Click Here
home features news forums classifieds faqs links search
6071 members 
Amiga Q&A /  Free for All /  Emulation /  Gaming / (Latest Posts)
Login

Nickname

Password

Lost Password?

Don't have an account yet?
Register now!

Support Amigaworld.net
Your support is needed and is appreciated as Amigaworld.net is primarily dependent upon the support of its users.
Donate

Menu
Main sections
» Home
» Features
» News
» Forums
» Classifieds
» Links
» Downloads
Extras
» OS4 Zone
» IRC Network
» AmigaWorld Radio
» Newsfeed
» Top Members
» Amiga Dealers
Information
» About Us
» FAQs
» Advertise
» Polls
» Terms of Service
» Search

IRC Channel
Server: irc.amigaworld.net
Ports: 1024,5555, 6665-6669
SSL port: 6697
Channel: #Amigaworld
Channel Policy and Guidelines

Who's Online
24 crawler(s) on-line.
 117 guest(s) on-line.
 0 member(s) on-line.



You are an anonymous user.
Register Now!
 amigakit:  26 mins ago
 OneTimer1:  32 mins ago
 NutsAboutAmiga:  36 mins ago
 kolla:  48 mins ago
 Gunnar:  51 mins ago
 Comi:  1 hr 17 mins ago
 vox:  2 hrs 3 mins ago
 zipper:  2 hrs 6 mins ago
 BigD:  3 hrs 10 mins ago
 OlafS25:  3 hrs 12 mins ago

/  Forum Index
   /  Amiga General Chat
      /  The One year from now thread!
Register To Post

Goto page ( Previous Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 Next Page )
PosterThread
T-J 
Re: The One year from now thread!
Posted on 30-Sep-2010 12:53:21
#21 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 31-Aug-2010
Posts: 596
From: Unknown

@ChrisH

Quote:
Even assuming that's true (I don't think it is completely), that doesn't actually contradict what I said. Because a lot of those in the "Community" were interested in AmigaOS4, but by the time they wanted to get a machine the AmigaOnes were unavailable. In fact, I was one of those people, and I've seen others as well.


Also, remember that the Sam440 is quite a bit less powerful than an EyeTech A1, so people lucky enough to have a working one of those would have little incentive to buy a 440. Most sales of the Sam440 were to people who missed the A1 boat completely.

The Sam460 will outsell the 440, I think. First, because it solves most of the performance limitations of the 440, and second because it will be powerful enough to serve as an upgrade for old A1s as well as 440 users.

 Status: Offline
Profile     Report this post  
persia 
Re: The One year from now thread!
Posted on 30-Sep-2010 13:39:05
#22 ]
Super Member
Joined: 14-Jul-2009
Posts: 1059
From: Unknown

@amigang

1) The final release of the OS 4.1 compatible Snowman Maker.
2) Amiga PC sales outnumber AmigaOne and SAM sales 100 to 1.
3) The various camps will still be going for each other's jugular at one instance and calling for cooperation at the next, making the Israeli-Palistinian conflict look easy in comparison.
4) Apple will allow UAE to be sold through the Apple store and UAE Tablet version (Android, iPad and RIM Playboy) will be the fastest growing sector of the community.

 Status: Offline
Profile     Report this post  
T-J 
Re: The One year from now thread!
Posted on 30-Sep-2010 14:17:47
#23 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 31-Aug-2010
Posts: 596
From: Unknown

@persia
Quote:

2) Amiga PC sales outnumber AmigaOne and SAM sales 100 to 1.

4) Apple will allow UAE to be sold through the Apple store and UAE Tablet version (Android, iPad and RIM Playboy) will be the fastest growing sector of the community.


You're very 'optimistic' about those PCs for some reason. I wouldn't expect them to sell at all, actually. The 'Commodore' brand, and by extension 'Commodore-Amiga', is worthless among the consumer of today, who associates it with the worst level of incompetence and failure if he or she is even aware of it at all. I have found that I get a better response mentioning 'a computer for enthusiasts running a non-UNIX, non-Windows OS on non-standard hardware with unique expansion and parallel processing options' than I do mentioning 'a new Amiga' of any sort. Its all about offering something the competition doesn't.

The UAE for tablets idea is more likely to pan out as you suggest, though. Its probably what Cloanto are working on at the moment and could be a nice little earner for them.

 Status: Offline
Profile     Report this post  
Mechanic 
Re: The One year from now thread!
Posted on 30-Sep-2010 16:10:46
#24 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 27-Jul-2003
Posts: 2007
From: Unknown


One year from now.

The X1000 will find its way into many fields beyond the individual computer enthusiast
running at least 3 OSs. Xmos and Varisys will come out with innovative hardware that
will drive sales and technology forward for a wide audience. AmigaOS will advance in
many areas due to consumer needs and spark interest for small professional developers to
create applications to take advantage of the expanding market.

MorphOS ???? I really don't know. It will still be here and improving, expanding onto
more equipment hopefully.

Acube will have introduced yet another MB more in-tuned to general purpose computing.

The general public, through low cost introductory offerings and promises of a better
computing/internet experience, gets sucked into 'clown computing' and many PC hardware
companies go out of business after which accelerating, profit driven, costs for mere terminals
causes the www to break into local Internets and then to bulletin boards visited by computer
enthusiasts and college professors using high end equipment made by several
smaller companies that do not rely on mega sales of low profit landfill junk to stay alive.

 Status: Offline
Profile     Report this post  
Hypex 
Re: The One year from now thread!
Posted on 30-Sep-2010 16:26:35
#25 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 6-May-2007
Posts: 11180
From: Greensborough, Australia

@agami

Quote:
It just so happens that I predict the future for a living.


Did you also predict that your home page is not working?

It's not doing much for your cred. Hehe.

 Status: Offline
Profile     Report this post  
persia 
Re: The One year from now thread!
Posted on 30-Sep-2010 17:21:22
#26 ]
Super Member
Joined: 14-Jul-2009
Posts: 1059
From: Unknown

@T-J

My belief is that CUSA will order a ton of these computer in a keyboard things and that after initial sales as novelty items fall off they'll end up in places like the "O" (overstock.com) and late night TV ads.

250 X1000s are not a game changer. I do believe that XMOS will start to invade the home hobbyist market, actually they already have, but that people will simply buy the USB boards as they do now and use them that way rather than buy an X1000 which lacks most of the tools necessary to actually use XMOS.

 Status: Offline
Profile     Report this post  
agami 
Re: The One year from now thread!
Posted on 1-Oct-2010 0:55:06
#27 ]
Super Member
Joined: 30-Jun-2008
Posts: 1637
From: Melbourne, Australia

@Hypex

Quote:
Did you also predict that your home page is not working?


I did, several years ago in another forum
Thanks for the heads-up. I've updated the link in my profile.

_________________
All the way, with 68k

 Status: Offline
Profile     Report this post  
T-J 
Re: The One year from now thread!
Posted on 2-Oct-2010 17:38:05
#28 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 31-Aug-2010
Posts: 596
From: Unknown

@persia

Quote:
My belief is that CUSA will order a ton of these computer in a keyboard things and that after initial sales as novelty items fall off they'll end up in places like the "O" (overstock.com) and late night TV ads.


That sounds more likely than what I was assuming you meant. I can see these keyboard computers as novelties that get bought for Christmas and then take up residence in the attic by Easter. I'll keep an eye out for them on QVC...

Quote:
250 X1000s are not a game changer. I do believe that XMOS will start to invade the home hobbyist market, actually they already have, but that people will simply buy the USB boards as they do now and use them that way rather than buy an X1000 which lacks most of the tools necessary to actually use XMOS.


Before I go into the point about USB, I'll just say that I agree with you up to a point - 250 is a very small number and the X1000 is too expensive to gain traction anywhere near the mainstream. But I do think that it gives an idea of what game A-Eon intends to play into the future, and I'm not convinced that USB is the only way to use XMOS successfully.


Trevor Dickinson told Amiga RoundTable that someone close to XMOS (presumably that means someone from outside the Amiga community) is porting the XMOS development tools to the X1000, so it should be at least as well provided-for as Linux there. But of course the real question remains: Why one would use the X1000 to work with the XMOS architecture, rather than just working over USB?

My answer is that XMOS architecture offers huge I/O capabilities which would ordinarily have to be pushed through the bottleneck of USB at a theoretical maximum of 625MB/s with a width of 1 bit, if you want to use it with a desktop computer. This isn't usually a problem, because until now most uses for the XMOS have been on standalone devices, often ones developed using the XS1-G kit we've discussed before. The USB connection in that situation is only there to program the XMOS device in the first place, after which it is independent of the desktop computer. But if you want to use the XMOS chip as an expansion to the desktop computer, or to communicate between the computer and a third device using it, the USB bottleneck would prevent you from fully exploiting what makes the architecture so powerful, its I/O capabilities.

On the X1000, a quarter of Xena's I/O lines are hooked directly to the CPU local bus, with the remainder pointing outwards over 'Xorro', a modified PCIe slot. (PCIe offers a bandwidth of 1GB/s per lane) These outward-facing I/O lines can then either interface with something feeding lots of data in, feed data or instructions out to some additional hardware or link up to other XMOS chips and scale up in parallel, all with very low latency and without a major bottleneck.

In short, in addition to the XMOS applications for which USB is the only sensible choice, there are other possibilies that need better latency and more width. We'll find out in the coming year whether or not there was any point in offering those possibilities as people either do or do not make use of them.

Last edited by T-J on 02-Oct-2010 at 05:41 PM.

 Status: Offline
Profile     Report this post  
itix 
Re: The One year from now thread!
Posted on 2-Oct-2010 22:19:19
#29 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 22-Dec-2004
Posts: 3398
From: Freedom world

@T-J

Quote:

But if you want to use the XMOS chip as an expansion to the desktop computer, or to communicate between the computer and a third device using it


Why would you want to? Why would anyone use an XMOS chip to communicate with it? It is better idea have XMOS chip on that third device and communicate with that device using a standard hardware. An example could be a GigE smart camera which has all logic and the software in the camera itself.

Why choose GigE or USB over Xorro? Simply because you can find ethernet and USB ports from every laptop and desktop today. You can find inexpensive cables and hubs from any store.

You could go ask yourself, if there was a Xorro expansion card for PC, would it be a success?

Quote:

In short, in addition to the XMOS applications for which USB is the only sensible choice, there are other possibilies that need better latency and more width. We'll find out in the coming year whether or not there was any point in offering those possibilities as people either do or do not make use of them.


Geek Port.

@thread

In year 2011: "the year 2012 will be year of Amiga" :P

Last edited by itix on 02-Oct-2010 at 10:30 PM.
Last edited by itix on 02-Oct-2010 at 10:26 PM.

_________________
Amiga Developer
Amiga 500, Efika, Mac Mini and PowerBook

 Status: Offline
Profile     Report this post  
Zylesea 
Re: The One year from now thread!
Posted on 3-Oct-2010 0:23:07
#30 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 16-Mar-2004
Posts: 2263
From: Ostwestfalen, FRG

@amigang

In one year time I will use MorphOS 2.7 on a laptop.

_________________
My programs: via.bckrs.de
MorphOS user since V0.4 (2001)

 Status: Offline
Profile     Report this post  
T-J 
Re: The One year from now thread!
Posted on 3-Oct-2010 0:30:43
#31 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 31-Aug-2010
Posts: 596
From: Unknown

@itix

Quote:
Why would you want to? Why would anyone use an XMOS chip to communicate with it? It is better idea have XMOS chip on that third device and communicate with that device using a standard hardware.


No it isn't. And I've been over the why use XMOS question before - latency and simplicity. USB is not a low-latency connection and PCIe is so complex that you need to have a serious professional grounding in electronic engineering to design anything for it. And you'll probably break your machine trying.

XMOS is low-latency and easily configurable. It is also made especially powerful by its large I/O capabilities that would be lost if you linked it via USB to anything. So, no matter what side of the 'standard hardware' the XMOS chip is, you don't get all the benefit of its strengths. The Xorro port is designed at least partly to provide a bridge between two XMOSes, one on the X1000 and the other on the expansion board controlling whatever you want to do on that board. This makes it possible to scale up the Xena into a real parallel processor, or to connect whatever expansion board you can design to your desktop via a safe, 5v connector that can be reconfigured to your needs.


Quote:
An example could be a GigE smart camera which has all logic and the software in the camera itself. Why choose GigE or USB over Xorro? Simply because you can find ethernet and USB ports from every laptop and desktop today. You can find inexpensive cables and hubs from any store. You could go ask yourself, if there was a Xorro expansion card for PC, would it be a success?


Your use of the example of a digital camera shows that we're not discussing the same thing - you're thinking consumer electronics, I'm thinking elsewhere. Any kind of real-time controlled hardware really doesn't want the latency inherent in USB, a 1-bit wide serial connection. You will also need to connect more than 1 I/O line to use the 'X-Links' technology which lets the XMOS architecture's parallel processing scale up to multi-core so well. Anything that wants to feed lots of data into the desktop computer and return instructions back along the same connection would be better like this than over USB. There are plenty of applications, but relatively few of them apply to the current consumer electronics sphere.

Quote:
Geek Port.


Not comparable. This 'Geek Port' thing had a pinout, so offers nothing like the freedom the 'Xorro' solution does. 'Xorro' has no pinout, save that you have ~3/4 of an XS1-L1 chip's I/O lines pointing in the general direction of the outside world. It and its fellow XMOS chips are redefinable in software, something that I don't think the Be-Box offered.

Anyway, you're suggesting that because someone failed at a broadly similar project 10 years ago, A-Eon shouldn't bother with this. I don't think that's sensible - technology has moved on, XMOS is better than the GeekPort, so let's try again.

 Status: Offline
Profile     Report this post  
itix 
Re: The One year from now thread!
Posted on 3-Oct-2010 8:45:55
#32 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 22-Dec-2004
Posts: 3398
From: Freedom world

@T-J

Quote:

No it isn't. And I've been over the why use XMOS question before - latency and simplicity. USB is not a low-latency connection and PCIe is so complex that you need to have a serious professional grounding in electronic engineering to design anything for it. And you'll probably break your machine trying.


And creating a serial/parallel communication link using XMOS is easier? I dont think so. Can you use hubs or connect more than one device easily? I dont think so.

Quote:

The Xorro port is designed at least partly to provide a bridge between two XMOSes, one on the X1000 and the other on the expansion board controlling whatever you want to do on that board. This makes it possible to scale up the Xena into a real parallel processor, or to connect whatever expansion board you can design to your desktop via a safe, 5v connector that can be reconfigured to your needs.


X1K is a consumer product. It is completely unsuitable for an industrial use. And there are already other products available for industrial use, like Beckhoff systems.

Quote:

Your use of the example of a digital camera shows that we're not discussing the same thing - you're thinking consumer electronics, I'm thinking elsewhere.


I am not thinking consumer products here but industrial high speed machine vision smart cameras. Usually linked via GigE to a server. I could imagine many applications where we could use XMOS to replace FPGAs. For example for routing I/O signals from the mill system we could use XMOS chip. But we couldnt afford another PC to our cabinet (it is already crowded) and we can not afford yet another incompatible development environment without memory protection just for I/O handling.

Industrial customers simply wont use consumer products.

Quote:

Anyway, you're suggesting that because someone failed at a broadly similar project 10 years ago, A-Eon shouldn't bother with this. I don't think that's sensible - technology has moved on, XMOS is better than the GeekPort, so let's try again.


An XMOS chip soldered to Acube's SAM board could have more success with industrial customers than X1K does. I dont know any reason why consumers would need anything like this.

_________________
Amiga Developer
Amiga 500, Efika, Mac Mini and PowerBook

 Status: Offline
Profile     Report this post  
Hisoka999 
Re: The One year from now thread!
Posted on 3-Oct-2010 10:32:17
#33 ]
Member
Joined: 5-Oct-2009
Posts: 82
From: Germany

@itix

I'm asking my self the same question. Why would someone want to use that chip in a consumer product. I think T-J means the connection to the classic. So to use it a custom chip to create demos or other stuff. I think another thing could be that Hyperion tries to create some sort of vendor lock in. So that you must have a XMOS chip for some tasks. That means forcing the customers to upgrade to a newer version of os4 and to new hardware.


Back to the topic:
The future is somewhat full of clouds for me. I can't not see what will really happen. ;)

AROS:
Here the discussion about the future will rise again. Thats the problem if you don't have a real vision for your future. But I also think that some new programs will be released. May be there will be some sort of office for AROS. I hope that it reaches a state where it is more or less usable for me.

OS4:
hmm, I'm somewhat splitted here. I think that the x1k could fail miserably but It could also work. In contrary I don't think that there will be a usable OOo(LibreOffice,..) port in one year. May be at the end of 2011 but I rather think it will be 2012.

Last edited by Hisoka999 on 03-Oct-2010 at 10:36 AM.

 Status: Offline
Profile     Report this post  
T-J 
Re: The One year from now thread!
Posted on 3-Oct-2010 14:06:15
#34 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 31-Aug-2010
Posts: 596
From: Unknown

@itix

Quote:
And creating a serial/parallel communication link using XMOS is easier? I dont think so. Can you use hubs or connect more than one device easily? I dont think so.


Yes, creating a custom link using XMOS is easier. The whole thing is defined in C, wheras PCIe or whatever would require considerably more advanced skills in software design and in electronic engineering. And of course you can connect more than one XMOS easily - that's one of their most salient features. 'Xorro' also uses the standard PCIe form-factor to simplify the manufacture of expansion boards, too, so there is a ready supply of blanks to use.

Quote:
X1K is a consumer product. It is completely unsuitable for an industrial use. And there are already other products available for industrial use, like Beckhoff systems.


X1000 is a product that can be applied to many uses. It is nicely suited to certain areas of industry and science, especially where there is a need for real-time control of hardware and real-time response to data input. It is also interesting to the enthusiast, bringing the cost and skill-base needed to design custom expansion boards down into the range of most computing enthusiasts.

As for Beckhoff, they aren't really doing the same thing as A-Eon and Varisys are trying to do. It seems that you would hire Beckhoff to build your factory an automated production line that would then have one function. XMOS is reconfigurable - its function in the X1000 is to provide a custom chip that can do more than one thing, and an expansion port that can do whatever the user wants.


Quote:
I am not thinking consumer products here but industrial high speed machine vision smart cameras. Usually linked via GigE to a server.


We're still not talking about the same thing. Those cameras do all their image processing on-board, so all you're doing is sending the finished product from the camera to the desktop over ethernet. There wouldn't be much point using XMOS there because latency between the camera and the desktop isn't an issue - you're doing everything on the camera, so latency only affects the wait for the finished image.

If you need your machine to respond immediately to outside input in real-time though, the event-driven architecture of XMOS is useful. If you need to sample data at extremely low latency, it is interesting. If you want to explore the possibilities of parallel processing, XMOS looks to be the best solution out there right now. If you don't want any of these things, you won't have much use for it.


Quote:
I could imagine many applications where we could use XMOS to replace FPGAs. For example for routing I/O signals from the mill system we could use XMOS chip. But we couldnt afford another PC to our cabinet (it is already crowded) and we can not afford yet another incompatible development environment without memory protection just for I/O handling. Industrial customers simply wont use consumer products.


You mean, you won't use A-Eon products. Anyway, from your description of your situation its clear you don't need many of the XMOS architecture's features and that you'd have to throw your existing system away to use it anyway. Everyone has different needs, though.

 Status: Offline
Profile     Report this post  
Nimrod 
Re: The One year from now thread!
Posted on 3-Oct-2010 14:39:06
#35 ]
Super Member
Joined: 30-Jan-2010
Posts: 1223
From: Untied Kingdom

@Hisoka999

Nothing in T-J's posts indicates that he is looking back to some form of "good old days" when everything was perfect, but rather that he has some particular job planned for the future that the X1000 may possibly be able to fulfill.
You comments on vendor lock in and forced upgrades don't carry any weight. Why should Hyperion support Trevor Dickinson, a newcomer to hardware manufacture over A-Cube, an established supplier. Also Ben Hermans lacks the egomaniacal arrogance shown by Steve Jobs to enforce the lock of OSX to Mac hardware.

Back to the future:

OS4.x on my new 460 based laptop.

_________________
When in trouble, fear or doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.

 Status: Offline
Profile     Report this post  
persia 
Re: The One year from now thread!
Posted on 3-Oct-2010 15:02:21
#36 ]
Super Member
Joined: 14-Jul-2009
Posts: 1059
From: Unknown

@T-J

All nice in theory but what practical applications are there? Someone mentioned theatre, but theatrical responses are neither communication heavy nor extremely time dependent, so that's not really it. So what application would benefit from an XMOS sitting on the motherboard rather than sitting out somewhere communicating over Gigabit ethernet?

There's a lot of assumptions here that just don't add up. How fast are you communicating with the device you are controlling? It would make no sense for XMOS to communicate faster with the X1000 than the device the device it is controlling!

I get XMOS, I just don't get what adding an X1000 tied to it through PCIe does for it.

 Status: Offline
Profile     Report this post  
Mechanic 
Re: The One year from now thread!
Posted on 3-Oct-2010 15:38:57
#37 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 27-Jul-2003
Posts: 2007
From: Unknown

@itix

Quote:

itix wrote:

An XMOS chip soldered to Acube's SAM board could have more success with industrial customers than X1K does. I dont know any reason why consumers would need anything like this.


Need? For a great number of noisy consumers a Xbox in a cell phone is all that's needed. It's
all they could ever understand from their faster/cheaper/throw away logic.

However, for some consumers Einsteins quote is more applicable.

“Innovation is not the product of logical thought, although the result is tied to logical structure.”

 Status: Offline
Profile     Report this post  
Mechanic 
Re: The One year from now thread!
Posted on 3-Oct-2010 15:47:34
#38 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 27-Jul-2003
Posts: 2007
From: Unknown

@persia

Quote:

persia wrote:
I get XMOS, I just don't get what adding an X1000 tied to it through PCIe does for it.


PCIe is not the only connection to X1000. At least not the ones A-eon is producing.

 Status: Offline
Profile     Report this post  
T-J 
Re: The One year from now thread!
Posted on 3-Oct-2010 17:30:16
#39 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 31-Aug-2010
Posts: 596
From: Unknown

@Mechanic

No, but the 'Xorro' is physically identical to a PCIe slot. I don't know if there are any similarities electrically, but its best that the physical shape is kept the same, so that we can use the same boards for 'Xorro' cards as PCIe cards. Keeps the costs down.

@Persia

For me, its mainly the possible applications in data processing that make the desktop integrated XMOS interesting. The event-driven architecture looks like it could make high-speed data sampling easier and the scalable parallel processing is of course interesting for number crunching. That aspect is also interesting in a more general mathematical sense, but that's getting beyond my field and into pure mathematics, which gives me a headache.

Connecting a motherboard-mounted XMOS through a modified PCIe port allows the desktop computer itself to directly sample data at rates made possible by XMOS. This is especially important for when you need to respond to data input immediately, as in all robotics from the hobbyist's shed up to industry and the laboratory. The desktop would provide an easier interface to program these machines through, and with the integration Varisys have designed there is the possibility of doing some of this on the fly. Or even having a program running on the powerful general purpose PPC CPU that can modify the Xena chip's behaviour on the fly by itself, depending on what sort of data is coming in from whatever Xena's controlling? That might be going too far, but its something to consider.

The PCIe-based link is especially important for the parallel processing applications, though. Xena/Xorro acts as a bridge between the large parallel cluster and the CPU, making it possible to interact with the parallel cluster from your desktop computer, on the fly. This has potential if it becomes possible to offload certain normal operation duties from the CPU to Xena and its attendant cluster, something that only makes sense when integrated closely like this over PCIe. This is because any latency here would make the whole thing an exercise in futility - the time you'd save doing the work in parallel would be wasted waiting for the finished result to be moved around.

Anyway, in theory any heavy duty processing task could be accelerated this way. Using it to process very large data sets is particularly interesting to me, but a more general-purpose application could be, for example, decrypting audio/video codecs. With enough additional cores, any heavy-duty desktop processing task could be made faster.

There are also other uses that are more interesting for what the XMOS could bring to the Amiga, rather than for what a desktop computer could bring to XMOS. The 'Amino' project to put a fully up-to-date TCP/IP stack on a chip is one. There's 'Python-on-Chip' as a demonstration of possibly making it even easier to use XMOS's customisable I/O. And there's quite a lot of ultra-low-latency audio processing and DSP going on that would be more usable and accessible to the enthusiast if one could do it on a desktop computer. Actually, a lot of the XMOS enthusiasts are focussing on audio at the moment, so that could be a particular niche the XMOS-enabled X1000 would be strong in, if it made the XMOS-based Audio tools easier to work with.

And finally, one particularly curious suggestion on the XCore forums' thread about the X1000 was that it might be possible to hot-swap different XMOS configurations from within AmigaOS. Provided that Xena can access main system memory (it is hooked up to the CPU local bus, so I think it can) there's no obvious reason why its onboard flash memory can't be changed on the go.


At this stage, we're just exploring the possibilities and a lot of what's been suggested might turn out not to be feasible, but that's why its interesting to explore. The whole prospect hinges on how well and how closely integrated the XMOS chip is to the X1000 and the AmigaOS.

 Status: Offline
Profile     Report this post  
persia 
Re: The One year from now thread!
Posted on 3-Oct-2010 17:56:50
#40 ]
Super Member
Joined: 14-Jul-2009
Posts: 1059
From: Unknown

@T-J

One could simply say if you put a more powerful CPU in the X1000 you wouldn't need to try to supplement it with XMOS. You can plunk a lot of XMOS chips into the X1000 and still not have the grunt of the 12 core intel behemoths that are rolling off production lines today.

It's also a lot to ask that an OS that can't even currently use the 2nd core of it's low end processor to use parallel XMOS in any efficient way. Add to that the fact that XMOS is not floating point and you've made it even more difficult.

XMOS is great for robotics but really the communication you need would be XMOS on the robot and wireless communication from XMOS to the computer. Having it wired to the motherboard is a disadvantage.

Correcting programming over USB or Wifi isn't really an issue either. C code is a few lines of ASCII characters, it wouldn't even interfere with a video stream if running concurrently.

 Status: Offline
Profile     Report this post  
Goto page ( Previous Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 Next Page )

[ home ][ about us ][ privacy ] [ forums ][ classifieds ] [ links ][ news archive ] [ link to us ][ user account ]
Copyright (C) 2000 - 2019 Amigaworld.net.
Amigaworld.net was originally founded by David Doyle