I have had my fun with PPC, but since I can't justify the price to get an X5000 or similar to replace my aging SAM440, with an OS that seems to be dead in the sea. I welcome these new initiatives, moving OS specific libraries and what not to ARM, that is almost to good to be true, to me that is.

_________________

minator Quote:

My guess is this is the next move on from the 600GS. A full case this time with more ports. I assume it'll also have a faster processor which really could be considered NG given the higher Orange Pi 5 models should be more powerful than *any* of the PowerPC machines.

What CPU core is *not* more powerful than *any* PPC CPU core?

2012 ARM Cortex-A53 no
2017 ARM Cortex-A55 no
2021 ARM Cortex-A510 yes
202? SiFive U74 no
202? SiFive X280 yes

Most SoCs higher end than MCUs released in the last 5 years have better single core CPU performance than *any* PPC CPU core, including the most modern SiFive and ARM low power in-order cores. Intel calls their small cores E-cores which target power efficiency (performance/W).

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/gaming/resources/how-hybrid-design-works.html Quote:

Intel Core desktop processors integrate two types of cores into a single die: powerful Performance-cores (P-cores) and flexible Efficient-cores (E-cores). Both types of core have a different role. Performance-cores are: o Physically larger, high-performance cores designed for raw speed while maintaining efficiency. o Tuned for high turbo frequencies and high IPC (instructions per cycle). o Ideal for crunching through the heavy single-threaded work demanded by many game engines. o Capable of hyper-threading, which means running two software threads at once. Efficient-cores are: o Physically smaller, with multiple E-cores fitting into the physical space of one P-core. o Designed to maximize CPU efficiency, measured as performance-per-watt. o Ideal for scalable, multi-threaded performance. They work in concert with P-cores to accelerate core-hungry tasks (like when rendering video, for example). o Optimized to run background tasks efficiently. Smaller tasks can be offloaded to E-cores — for example, handling Discord or antivirus software — leaving P-cores free to drive gaming performance. o Capable of running a single software thread.

Intel tried multiple times to make a power efficient in-order core based on the original P5 Pentium including the Bonnell Atom and Larrabee microarchitectures but they gave up each time as the lack of x86 orthogonality made x86 OoO cores more power efficient which is what the x86-64 E-cores are today (the 68060 is a much more power efficient in-order core than the P5 Pentium). The higher power draw and large area of OoO E-cores cores though has kept x86-64 out of high end embedded markets and smart phones. The newer ARM Cortex-A510 is higher performance than the Cortex-A55 but power efficiency is more important for a small E-core where the Cortex-A55 is a better design.


https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/ro7boy/golden_reviewer_a510_in_s8g1_has_33_worse/

The performance does not justify the power increase and this doesn't even consider the larger area of the newer core. The Cortex-A55 dominates the Cortex-A510 in Power, Performance, Area (PPA) like the 68060 embarrassed the P5 Pentium (the 68060 PPA advantage is likely larger). How much difference does power efficiency make?

The Smartphone CPU Review You NEED to Watch!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0ukXDnWlTY

A 3 year older smartphone is outperforming the newer smartphone with newer ARM core designs and better fab processes which should not happen. The video explains about power efficiency and measures and compares the power efficiency of many smart phones and their ARM cores. If you are too lazy to watch the whole video, the following link will jump to the small core comparison.

The Smartphone CPU Review You NEED to Watch! (Cortex-A55 vs Cortex-A510 power efficiency)
https://youtu.be/s0ukXDnWlTY?t=937

Some big ARM OoO cores have issues too like the Cortex-A710 and newest cores see minimal improvements considering the area of OoO cores often grow exponentially and most gains come from the die shrink. ARM should go back to the Cortex-A55 or at least their customers but it is not so easy to do with big and little cores designed to work together. I believe the problem is that 3-wide issue and execution pipes of the Cortex-A710 are not worth it as they sit idle wasting power too much of the time due to load-to-use stalls. I would love to see a comparison of the SiFive U74/X280 cores but nobody is making smartphones yet even though maybe they should be. Underdogs have an uphill battle but MediaTek shows that good engineering can compete with the likes of Apple and may actually be beating them in some ways considering they are likely using a fraction of the area/transistors/caches. Politics, marketing and propaganda are certainly important but ignoring the performance metrics like Motorola did when sabotaging their beautiful 68060 baby for fat shallow pipeline PPC can end in disaster too.

amigang Quote:

I did quick google search and it looks like its got a page that been setup for A1200NG https://www.amigakit.com/a1200ng-motherboard-p-91333.html nothing there now, but on Google it says, "A1200NG motherboard revision 3A Features: Games menu: add, edit & launch ADF/HDF/WHDBoot games, scene demos and apps (OCS, ECS & AGA)." So its highly likely this is a A600GS type machine, but done in A1200 style.

It probably is some new emulation crap hardware but there are some similarities with the planned iComp Amiga 1200 reloaded motherboard.

https://wiki.icomp.de/wiki/Commodore_A1200_Reloaded

No CPU/FPGA has been shown which the A1200 Reloaded lacks as it requires an accelerator/CPU card. The competition is heating up but dividing the market with more low value hardware. The A1200 Reloaded is a cool product like the AA3000+ motherboards but the Amiga needs more integrated, more modern and cheaper hardware to come close to competing with the RPi.

Last edited by matthey on 19-Dec-2024 at 12:53 PM.
Last edited by matthey on 19-Dec-2024 at 12:50 PM.
Last edited by matthey on 19-Dec-2024 at 12:47 PM.

@ppcamiga1

Quote:

ppcamiga1 wrote: 1 stop this crap move from ppc

Punctuation is important. Let me fix that for you:

"1 stop this crap, move from ppc."

I agree, we all need to move from ppc.



Quote:

not want to switch from ppc after 27 years of use it and may want ot use it to the end

The end is not as far away as you might think.

_________________
All the way, with 68k

@matthey

Quote:

matthey wrote: No CPU/FPGA has been shown which the A1200 Reloaded lacks as it requires an accelerator/CPU card. The competition is heating up but dividing the market with more low value hardware. The A1200 Reloaded is a cool product like the AA3000+ motherboards but the Amiga needs more integrated, more modern and cheaper hardware to come close to competing with the RPi.

In what way is the Raspberry Pi competing with the Amiga?

A1200 reloaded is apparently a redesigned A1200 motherboard with original AGA chipset but other peripheral chips replaced with CPLDs etc. Not bad so long as they have a good stock of AGA chips.

As for this 'A1200NG' from Amigakit, they can't even create a decent web page for it. C'mon fellas, it's 2024 - almost 25 years into the 21st century - and that's the best you could do?

@bhabbott

Well I don't know about the AGA part, care to elaborate.
Honestly, I do not know anything about the A1200NG, that any one of you know, but I would love to learn more.

I do not think, you would not need the original AGA chipset to support AGA.

_________________

@ppcamiga1

PowerPC is antiquated garbage and most people don’t want it anymore. I’ll take an arm system over PowerPC any day. Honestly if it was up to me I would make sure stuff like the updated Final Writer never runs on PowerPC just out of spite because you act like a tool. Oh wait, it is up to me. 🤣

_________________
Support AROS sponsor a developer.

"AROS is prolly illegal ~ Evert Carton" intentionally quoted out of context for dramatic effect

@ppcamiga1

Quote:

1 stop this crap move from ppc accept that other people may not want to switch from ppc after 27 years of use it

It's very clear that there is at least one person who doesn't want to switch from ppc. I cannot say how many more there are, if any.

IMHO, PowerPC is failing to deliver, and it's time to move. Either to ARM, or RISC-V. A few months ago ARM looked like the best option. Now with the ARM vs Qualcomm legal spat, it's not so clear.

Hans

_________________
Join the Kea Campus - upgrade your skills; support my work; enjoy the Amiga corner.
https://keasigmadelta.com/ - see more of my work

@Hans

This perpetual question mark of which CPU architecture we should use never goes away.

This is why, for a long time, I've been of the opinion that in virtuo 68K is the way to go. We abstract out everything else in our need to support as much hardware in as sane a way as possible, so why not the CPU?

We have extremely mature JIT emulation for x64, ARM and PPC already. It's a well understood problem domain.

The hubris is in thinking that you have to be native when most applications are IO bound most of the time and then fretting about the fact that your preferred CPU metal has gone / is going obsolete.

_________________
Doing stupid things for fun...

@Karlos

it is not virtual 68k it is emulator
get lost with this shit pistorm

@terminills

time you waste on attack on ppc you should spend on hard work on aros

@Karlos

so we again are going to endless aw loop

1. switch from that bad ppc

2. leave ppc as it is

provide sometning fast native up to date on x86/arm

3. some dumb scumbags here instead of starting working on x86/arm made goto 1

@ppcamiga1

PPC is flat out dead as a dodo, as extinct as the 68K line. Get over it. We don't even have software that can fully take advantage of the last generation of PPC hardware we got, so what is the point of it?

Unlike the PPC, the 68K scene is very much alive and kicking thanks to the number of platforms it was used in and the fact that people are not averse to emulation.

Abstract the CPU and enjoy the post physical Amiga universe.

_________________
Doing stupid things for fun...

@Karlos

You won't get to him through logic alone, you have to use magic, perhaps cast a spell, use an enchantement, otherwise he will not get it.

_________________
Indigo 3D Lounge, my second home.
The Illusion of Choice | Am*ga

@ppcamiga1

Oh but I am working on AROS. As a matter of fact I’m doing everything I can to make sure it survives. Which is why I’ve been buying up the rights to software. And with those rights comes the power to control where it’s able to run.

_________________
Support AROS sponsor a developer.

"AROS is prolly illegal ~ Evert Carton" intentionally quoted out of context for dramatic effect

@Karlos

Quote:

This is why, for a long time, I've been of the opinion that in virtuo 68K is the way to go. We abstract out everything else in our need to support as much hardware in as sane a way as possible, so why not the CPU? We have extremely mature JIT emulation for x64, ARM and PPC already. It's a well understood problem domain.

That's on point. As long the system feel snappy, you cannot get much more snappy than snappiness itself. We need more users so that software actually starts to take advantage of all that cpu power. For me as long as the system connect to hardware level in the gfx system and all that it needs to feel snappy, a transparent way to access all 68k library feels much more important to me.

_________________
Indigo 3D Lounge, my second home.
The Illusion of Choice | Am*ga

@Karlos
BTW, do you know that for the amount of time ppcamiga1 moans about mui on AROS that SCALOS run pretty well on it as shown by Olaf's great AROS Vision distro.

Last edited by pixie on 19-Dec-2024 at 03:45 PM.

_________________
Indigo 3D Lounge, my second home.
The Illusion of Choice | Am*ga

@pixie

Moaning about it is all he knows how to do.

_________________
Doing stupid things for fun...

@ppcamiga1

Ooooh no! You forgot you medicine. Again ;)

bhabbott Quote:

In what way is the Raspberry Pi competing with the Amiga?

The Amiga does not compete with the RPi which is the problem. The RPi is the lowest end mass produced general purpose hardware and PPC hardware, FPGA hardware and emulation are not competitive in performance, price, features, performance efficiency (performance/MHz), price efficiency (performance/$) or power efficiency (performance/W). Amiga hardware is less competitive than the 68EC020+AGA was when Commodore failed and is falling further and further behind the tech curve. At least with 68k, memory and gfx card upgrades, the 68k Amiga was more competitive for at least 5 years after the demise of Commodore than the 68k replacement PPC is today.

Is the Amiga competition the new Atari VCS which uses more powerful and better value x86-64 hardware than PPC AmigaNOne hardware? I do not think so as the VCS misses most of the 6502 and 68k retro market by the hardware being too different from the original VCS. The original VCS can not be easily upgraded with compatibility like the 68k Amiga and the hardware is small so a FPGA solution with more modern I/O is adequate. The new VCS has x86-64 retro themed games but the Atari successor is the 68k Atari ST and/or Amiga as they share some roots and more than a few of the developers (Larry Kaplan, Jay Miner, Joe Decuir). Atari fans may like to see an alternate history where the Atari co-founder and more developer friendly Nolan Bushnell was not pushed out of Atari allowing for the Atari 68k Amiga. The new VCS could compete against Amiga hardware if there was a good enough virtual Amiga installed only because Amiga hardware is so bad. If 68k Amiga hardware was available, it could take Atari VCS market share with Atari support like the AC/Vamp hardware is partially doing now despite the problem that the new VCS is cheaper and more powerful.

Who is the Amiga competition? Amiga businesses mostly cannibalize themselves with divided market share unable to achieve economies of scale to compete outside the Amiga market. The Amiga is sure to die with the 68k Amiga retro market unless using retro market economies of scale to propel forward to compete in other markets. Of course this needs investment as x86-64, ARM, RISC-V emulation hardware and FPGA hardware are not competitive for 68k Amiga hardware outside the Amiga market.

bhabbott Quote:

A1200 reloaded is apparently a redesigned A1200 motherboard with original AGA chipset but other peripheral chips replaced with CPLDs etc. Not bad so long as they have a good stock of AGA chips.

The A1200 Reloaded motherboards come after the Clone-A FPGA project by Jens Schönfeld and Jeri Ellsworth where Jeri also worked on a SoC ASIC that never made it to market and was approached by Retro Games Limited to create an ASIC for THEA500 Mini.

http://www.bambi-amiga.co.uk/amigahistory/clone-a.html

No Amiga SoC ASICs yet but Clone-A tech was used in the Chameleon full FPGA hardware and Indivision which practically replaces the ECS Denise with a FPGA enhanced version. Also, one accelerator from iComps is finally using a 68000 core in FPGA for "compatibility". It is surprising to choose not to use a full FPGA chipset at this point instead of AGA but the CPU core remains the hard part as it was for the Natami project. I wish I could say the AC68080 was ready for an ASIC but I'm afraid too many mistakes have been repeated from history. The path is clearly pointing in one direction if Amiga developers decided to get competitive and work together instead of losing 90% plus of the Amiga market by repeating the same mistake of replacing the architectures like with PPC. Losing the retro 68k Amiga market compatibility is not an option and expanding the 68k retro market to other 68k computers and consoles remains the way. It should have been done years ago and then I would not sound like a broken record. At some point, the missed opportunities and the Amiga will disappear together.

bhabbott Quote:

As for this 'A1200NG' from Amigakit, they can't even create a decent web page for it. C'mon fellas, it's 2024 - almost 25 years into the 21st century - and that's the best you could do?

Never heard of a marketing teaser?

https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/what-is-teaser-campaign Quote:

What is a teaser campaign? A teaser campaign refers to a series of advertisements that slowly reveal information about an upcoming event, product launch or announcement. Also known as pre-launch campaigns, they use clues to provide the audience with hints about the announcement. The clues may be straightforward or cryptic, encouraging audience members to decode the message behind each ad. The goal of teaser campaigns is to get people to talk about a specific brand or product, which increases awareness and engagement. Marketers who develop teaser campaigns carefully plan each phase of their communication strategy to ensure every ad creates suspense and excitement leading up to the final reveal. They may use several forms of media to create these advertisements including videos, graphics, photos, soundbites and GIFs.

Perhaps you have already been hooked?

Last edited by matthey on 19-Dec-2024 at 06:35 PM.

@Thread

Quote:

Yssing wrote: I am excited about the potential move to ARM over PPC.

Always keep in mind:
1. Introducing a retro machine with an Amiga emulator doesn't meant Hyperion/Aeon moved away from PPC
2. A 'new Amiga' means more than just an good Amiga emulator, think about TCP/IP, WWW, Video, 64Bit, Multiprocessing. A 'new Amiga' would at first need a new AmigaOS, making all this possible.


BTW.:
Nice retro Amiga, I'm curious if it will be an Amiga1200 like keyboard computer, an A1200 replacement board or both. New keyboard cases with A1200 keyboards are available but would triple the price of an A600GS, could be better if production is targeted on a bigger market.

It could make AOS4 obsolete (in the long run), it depends on software support and improvements of the OS that is used.