vs tinkerers/hackers?

A new consumer personal computing platform must target a greater ratio of tinkerers/hackers in the first few cycles. To paraphrase another proverb, a new platform should not be looking to simply "sell users a fish", but rather to teach a new set of users "how to fish" in our new waters.

Last edited by agami on 29-Apr-2022 at 04:09 AM.

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All the way, with 68k

ppc is far away from dead.
060 is too slow and too expensive.
vampire has not compatible MMU.
aros and amithlon are too slow and outdated even compared to twenty yers old Windows XP.
so from developer pov ppc is far away from dead.

@ppcamiga1

I'm not sure what fantasy world you are living in but PowerPC platform has been replaced since many years by ARM in the bigger industries for Telecom etc. The remaining supplies are just for legacy support (military and Telecom). Consumer gods where dropped even earlier.

Or do you think Power9, Power10 is for normal users ? =)

No one using PowerPC for new development since it's to expensive, slow and costly.
Just let it go, it's a dead end solution for Amiga kind of env.

@ppcamiga1

To quote Bender Bendig Rodriguez... "Ha ha ha ha Haah haaaa. Oh wait. You're serious. Let me laugh even harder! Ha ha haa ha haaaa haaaaa!!"

Your deluded nonsense is the funniest thing I've read in ages.

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Doing stupid things for fun...

@ppcamiga1

you sound like a broken record...

the mass of people today use specialized devices (you should know as "developer"), they do not care about hardware. For them PPC is just another obscure platform. And of course people compare options based on price/performance and software. Your beloved NG systems have nothing to offer to those people, even technical they are far below. You cannot avoid competition by using a obscure hardware. I read that nonsense from others already too (I think Hyperion), it only shows that these people had no clue about marketing and consumer buy decisions.

Yes Vampire is not competitive to a current PC, nobody here claimed different. But it offers some kind of geek factor and is retro. That makes it interesting to a certain niche whereas NG is not geek but also not modern enough to create interest from outside. And most important there is no exclusive software for it.

@Karlos

Quote:

Adopting the 68K ISA as a target / binary format for software distribution and creating a community led group for defining interoperability standards between target platforms we could all have our cakes and eat them.

For backward compatibility and for some transitional use cases, 68k emulation is definitely more than good enough.

Let's face it, there are already many software abstraction layers between modern applications developers make and the platform (hardware) it runs on:
- Programing language/framework
- SDK
- APIs
- Objects/libraries
- Kernel

Adding emulation as an additional layer on highly performant commodity hardware is negligible.
Outside of a few use cases, most developers never deal with CPU ISA.

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All the way, with 68k

@agami

Don't think of it as an emulation. Think of it as a JIT compiled intermediate machine level language that just happens to run directly on the traditional 68K architecture and FPGA derivatives of it.

On other targets, the ideal would be that 68K binaries could be AOT translated provided the code in the binaries was amenable to it, but a regular JIT is fine. On modern CPUs even interpretive emulation is going to be faster most of the time than any real 68K, but there's no need to depend on this since 68K JIT emulators are very mature these days.

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Doing stupid things for fun...

@kolla

Quote:

Yes they did? As far as I know, Apple license rights to design and produce ARM chips, and all ARM in Apple products since iPhone have been made in-house. Before that, they used ARM chips from Intel, XScale etc.

They designed the ARM CPU? That went into the Acorn? To my knowledge they took an existing ARM CPU and customised the core for their purposes.

Quote:

Because Apple didn?t design and produce the PowerPC chips, Motorola and IBM did.

Apple controlled it. The A in AIM stands for Apple. They had CPUs designed for them. Apple had priority with Mototola above everyone else. And with the P.A.Semi Apple made sure they destroyed the last of the PowerPC when they had abandoned it.

Quote:

Not really, Apple wasn?t doing much chipdesign at the time, all though they provided input to Motorola in terms of needs and wishes, and could benefit from being primary customer.

Yes, so without Apple, PowerPC would have been dead earlier.

Quote:

Forget architecture, RISC vs CISC and all that? - Apple had commitments when it came to PowerPC, due to AIM, but also to their customers to whom they had been touting the superiority of PowerPC to. So the OS (NeXTStep) had to be ported to PowerPC. When this port was done, we had OSX. In 2006, there were no good reasons to stick with PPC, as Motorola was gone, Freescale and IBM weren't so interested in 'desktop class' PowerPC anymore (focusing rather on embedded and HPC), and so going back to IA32 was the obvious escape. However, with Intel, Apple was just yet another customer and had little to no influence over the architectural decisions. It was now clear for Apple that the best way forward was to rely on themselves for chips, but getting there was a long path. Apple licensed ARM (which they already had lots of experience with from previous products) and started doing their own CPU designs and SoCs. First product with the new internally designed CPU was the original iPhone.

Going back? I didn't know they had been on Intel at all. But it was a strange move. They had practically moved to an obsolete architecture. They had just gone 64-bit with the G5. The next year they go x86 and back to 32 bit. That makes no sense! If they had gone direct to x86-64 I could understand the move.

Of course they were still selling 32-bit laptops but it was long in the tooth as AIM had failed to produce a mobile G5.

But why do they need to influence architectural decisions? They already had Intel doing it for them. No one is going to beat Intel engineers anymore.

Quote:

So no, going to ARM is not ?going back to the failure that is RISC?, it is going forward with in-house design and production, and being in control over their own supply lines. If anything, it was going to Intel for OSX in 2006 that was ?going back? - OSX on PowerPC was just a short period of 6 years, before that, Rhapsody and NeXTStep had existed on x86 for equally long period already.

OSX was when Apple dumped MacOS and slowly cut ties with Classic and backwards compatibility. But the problem is that they need to use it for a desktop eventually. And as much as ARM has moved forward it just isn't in the same league as x64. The problem is, as always, it isn't x86 and they will be compeiting with x86. They need to match x64 but I just don't see the power of Intel being put into ARM. So, ARM would be great for OS4, but I just don't think it's there yet for an Apple desktop workstattion. They'll need to customise some seriously server class ARM chips!

@BigD

Quote:

Apple's vertical integration is the most commendable part of their business development IMHO. They have invested shrewdly with PA Semi etc and forged their own path. While their walled garden and over emphasis on style over substance is still an issue to me they have upped the game substantial on the chip fab/design level compared to C= and MOS which was small fry by comparison with no R&D ongoing! Fabless chip design is they way to do it and licensing ARM while adding value with PA Semi engineers is inspiring.

They stole some core functions from the P.A.Semi PPC design and put it in their chips. The same Linux source code now manages both P.A.Semi CPU and Apples. I say stole as it's about the only thing left over from P.A.Semi's designs.

But they already were fabless with Intel. They could get Intel to do the fab. They just needed fab products.

MOS was at a simpler time. But they keep updating. Unfortunately it looked too early. They took the 6502 core, now used in the 6510, and customised it for the C16+4, going from CMOS to HMOS in the process with the 7501/8501. It failed. And no not the computers. The HMOS variant suffered overheating issues from just being on. They had a perfectly fine fab process that was ruined. In edition they eventually needed it for the C128. Which was at risk from using a new risky process.

As to Commodore, after the Amiga, they soon gave up on R&D, the lazy buggers!

@OlafS25

Quote:

I think you mix something here... Amithlon was not a real emulation like UAE emulating amiga hardware (as I understand it)

It has minimal emulation. When it boots it needs to emulate basic chipset features or there is no early startup menu. But these are cut down. It would need basic CIA input lines emulated for mouse. The idea very similar to OS4 in fact. When Amithlon came out suddenly Amiga users wanted to jump on to the PC platform and wanted OS4 cancelled in favour of Amithlon.

But I would describe it as an AmigaOS emulator. It was designed to emulate the OS and 68k programs. As well as the special x86 binaries where it shined; x86 native Amiga programs, using emulation only for OS calls.

Last edited by Hypex on 29-Apr-2022 at 08:04 PM.