Isnt all this talk of G5 too early..

We need to get the user base sorted first, and that means more apps. We have suitable hardware. I would love to see a G5 one day - but imho the other pieces of the puzzle need to be sorted out first. If you were to make the board for you company and find a way to fund an OS 4 port later that may be different, but to specifically go after the same market could be finiancially suicidal. As for selling boards at cost - I think its only right that those involved should be allowed to make a prophit. They do need to eat after all.

I havent read the entire topic - but earlier someone mentioned it would be good for competition.. This is true when you have the mass sale of units, but I fear our market is too small for this, and it could cause some players to sink. I also dont think Eyetech are making millions off A1 sales. Alan explained all the margins in his presentation at Bath.

@Bobsonsirjonny

Considering the amount of time to get something like this rolling I don't think ANY date could be considered too early

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@olegil

Quote:

olegil wrote: @Bobsonsirjonny Considering the amount of time to get something like this rolling I don't think ANY date could be considered too early

Exactly! Theoretically, by the time that the board has been developed, all (major) bugs have been ironed out, and the OS is working, then I would expect that the A1 has been selling properly for a fair while - and perhaps the microA1 has hit the market.

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@Bobsonsirjonny

>We need to get the user base sorted first, and that means more apps. We have suitable hardware.
I Agree on that the software issue is the most important one, but I dont see any reason not to address both problems.

I share your supportive sympaty for Eyetech, and other amiga companies, and I think your that our community is quite too small for cannibalism.
I think that pegasos/morphos Amiga split was a BAD one for the community, but I dont think this will hapen with this forward looking product.

I dont think this is too early, hardware design prototyping and OS porting, all takes time.
My unqualified guess is that Amiga5 with OS4 or OS5 support will not hit market before 18 -24 month.

In this time Eyetech should be able to, have profited for their investment and, in this time I think that the the A1 will be a bit outdated.

What then, I have not heard of any plans from Eyetech about an Amiga TWO, yes I am aware of they are working on completion of the micro A1, which I am looking forward for.

I think that the Amiga5 could, actualy be a benefit for Eyetech and the rest of the community.
We should embrace technology advancedment, not figth it.

I think an Advanced motherboad like this, is likely to be adopted by other markets, *NIX , MAC, think about Mac on linux, sections of BeOs society,
some BeOS die hards is not particular happy with X86 architecture and would love to have dual PPC computer running BeOS.

Which would only help driving the price of the motherboard down, and giving the Amiga platform more attension.

What I like most about this project is that it is an Open initiative,

[quote]
Digital disaster
As this is not a commercial effort (the idea of this project is a board made for the community by the community), nor is it a nmae of a product we can use the name Amiga to refer to the project in the same way that AmigaWorld.net can use it as their name
[\quote]
If Open is used the way is to be understood a bit like "Open source". It would allow Eyetech, to improve this comming Amiga architecture and sell
derived and specialised products for profit, and spare the cost of the basic mother board design.

A few exampels for what Eyetech could, do to improve the platform.
PIM would be realy nice to have in the future, this ofcouse neads support both by computer arcihtecture and OS.
PIM stands for Processor in memory.
DSP would also be realy nice to have and done the rigth way I belive that Amiga gan reclaim lost teritory, and win new ones, grafics and video industry.
Linux is gaining market shares here, which I think we should use for our advantage, providing the market with nice hardware to take advantage of these
hiqh quality products, both by having good linux support on Amiga and ports of this software to the Amiga OS.

I think that DSP could be used to implement low cost/ high performance streaming systems.
Applications gfx, and video rendering, scientific computing, this of couse requires a software support.

Eytech could f.eks. also earn money making making legacy suport hardware.
f.eks.

PCI Express -> AGP card, to support low end GFX cards.
legacy I/O cards. I think alot Amiga users would like to use legacy hardware for newer Amiga computers, exampels include keyboard, joysticks.
to only name a few.

Plz forgive me for not going in details, with the subjects, but my primary concern was to address the concern of Eyetech, and to communicate
visions, and idear, not solutions at least not with this posting.

@digital disaster
I am quite excited about the ide of making the idear of making the Amiga5 a community effort.

I have some questions and comments on this matter.

Will the design or part of it become open source?
Are there any plans to involve people outside the Amiga community, I specily think about the linux ppc and BeOs, community. The MAC society is of cause also a teoretic opportunity, but to run MAC OS, on non apple hardware legaly, you need the permission of apple, but I dont think they would sell such licenses for obvius reasons.

Are there at this time, plans for making a simulator of the architecture.
If this such a simulator can be with a good quality, I think it could be a huge advantage.

F.eks. linux support, the linux developer can start porting *nix to the architecture before the boards become availible, and does not require the developers to actualy own a board to develop for it.

I also think having a simulator would aid, the effort of porting OS4.
Amiga device drivers work could also be begun before, the developers actualy get a board.

More developers could help finding and removing bugs in the board design, reducing the time to market factor.
It would make life much esier for developers actualy, working on the design of the motherboard.

I think, that openess of the project would aid the project in big ways.

There are not many open ppc architectures, I dont even know one.
Taking a look on NIX and their market share and growth, I see it as a golden opportunity, to get this computer to be adobted to a larger market.

The same with the Amiga OS, I think more people would be interested in Amiga OS if it can run on the same hardware as the do use for running Linux on.

Also If the Amiga 5 gets wider market, shares hey more jobs

@Bobsonsirjonny

Quote:

Isnt all this talk of G5 too early..

If we don't talk about it now, we'll hit a dead end in a year or two, because the G3's and G4's will only last so long.

Quote:

I havent read the entire topic - but earlier someone mentioned it would be good for competition.. This is true when you have the mass sale of units, but I fear our market is too small for this, and it could cause some players to sink. I also dont think Eyetech are making millions off A1 sales. Alan explained all the margins in his presentation at Bath.

I would have to agree on this. Being an open design and such, would it be possible to donate such a design to Eyetech and ask (no, beg!) them to manufacture it? I think that would be alot smarter than trying to compete with them.
The other way around would be simply to ask Eyetech flat out whether they are planning G5's or not. If they aren't, then there isn't really competition except for Genesi, and things would be fine. If they are, then let them have a look at this thread and tell them that someone is willing to do much of the initial effort for them.

I think the biggest problem in all of this would not to be to produce a prototype, but to produce it in quantity as cheaply as possible. PC manufacturers could do it as long as they are produced in the 100.000's range. Too much for this little market, yes, but it would need to be a general purpose G5 board which should be able to run as many OS'es as it can get away with. I think it could get really popular, because it's relatively modern compared to the A1. If the price is lower, then we're almost there.

Next year the G5's come in dual core configuration. It would be awesome to see OS4 running on such a beast and allow Linux/BSD users to take advantage of the board.

High end machines would be nice, but a very low cost, simple, low-power consumer unit would be much nicer. In order to make production of G5s plausible, we need a much larger user-base overall: imagine how many A1200s sold compared to A4000s.

We have working hardware - if the MA1 gets manufactured in any real numbers, the community will need better and more uptodate software. Those $s spent on hardware projects could finance some major ports, perhaps.

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@Bobsonsirjonny

Hi Bobson

My first thought was also that software was more important and that we didn't need a G5 right now (and personally I dont, my XE-800 is plenty fast for me).

But as others said the development takes time and it's not like working on this project will stop software development.

The Amiga market is most certainly too small for both a XE/Micro/G5 and the other board Eyetech have mentioned (dont remember the name...XC??) but IF eyetech concentrated on the MicroA1 and future versions of low power devices there would be room for a G5 board in the Amiga market.

Seems there will be produced no more XE boards and the MicroA1 is not really a desktop system but something that would fit nicely aside the G5 board. Besides I think Eyetech will be clever to focus more on the embedded market with the MicroA1.

This project shouldn't compete with Eyetech (there's nothing gained by competition in this small market) but instead be the top of the range Amiga where Eyetech can deliver the cheaper less powerfull amigas.

As for selling boards at cost I dont think its a good idea, it will kill the last remaining Amiga dealers and I think it will look like a bad thing to investors in the project. Future developments will also need to be subsidised in some way.

Troels

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@Troels

Quote:

Troels wrote: As for selling boards at cost I dont think its a good idea, it will kill the last remaining Amiga dealers and I think it will look like a bad thing to investors in the project. Future developments will also need to be subsidised in some way. Troels

Exactly - people should be allowed to reap the benefits of what they sow.

@Bobsonsirjonny

Quote:

Bobsonsirjonny wrote: Isnt all this talk of G5 too early.. We need to get the user base sorted first, and that means more apps. We have suitable hardware. I would love to see a G5 one day - but imho the other pieces of the puzzle need to be sorted out first.

Good points. However, I see no reason we can't parallel the tasks. Rarely are the hardware developers working on productivity software and vice versa. Also, a faster motherboard with USB2.0 and newer standards will help to show users that Amiga is here to stay and they'll be running with the bulls as far as hardware performance.

The G5 will take time, let's assume 1 year. During that time you'll see dual core Windows systems come to life, 64-bit enabled MacOS come out and possible dual core G6 chips. Linux, of course, runs on these platforms so they are along for the ride. If the Amiga hardware stagnates at 1-1.5 G3/G4 and the costs remain the same as the other platform the cost performance ratio of the Amiga doesn't look attractive. Sure, us again ex-Classic Amigans will want the ride but I don't see how someone that hasn't used an Amiga will be attracted.

@HMK
I Agrea on that the most effective way to bring the cost down, is to get the beast produced in quantiy.

I think that, it's not the best buisness model makeking lowend Amigas, the money safed by using cheaper coponents is quickly eaten by development cost and higher manufactoring cost.

The components may be cheap, but i dont think the machine will be, unless new markets can be found for a the low cost ppc computer.

Also, a powerful dual ppc amiga, well I dont think It will nessesary to update such a beast for some time!

@Bobsonsirjonny

Quote:

Exactly - people should be allowed to reap the benefits of what they sow.

What has Eyetech sowed? The AmigaOne is one of the answers. However, Eyetech has sowed some other things too. They allowed the Amiga to come back to market by R&D, manufacturing relationships, creating a sales channel, supplying vendors, supporting vendors and end users, and giving presentations on what a great thing their product is. These factors all go into the AmigaOne cost.

The AmigaOne market needs to pull in current and old Amiga users but to be truly profitable you need new users. New users look at a variety of factors one of these is price / performance ratio of the system. The AmigaOne isn't the best value of this ratio today. It's not horrid but it will probably be a horrid value in 2-3 years. Thus, someone, hopefully Eyetech, will make the next generation PPC Amiga. Thus, there's a limitation to how long they have to reap the benefits of what they have sowed.

Digitaldisaster has offered to do the R&D work if enough Amiga users will cover the costs of the R&D system. Digitaldisaster also offered to provide the working R&Ded system to the manufacturing company. Thus, we've removed the future vendor of the AmigaG5 system from having to incurr much of the R&D costs. They don't have to buy a test system and they don't have to pay salaries of the employees.

Now if Eyetech was to step up to the plate and realize that besides R&D costs the other things sowed by them 'manufacturing relationships, creating a sales channel, supplying vendors, supporting vendors and end users, and giving presentations ' could be useful. They could make a larger profit off of the system since they haven't incurred R&D costs. The system is able to be sold at a lower price since there isn't those R&D costs. This may inturn make the G5 appear more valuable then the G4 and attract even more users. More users mean larger manufacturing runs which also means lower cost per board.

I'm glad you're worring about Eyetech and their ability to reap what they sow. But, there still is oppurtunity for them. The G4 will still be sold for 1-2 years while the G5 R&D and manufacturing occurs. Plus, if Eyetech signs on to use the other things they've sowed they could be a position to reap even more.

I agree with BrianK on this...

The G5 is a must. I see Bobsonsirjonny's point that there needs to be a userbase big enough to make it practical for such hardware, but this is the chicken and the egg factor, future Amiga users won't take the plunge if they don't see any performance advantage in Amiga hardware versus PC hardware. Yeah we know that AOS is light and fast, but that only covers part of the problem. People are hungry for CPU power and speed and the G5 can deliver exactly what they want. The G3s and G4s are great and hold their own, but they're getting long in the tooth as far as the tech geeks are concerned.

Low end Amiga hardware can sustain using G3s and G4s for awhile, but we need to have a high end machine and that machine needs a G5 under the hood.

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@AmigaMac

I would imagine that it would be an effort too far for volunteer/open source. After all, POP has already been designed and companies are loath to make the investment required for VLSI or even PCB.

Perhaps it would be more productive (and realistic) to join forces with Linux PPC and lobby IBM for a PPC Linux workstation instead of Power4 etc.

@BrianK

I went away and had a think and was just going to post something along the lines of what you have posted.

Eyetech have all the channels - if DigitalDisaster developed the board there is no reason that Eyetech couldnt use all there channels to bring said board to market.

It could work for both DigitalDisaster as well as Eyetech.

I guess the most complex thing would be negoitiating, and porting OS 4 to it. It was said in the past that a Peg version of OS 4 could be made provided Gensi met all the requirements pertaining to the licence agreement. We know Eyetech can meet these. But now that KMOS own the OS will future licencing agreements remain the same?

Eyetech are on Holiday at the moment - maybe Digital Disaster should take this thread and go see Eyetech in private and see what can be done. It could be a relationship that works for both of them.

@DigitalDisaster

I'll donate some money sooner or later once some people who owe me cough up.

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I have been following this thread with interest. I'll love to see a dual G5 system. Ideally we would have a low end G5 micro A1, and dual G5 for high end. If you can pull this off, personally I still couldn't afford it or justify it though. If I could afford a dual G5 system it would have to be a Mac partly because the OS and software would make better use of the SMP and 64-bit extensions, not to mention the software base. I am still interested in the micro A1 though. It would be great if we had a G5 one with something with more grunt than a ATI 7000 but we are at least 18 months away from that if at all. We haven't got the release of the G3 / G4 ones yet.

There is not a second to loose. I don't know how long all this is going to take but it will probably take at least a year for it to get to market. In 6 months time the only PPC's in the high street will be iMac G5's.

Also, I don't know what the situation is when Linux is concerned but a decent version is a must to increase the amount of sales. (Probably mentioned already)

Finally dump AGP if you can. Lets start with something fresh for a change. If this thing comes to market you will have as much trouble finding a AGP card as you do finding a PCI card now. You need to think a year ahead plus a bit more as board needs to last four years.

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@Intuitioned

Quote:

Finally dump AGP if you can. Lets start with something fresh for a change. If this thing comes to market you will have as much trouble finding a AGP card as you do finding a PCI card now. You need to think a year ahead plus a bit more as board needs to last four years.

Well, I would agree with you if, and only if there was a PCI-Express solution available for this board. But without PCI-Express, you absolutely MUST have an AGP 8X slot. AGP will be around for just awhile longer, and there are already some fantastic AGP 8X cards out there.... Until PCI-Express takes the market over completely, AGP will remain in place as a viable alternative. Hopefully someone will make a chip for the PPC that is PCI-Express capable.

@Herewegoagain

Quote:

you absolutely MUST have an AGP 8X slot.

It should suprise me alot if A PCI Express to AGP bridge board does not show up on the market, for the same reasons you mention

Damn I see some dangers making the design open source

Somme rich and BAD computer firm could just take the design, and make a bigg a** production and sell it before Eyetech could put it into production, get the board produced at a much lower prices than Eyetech could manege, and sell it for a lower prices.

Eytech would not a hard time to sell it to the general ppc market, and have problems to get the manufacturing off scale bonus, as lots of potential customers have already bougth the same product for a cheaper price.

The BAD computer firm would then be the big winner, got free R&D, and we would lose.

In this ligth I see it would be better if R&D is done inhouse in Eyetech, with the aid of digitaldisaster and eventualy other amiga engineers and technicans.

Some stuff, may be done in the open withouth to much risk

@olegil

Yep, this is what they told me when I asked about buying one (for personal use) but they seem to think that their website is clear enough, evidently we are the only ones confused by this.