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hazydave 
Re: Dave Haynie expresses thoughts on Natami and X1000
Posted on 16-Apr-2011 6:16:58
#121 ]
Member
Joined: 8-Sep-2004
Posts: 65
From: Unknown

Quote:

Fransexy wrote:
@Forcie-NatamiTeam

Quote:
You're not just a PC with a PowerPC CPU and some VGA chip


Quote:
X1000 thing...[...]..... not that interesting


Funny and ironic words from a man that designed the PIOS One (a mere PC with a PowerPC cpu) and wanted it to be the next gen AmigaOS compatible machine


A couple of things. For one, the world was very different in 1996-1997. The PowerPC had not yet been given its death sentence.

And while I used PC technology (like the BeBox... "parts of the PC gene pool"), it wasn't just an off-the-shelf PC with a PPC core. For one, as in the latter Amigas, the PIOS One was based on a CPU card architecture. So you could have one PPC, or four... and yeah, we did have a four processor card in development (real hardware, I may even have one around here somewhere). Or an x86, or even a 68K, if there was some reason for it. The module connection was via the PCI bus.

On the main board, sure, regular PC things were there. And other stuff. I had a very high quality on-board audio section and audio I/O connector for up to about 8 channels via an fairly low cost external box.

And it wasn't necessarily The Next Amiga. We wanted that, but that would have required real AmigaOS. We did try to negotiate for a license, but unfortunately, the AmigaOS was in limbo for too long. So we moved on, and planned to support BeOS, Linux, and MacOS. I personally met with the Apple CHRP team in Cupertino, which was the final thing that lead our decision to support MacOS. This also lead to a re-design, and ultimately killed the project, after Apple nixed MacOS licensing later that year. Anyway, that's the story.

And that was 14 years ago. It's not uncommon for the wisdom of a decade and a half ago to be counted as foolishness today.

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hazydave 
Re: Dave Haynie expresses thoughts on Natami and X1000
Posted on 16-Apr-2011 6:53:09
#122 ]
Member
Joined: 8-Sep-2004
Posts: 65
From: Unknown

Quote:

damocles wrote:
@Fransexy

Quote:
Funny and ironic words from a men that designed the PIOS One (a mere PC with a PowerPC cpu) and wanted it to be the next gen AmigaOS compatible machine


No, it was a quad PPC CPU mobo and he and Andy were working CAOS which, IIRC, ended up in their Met@Box STB.


There was no CPU on the motherboard. The CPU card I designed has a PPC603 built-in, and the PPC standard "upgrade socket" for a second/replacement CPU. I also designed the whole motherboard. Another engineer at PIOS, Thomas Rudloff, designed the quad PPC604 card, which also had L2 cache. He also designed the CPU cards for the various Mac compatible systems we did release in '96-'97, including the world's first shipping Mac-compatible at 300MHz.

We were not working on CaOS in the PowerPC/PIOS days, that came later. After the PowerPC stuff was killed, we decided to go into advanced set top boxes. The ultimate goal was to deliver what was essentially a personal computer for your livingroom. But of course, you couldn't call it that, or people would think "PC".

After the PPC thing, too, we changed the company name to Metabox. The primary reason was that someone somewhere had used that name for a software package, something like that, and was suing.

We had an OEMed basic internet terminal, the Metabox 100. We developed the first one, the Metabox 500, based on very cheap PC parts. We wanted BeOS, but Be, Inc. was very insistant on $50/copy, which didn't fly for what was basically a $200 machine. We were running Linux for awhile, but back then, we could find no Linux engineers who actually wanted to work on Linux for a living, at least not in Germany. So we went with IBM's OS/2... with zillions of ATMs being controlled by OS/2, IBM understood the need for a $10 or $5 OS.

Anyway, on that machine, the whole GUI ran in Netscape. It could play basic videos in MPEG-1, simple internet games, etc. It wasn't quite what we wanted, but we had a clear need to get into a new business fast. It also had this thing I helped develop, based on a project between the German Telekom and the University of Dresden, the BOT (Broadcast Online Television) modem. This allowed a steady 80kb/s of data to be hidden in a normal analog television signal, without interfering with any of the other stuff that used to be hidden there. Or we could take over the whole channel and run at 4Mb/s. The idea here was simple: in Germany, as much of Europe, users had to pay per minute for dialup of any kind, even POTS. So if we pushed out the most requested web content (the boxes ran an Apache web server), they'd have to actually hit the net much less often.

The real project was internally called Phoenix (the company's rebirth, in theory) and wound up as the Metabox 1000. That's the one we developed CaOS for. Actually, Andy was working with a licensed OS called Nucleus, and not too happy with it. One of other top SW guys, Carsten Scholte, had started developing an Amiga-like OS on his own, and that eventually became CaOS. The OS was very much an updated AmigaOS-like OS... you'll find this has happened a bunch of times in the power-Commodore world (in fact, the multitasking OS that runs on the React and Sensor digital R/C controllers I developed at Nomadio run a very Amiga-like OS, designed by Scott Drysdale and Frank Sczerba).

In fact, it was so Amiga-like, we were hiring Amiga developers to port their stuff. The "desktop" was again primarily via the browser, but it was Voyager... we funded the upgrade of V to a "version 4" class browser,,, there were even custom HTML tags for things like video overlay. The main UI was via MUI, etc. This was, in fact, the only thing I did at Metabox or anywhere else I'd claim is essentially Amiga-like as a whole.

And in fact, the hardware was similar to Amiga, too. It didn't have Amiga chips, but I used a VGA-like chip with a blitter, and some extra features like video overlays... this let us put DVD or other add-on video in a Window, too expensive to do in software in those days. The CPU was a 5307 Coldfire, so even the instruction set was Amiga like (we ran the core at 90MHz or 144MHz, the main SDRAM memory bus up to 75MHz... decent enough for a set-top box in 1998). It did USB, also had feature slots. One was a network interface module that could be Ethernet, POTS, or ISDN.... and possibly cable modem, had we kept going. The other was a video coprocessor slot, the first was the video module that did DVD and DVB.. the only device in the world at the time that did both of these.

When I helped jump-start Metabox USA, we were actually in talks with a number of companies, including the Amiga, Inc. of 2000, for application middleware. We actually had the MHP Java stuff pretty much working, as part of DVB, but I was looking for something higher performance. Amiga, Inc.'s Intent-based stuff seemed fairly reasonable. I wanted a VM, so that we could change the CPU any time we liked.

Metabox also ran an ISP, and developed head-end tools for pushing content directly to the STBs, via cable/satellite, authored to look good on TV of the day. The main customer for the Metabox 1000 was cable companies in Europe... we had one company planning to order 500,000 in Israel, and a consortium called NorDig looking for 1.5 million (I was actually involved in putting that deal together).

But along the way, the managment kind of got that whole Internet Company disease, the one that made plenty of companies go insane. So they spent huge chunks of money on things we didnt need, yet. And when the 2000 crashes came, all of sudden Metabox was running low on money. Worse yet, the way the company was organized, we had a large number of contract developers.. who had to be the first to be let go -- Germany has very strong employee protection laws (one reason you don't hear of all that many German startup companies).

I was primarily doing the Metabox USA thing when this was happening .. the hardware was mostly done, we were waiting on software. Thing about an STB, it's kind of a like a smartphone is sold today: you need the main machine, but some specialized hardware for your network interfaces, apps for TV, DVD, email, web, etc. In the USA, we were looking at the Metabox 1000 more for IPTV, since satellite and cable were not standards based as in Europe. We we taking meetings with Enron (yeah, that Enron, in Dallas TX... Metabox USA was based in Austin) and Blockbuster. Needless to say, Metabox wasn't the only crash-and-burn story that year

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hazydave 
Re: Dave Haynie expresses thoughts on Natami and X1000
Posted on 16-Apr-2011 7:15:47
#123 ]
Member
Joined: 8-Sep-2004
Posts: 65
From: Unknown

Quote:

Mechanic wrote:
Is this the same Dave that wanted to put AmigaOS on commodity hardware and call it Amiga?

Maybe not.


I wanted AmigaOS on commodity hardware, and I'd call it AmigaOS.

I mean, you don't need to be hit over the head with a clue-by-four to understand that, for practical systems that might actually grow the Amiga community, you can't sell 10-20% of the performance for 300-500% of the price. I can buy a $300 PClone that'll put that PA-Semi CPU to shame. And if I needed 100,000 of them, I could get them.

I'm not calling that an Amiga. I don't call a PC running Linux a Linux, I call it a Linux PC. This would be an AmigaOS PC. Apple did just fine turning Macintosh into Mac PC (they don't like to call it that, but that's precisely what it is).

It's simple: for any AmigaOS system that hopes to grow its market, it needs to offer something to new users. That's perhaps not something folks here think about, but that was how I looked at it at Commodore. And the fact you all are here indicates that yeah, my gang helped to build the Amiga beyond the A1000. We grew the market. And, far as I know, we never sold you on something you didn't get. The X1000, whether its AEON themselves or the fanboys, I don't know, but it's writing checks it can't possible cash.

Today, I'm not even claiming that you'd have to go x86. I recently bought a nVidia Tegra 2 based tablet computer. AmigaOS would ROCK on a device like this. Android certainly does. An ARM Cortex A9 is about as fast as an Intel Atom at the same clock speed. But toss Windows away, and even that modest GPU (which is 1000x faster at some things that the Amiga chips were) is downright snappy, even though Windows will definitely lag on a netbook, which doesn't just have an Atom core or two, but they're clocked 1.5x-2.0x as fast.

Possibly the most annoyance of all I had with the Amiga, Inc. of the 2000's was the fact they were do frackin' religious about PowerPC, rather than getting serious about CPU-independent AmigaOS. The hard work is moving off the 68K, not on to the PPC. If they had actually put together a real OS team, rather than farming it out with the PPC mandate to a video gaming company, they could have done AmigaOS for PPC, AmigaOS for x86, and AmigaOS for ARM in the time spent. I mean, seriously, the AmigaOS 4 for PPC has actually taken longer than Amiga did from scratch through at least 1.3 if not 2.0.

In short, I did not see any new Amiga hardware coming to light. And right now, the only hardware doing things the Amiga way are these FPGA-based systems, such as Natami. That's fun because, once delivered, it's still doing Amiga things the Amiga way. It's fun for the same reason that other retrocomputing projects are fun... as long as it's not too expensive. But it also has the potential to keep going, improve, evolve, drop in price, etc. as long as there's interest. That's is another essential component of a viable platform.

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hazydave 
Re: Dave Haynie expresses thoughts on Natami and X1000
Posted on 16-Apr-2011 7:25:20
#124 ]
Member
Joined: 8-Sep-2004
Posts: 65
From: Unknown

Quote:

Dave probably views AROS in the same light as MorphOS.


Nope. I'm a big fan of FOSS, and love the idea of an open source Amiga-like OS. Keep in mind, while the Amiga itself in the day was of course closed source, most of use were knee deep in open source stuff. Some of that was just the open source Amiga programs, some of it was GNU ports (I probably has as many GNU programs in my command path as I did Amiga programs), some were organized projects like ARP.

I have run AROS at various points along its development, at least once a year. Not just AROS, I also follow the Haiku OS. And I jumped on Android pretty early one, and usually have 2-3 versions of Linux available, at least under VirtualBox. There are some things I need Windows for, simply because there are some apps I need and/or like that only run under Windows. Some of the stuff I do really does need my 6-core PC. Some works fine on my smartphone. Since Commodore, I have been open and interested in pretty much anything that works to replace Windows at a practical level. Problem is, so many of these things move very slow, until you get some serious cash behind it.

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hotrod 
Re: Dave Haynie expresses thoughts on Natami and X1000
Posted on 16-Apr-2011 7:35:40
#125 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 11-Mar-2003
Posts: 3005
From: Stockholm, Sweden

@hazydave

Allright... your dream-amiga of today, what would it be like? Would it even run AmigaOS? Would it use custom chipset and what would they do that a computer based around standard PC hardware can't do or can't do as well.

I know you didn't create the original Amiga but is it at all possible to create something today that are as revolutionary as the Amiga was back then? Today we have so much good hardware and software that wasn't available back then.

Please share your thoughts on this .

Thank you for telling the story, it's really good reading .

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pavlor 
Re: Dave Haynie expresses thoughts on Natami and X1000
Posted on 16-Apr-2011 8:01:03
#126 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 10-Jul-2005
Posts: 9639
From: Unknown

@hazydave

Interesting read!

Quote:
The hard work is moving off the 68K, not on to the PPC. If they had actually put together a real OS team, rather than farming it out with the PPC mandate to a video gaming company


If I remember correctly, the price of OS4 port (in point of view of Amiga.Inc) was 25000 USD - really sufficient budget for such task.

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hazydave 
Re: Dave Haynie expresses thoughts on Natami and X1000
Posted on 16-Apr-2011 8:05:55
#127 ]
Member
Joined: 8-Sep-2004
Posts: 65
From: Unknown

Quote:

It is clear that Haynie sees Amiga as solely being custom chip-sets (probably because that's what he did) while Carl Sassenrath might be more prone at considering the OS part too.

You better get a new pair of glasses, dude. There's no clarity there. I have been advocating for AmigaOS being a separate thing for many, many years. The simple fact is that custom chips (which I did not design) were simply a means to an end. Back in the 80s, that's why Amigas seemed several times faster than Mac, even though we ran our clocks a little slower. Well, ok, we really were faster... you needed an '020 to outpace the blitter, and we used DMA and interrupts where Macs did polling, etc.

Today's netbooks are not just faster than every Amiga every made, they're also faster than every post-Commodore attempt at Amiga replacement. And they cost $200. Why would you not want a native AmigaOS running on commodity hardware? That IS what I have been advocating at least since Apple killed the possibility of a second desktop commodity platform back in 1997. And today, as mentioned, there is another commodity platform: ARM. In fact, ARM computers outsell x86 computers as of last year.

It's the Amiga wannabe companies who think that the AmigaOS is someone not AmigaOS if it's running on something that isn't some fringy PPC kluge. If, like me, you think the OS stands on its own, why would you entertain these overpriced, underpowered systems. Much less agree that they're somehow Amigas. I probably get better performance with UAE (my primary Amiga for the last 8+ years) than any of these to surface yet.

Quote:

The problem for Haynie is that he fails to understand that you don't do things the "complicated" way for the sake of it, you do it when that complicated way allows you to achieve things not possible earlier,

Dude, I am an actual engineer. No one who actually makes computers does things in a complex way for complexity's sake. All these wannbes, I can assume, are otherwise motivated, because that's exactly what they're doing. I think it's the fact they're building some monstrosity that's going to sell for $1500 but only given you, if you're lucky, $500 worth of performance. And yeah, sure, Apple does that too Doesn't make it right.

Quote:

That was the spirit of what JMiner was creating in 1983, but it didn't end up being what Haynie did sadly. Both AGA and AAA were too little too late (with the latter being soo late it actually never saw the light of day).

I am not a chip designer. I did design the first motherboards for both Pandora (aka AA, aka AGA... AGA is the Marketroid's name for it, not the Engineers'). In case you're curious, Bob Raible designed the Lisa chips, Victor Andrade designed the Alice chip. They did a great job... "AA" was started after AAA.

The problem was Commodore management. None of these chips were overcomplcated for what they set out to do. Yes, they were both late. Have you seen my film? Commodore was paying folks like Irving Gould about $3 million per year. In those days, neither the CEOs of Apple nor IBM made over a million. And Gould wasn't alone. The budget at Commodore was pitiful.. that's the only reason the chips couldn't keep up. Fact is, I think we did an ok job, all things considered, on the systems, and an amazing job on the OS, given that Commodore WAS doing custom (which most of the competition wasn't) and probably had 1/10th the budget of a company like Apple. And forget about IBM's cash, back in those days.

Quote:

He stated PA-Risc was never meant to be the CPU of the next generation Amiga (it was there as part of Hombre' graphics subsystem and not as a CPU) as things evolved it seems quite clear that PPC was the only option as a CPU and that the Hombre Sub-System could have been used as a Graphic card (on a modular system, NO fixed chipsets anymore) using his "Acutiator" system architecture, but it is also clear that at the speed things were moving, that GFX slot (in a potential NG Amiga) would have been soon fitted with a competitor's graphics solution as there was at least 1 new GFX card coming out in those days, every 3 months! (ie:the evolution speed of those things was impossible to cope with, the world had changed forever).

The Hombre chip was, of course, the thing after AAA, and very much not Amiga. But the next thing after. This was designed by Dr. Ed Helper... if anyone could claim to the the Jay Miner of the East, it was Ed. Amazing guy. Keep in mind, this was like '92-'93 stuff, and it just Ed working on Hombre, Bill Gardei working on the ill fated C65, and everyone else on AAA. The PA-RISC was chosen by Ed because he could easily add new instructions. The idea was that the PA-RISC would be the lone CPU for a CD32 follow-on games console... he had instructions in there for 3D graphics manipulation. But in a computer, the PA-RISC would take on the role of the modern GPU, and the computer itself would use a different CPU. In 1992-1993, the obvious choice was PowerPC. But there were folks at Commodore also interested in the DEC Alpha.

Acutiator didn't have a graphics slot. The first revision had a thing I designed, called the AMI Bus (Amiga Modular Interconnect), a high speed bus for CPUs, graphics devices, etc. By 1992, Intel had announced PCI, which was different, but solved exactly the same problem as AMI bus, but as an industry standard. So Acutiator changed to PCI. Dr. Ed, independently of what I was doing, also chose PCI as the system bus for Hombre.

And yeah, the point very much was to keep Commodore responsible in their graphics chips. I really liked AAA in 1988, but based on C= budgets, it wouldn't have been out until 1994 at best, maybe 1993 had Commodore been run even a little better going into the 1990s. Hombre was definitely what you wanted by '93-'94. But absolutely, things changes. In fact, you may recall that Commodore used to make their own CPUs. With the Amiga, they stopped that. In the 1990s, the same industry forces were acting on the graphics chip as they did the CPU, making it a very complex, very specialized thing. The reason C= didn't make a CPU wasn't that they couldn't... it's the same reason Apple didn't -- new CPUs are very expensive, and you need a large market to justify a new development. Apple didn't sell enough Macs to do this with desktop PPC, and they had killed off every other desktop PPC, the failure was inevitable. And once you needed 10 million or more units shipped to build a competitive graphics chips, it wasn't just Commodore in trouble. That was more units than any PC company sold in those days: HP, Compaq, Dell, etc. The only question left was who would succeed: we had Cypress, S9, Tseng Labs, 3Dfx, a bunch of them, who didn't make it.

Quote:

That IF they finished "something" in time, however nor AAA nor Hombre were ever close to completion (the latter in particular was almost at vaporware early stage) when competitor's solutions were already coming out steadily, so, in the end, Haynie's doings would have been ditched for something made at ATI or Nvidia (too far ahead very soon),

Are you new at this? nVidia wasn't even founded until 1993. The NV1 didn't ship until 1995. Commodore and nVidia didn't intersect in any meaningful way. ATi did.. in fact, Commodore was one of their first customers, back in the late 80s.

Quote:

The only hurdle I see in for it, is that it will have to prove itself as being something "more" than an Amiga compatible HW, specially if it will cost 800 eur as I've heard.

As I said... at the right price. I love the idea, and the fact it can evolve, the price can drop, etc. The FPGA is an issue, though. While prices vary by complexity, of course, the rule of thumb designers use is that you can have your choice of speed, density (gate count) and low cost in any FPGA, gate array, or custom chip. However, the cost of the gate array is likely 10x that of the custom chip for that same mix of features. And the cost of the FPGA is likely 100x. The development costs, of course, fall the opposite way. The potential win, of course, is that 100,000 logic gates actually cost a few orders of magnitude less today than in 1990 or 1985. So maybe this becomes practical today... but you know in 2-3 years, it could well be half that price.

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hazydave 
Re: Dave Haynie expresses thoughts on Natami and X1000
Posted on 16-Apr-2011 8:38:03
#128 ]
Member
Joined: 8-Sep-2004
Posts: 65
From: Unknown

@-Sam-

Quote:

I agree with you entirely except for your point abut DH's comments. I didn't take Dave's comments as saying that the X1000 isn't the best strategy - I don't think he's interested in any of that. I think he just simply meant that the NatAmi was more interesting to him - not taking business strategy or anything else into account as we both are.


The best strategy for an actual resurrection of the AmigaOS was AmigaOS on commodity hardware. With a team that could actually keep evolving the AmigaOS in a modern direction. I'd be happy to be wrong, but this doesn't seem to have happened.

With that gone, what's left. Ok, you have AmigaOS 3.x for 68K and AmigaOS 4.x for PPC. Neither has a great deal of continuing developer support. Sure, some 68K Amiga programs were ported to PPC, some not. There's the same freeware everyone has on every other platform, too, at least if someone's up the challenge of porting Linux code to AmigaOS (and they have been, historically). But aside from FOSS, you need units in users hands to have any real commerical market.

The big problems with PPC "Amigas" has been that they're too expensive for "fun hobby toy", and either too slow or two software limited for real work. Now, sure, if you have a different demand for real work and your PPC Amiga does the job, more power to you. But aside from that computer, think: would you invest money in the company that made that system? Do you expect they're going to really re-ignite the Amiga market?

And as I said before, it the X1000 were a magical gift from Jay himself (and I'm confident its not), it is not a viable business, for the simple reason that there is an absolutely finite number of these that can ever exist -- the CPU is out of production. AEON presumably bought something like min(, ). That's the end, and there's really nothing in PPC land to replace that PA Semi dual-core.

And for some kinds of work, that wouldn't be suitable anyway. I mean, look at traditional Amiga work: video and 3D. I'd be surprised if the X1000 did this stuff at 1/10th the speed of my AMD 1090T x6 desktop. I did a 6 hour video render the other day... I'd hate to have that take 60 hours. Sure, there are plenty of things that don't need that kind of performance, but then again, 80% of what I do works just dandy on a $200 netbook or Android tablet. When you're talking working PC, not just something as a cool hobby... I could by TWO 1090T machines for $1500, if work is the issue.

The Natami I understand, because, once it's ready anyway, it's a real Amiga in every critical way. It may well be too expensive to justify as a general purpose computing device, but for that hobby, it's for fun. I'm not going to do the same kind of things with this than I would a for-work computer... that for work system is a tool, like a hammer or a belt sander. X1000 doesn't seem Amiga-enough to have that hobby interest, or PC enough to be competitive for real work.

I didn't always understand the hobby aspect -- Amigas was both my profession and one of many hobbies, back in the day. But in particular, hanging out with the C64 folks and others committed to retrocomputing... I do understand. The C64, for example: you could learn just about everything there was to learn about it. That's very difficult on the Amiga, and impossible on Windows or Linux... just too much stuff, and too little interest.

And no one here is under any obligation to listen to anything I have to say... and of course, you know it. This all started because I answered a direct question. And I have looked over the X1000, the stuff they've announced anyway. I read the specs on the XMOS chip, and that's one of the problems. It's not a terribly interesting chip. I can see some potential use in some embedded applications, but only if it actually saved power over using, say, one far more powerful $10 ARM chip. It's not programmable silicon, it's a CPU array with a bunch of pretty uninteresting little tiny processors. If you really want to make things go fast on these machines, you need OpenCL ported, so you can use that Radeon GPU.

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eXec 
Re: Dave Haynie expresses thoughts on Natami and X1000
Posted on 16-Apr-2011 8:59:05
#129 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 21-Jun-2004
Posts: 956
From: Burkina Faso

@hazydave

Hi Dave...

I`m glad that finally someone who belonged to the story, but from the other side of the mirror, showed to the crowd where do they belong. There is a huge flame thing around
the PPC/x86/ARM and only on mentioning of anything except PPC you get crucified
around this place. So called , self named "Amiga Elitist" are not thinking on a real
way of thinking. Why would you pay +2000¤ for something that is overpriced
and not even completely supported by AOS4 (XMOS).

What do you suggest as a real course for prolonging the life of the AOS into
the future. Which way to go? The way things are standing now, it is doomed
because the new hardware is highly overpriced and by raw power in the range
of the low entry x86 boards + CPU that cost under 120¤..

Please, as a person that is a reference in the current Amiga "World" give us a
hint...what would be a best way to continue in a further development.

_________________
____
...administration is for serious people only....

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hazydave 
Re: Dave Haynie expresses thoughts on Natami and X1000
Posted on 16-Apr-2011 9:02:41
#130 ]
Member
Joined: 8-Sep-2004
Posts: 65
From: Unknown

Quote:

hotrod wrote:
I must say that I hate the word "fanboys". If I use AOS 4 I'm an AOS 4 fanboy, if I use a Wii I'm a Wii fanboy, if I play my Jackson guitarr I'm a Jackson fanboy.

Kind of true... but also not. It's not just what you're using, it's your advocacy. If I just play my Martin or Line 6, I'm not necessarily a fanboy. If I'm preaching the Martin gospel in every guitar forum I can find, I am most assuredly a fanboy.

Quote:

What if I also use MacOS X and Windows?

The only possible reason to use MacOS is as a fanboy... or fangirl, in the case of my sister Kathy, who has drank all the Apple kool-aid she can get her hands on. Then again, she's now in TWO separate rock bands, as well as having a PhD in Psychology from Stanford... thus, cooler than me, and by extension, all of you. So "fanboy" isn't the end of the world.

Quote:

What if I like to try playing on any guitarr I can get my hands on?

I also have an Ibanez electric-acoustic, made of cocobolo, an Ibanez 12 string ($50 at a flea market), a Martin Backpacker (Kathy's ex, Bob, designed it for Martin) and a Go Guitar (a slightly better sounding, slightly heavier backpacking guitar).

But in answer to your question, no, that doesn't make you a fanboy. In fact, far from it. If you were a true Jackson fanboy, you'd have no interest in touching a Martin or a Gibson or even a Line 6. I've never actually met guitarists that dedicated to one brand... I think we all have a little of the GAS. Photographers, on the other hand... Nikon vs. Canon is like religion.

But this does seem to be a part of the human psyche (I only minored in psychology). You have Ford vs. Chevy arguments between their respective fanboys. The cameras and camcorders, other CE stuff... I know people who also are reverse fans... hating anything from Sony is nearly as popular as hating anything from Microsoft. I think, at least in part, that all of these involve big money. Once I commit to that thing, that decision says something about me, and if you're attacking that decision, you're getting close to calling me a fool. This is not reasonable behavior... specifically why I said "FOR ME" the Natami is the one that makes sense, of these many not-quite-Amiga things that are sold to Amiga fans.

But really, if you want a Taylor or a Gibson, a Nikon or even a Pentax or Sony (yeah, I have Canon SLRs, but Panasonic camcorders -- go figure), a Bud instead of a Guinness, or even an Impact instead of Prius.. no problems. You have different needs. I don't know why so many human activities have to be converted to religions.

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hazydave 
Re: Dave Haynie expresses thoughts on Natami and X1000
Posted on 16-Apr-2011 9:16:30
#131 ]
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Joined: 8-Sep-2004
Posts: 65
From: Unknown

Quote:

BigD wrote:
I'm surprised Apple has clawed itself back into such a powerful position in the computer industry. I think the iPod, iPhone and iPad have helped the Mac amazingly.

They have helped Apple, no doubts. I'm not certain they've helped the Mac at all.

Set the wayback machine to 1993. Mr. Peabody has taken us to a little PC firm called IBM. They're trying to get their operating system, OS/2, to go mainstream. There are people at IBM who have put millions, perhaps billions into this OS. Their big win to date: ATMs.

Zoom back, look at all of IBM. There are large proponents of Windows at IBM. And tragically, among them are the guys responsible for IBM's own line of PCs. Zoom back a bit more, look at planet earth. From space, it sure seems to be all of the world plus half of IBM versus OS/2 and the other half. The IBMers, in particular, are actively against OS/2 because, being at the same company, they're inherently in competition for the same limited resources.

Back in the Wayback machine... back to 2011. Mr. Peabody skillfully lands the Wayback machine on Infinite Loop in Cupertino, California. A freakishly old looking Sherman meets us as we open the door (ooops... I knew we forgot something). Mr Peabody deftly delivers a death blow to his temple, and we continue into Apple. Inside, the buzz is about the iPad 2, of course. Very much a modest upgrade, but hey, look at last year. The new iPad -- a whole new product line for Apple -- was nearly as profitable as the entire Mac line of computers. The iPhone and iOS guys are beaming as well.... careers secure. The Mac people are nervous and shifty. No wars started yet, but they all know how much cash Apple keeps pouring into that Mac. There's conjecture the MacOS will increasingly be merged with iOS.... and far more dire prognostications.

Quote:
It's a shame Dave Haynie can't see the value in the X1000 project.


I see no value in a produce that hits the market already dead. Sorry, that's just how I roll . If you want one, don't let me stop you... it's not necessarily a problem for the end-user, assuming you don't need long term support, spare parts, etc. But it's not a good business decision for a real company.

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hazydave 
Re: Dave Haynie expresses thoughts on Natami and X1000
Posted on 16-Apr-2011 9:26:19
#132 ]
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Joined: 8-Sep-2004
Posts: 65
From: Unknown

Quote:

pavlor wrote:
Quote:
The hard work is moving off the 68K, not on to the PPC. If they had actually put together a real OS team, rather than farming it out with the PPC mandate to a video gaming company


If I remember correctly, the price of OS4 port (in point of view of Amiga.Inc) was 25,000 USD - really sufficient budget for such task.


Might explain why it took so long.

I do know software, but I don't claim to be a former head of AmigaOS Software Development or anything. However, my good friend Andy Finkel was exactly that. As well as 11+ years together at Commodore, and two startups (PIOS/Metabox and Fortele), we both consulted for Amiga Technologies in 1995-1996. I was working on a way to deliver the new PPC computer they wanted without C= style chip resources, Andy was planning to do the 68K -> Portable port, and of course, support the PPC as the first target.

My best recollection of Andy's resource requests had us with a team of about 30 software engineers working two years to deliver what we wanted.... maybe they get things going a bit faster.

$25,000 buys you a 1/2 year of a mid-level software engineer. No PC for him, no office, no bennies, etc. For a seasoned consultant, that gets you a month and a half.

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Leo 
Re: Dave Haynie expresses thoughts on Natami and X1000
Posted on 16-Apr-2011 9:45:26
#133 ]
Super Member
Joined: 21-Aug-2003
Posts: 1597
From: Unknown

@hazydave Finaly someone else thinking that handing the port of an OS to another architecture to a gaming company is not the optimal solution... Thank you :)

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DAX 
Re: Dave Haynie expresses thoughts on Natami and X1000
Posted on 16-Apr-2011 9:47:42
#134 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 30-Sep-2009
Posts: 2790
From: Italy

@hazydave
First of all thank you for taking the time to provide very detailed replies (where some new interesting details are to be found), and let me apologize if my post gave the impression you were personally responsible for the delays (as a matter of fact, you might have been "involved" in those projects, the reasons for the delays are a different thing however and might be too complex to be detailed in a simple forum post I presume).

Being an Hardware engineer, I am under the impression that you somehow consider as "Amiga", only the game-console like HW made initially or whenever (all in all, the original Amiga is more similar to a console or a Jamma arcade video game board), while many consider it a computer platform (that evolved over time) which they call Amiga regardless.

The OCS while good for low res 2D games, soon became a chore for everyone who was trying to work at high-resolutions or needed true-color graphics, so people like me bought some sort of frame-buffer or RTG card before AGA came out or soon after (for hi-res 24-Bit resolutions).
In the end, the 68040 or even worst, the 68060 of late wasn't 100% compatible with the original 68000, the GFX system was different, yet we called it Amiga just the same.

Let's imagine Commodore kept releasing Amiga after AMiga using custom chipsets that would be obsolete the day they came out (due to delays caused by their mismanagements), wouldn't we had seen the same situation over and over again? People using alternative GFX solutions although a chipset (AAA/Hombre or whatever) was present in the machine? And if that custom GFX acceleration solution (chipset) was to be made modular eventually, wouldn't we see also Amigas using third party solutions there, instead of what Commodore did put there originally?
Bottom line, What if the lack of chipset "usage" (by end owners) is only dictated by the fact that at any given moment a more powerful add on (than what's on board) is readily avaialble?

Can Amiga be defined just by the presence/usage of a chipset, while the lack of it makes it something else?

Many just don't think so.

When I commented about Nvidia and ATI, it was with a "what if" final scenario in mind: consider how many GFX chips vendors existed back then (even before ATi and NVida), and the pace they were delivering commercial products, considering that in 1995 AAA was already scrapped, and Hombre (aside from the only hypothetical Amiga connection) was in its early stages still, Isn't it probable that by the time it would have been finished, it would have been surpassed by the competition in terms of both performance and cost effectiveness?
I imagine an A5000 that while having some sort of chipset built in (modular), would not only allow the installation of third parties -more powerful- solutions (like its predecessors), but the possibility (being a modular design) of extracting the board containing Commodore's solution and replace it with a third party one.
Yet everyone would keep calling it Amiga just the same.

Thus It's not that hard to imagine a new "Amiga" today featuring a PPC cpu and GFX acceleration provided by a third party.

I'm completely with you on the price/performance allegations you make, but as you know, given the right numbers, you could build a powerfull PPC system and sell it at competitive prices, what's missing is an investor with deep pockets.
I assume the idea here is to first provide a machine to grow AmigaOS funcionalities (add SMP, modern 3D and so on) and then who knows, when you have a modernized platform you might even find an extra investor or 2.
Might be a bad idea mind you, I'm not advocating any rosey situation of course.

Last edited by DAX on 16-Apr-2011 at 11:09 AM.

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jas_mc 
Re: Dave Haynie expresses thoughts on Natami and X1000
Posted on 16-Apr-2011 9:47:55
#135 ]
Regular Member
Joined: 7-May-2010
Posts: 232
From: Unknown

@hazydave

Very interesting to read your posts here.

Quote:
I see no value in a produce that hits the market already dead. Sorry, that's just how I roll . If you want one, don't let me stop you... it's not necessarily a problem for the end-user, assuming you don't need long term support, spare parts, etc. But it's not a good business decision for a real company.


Out of interest, what's your opinion of A-Cube/Sam?

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DAX 
Re: Dave Haynie expresses thoughts on Natami and X1000
Posted on 16-Apr-2011 10:04:23
#136 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 30-Sep-2009
Posts: 2790
From: Italy

@hazydave
Quote:
That's the end, and there's really nothing in PPC land to replace that PA Semi dual-core.

Freescale PR went on record stating their customers have asked for more powerful cores (not necesarily "more" weak ones) and as a result, their latest 5020 offers more powerful figures in both int and floats departments.
The next series (60x0) will see the introduction of Altivec and possibly additional gains in the int department. Up to 8 core designs are planned (and there will be a 70x0 series after that).
So they are not from PASemi but they could be good chips (60x0 in particular).

Quote:
I read the specs on the XMOS chip, and that's one of the problems. It's not a terribly interesting chip.

On its own it might not, although it might still be used in unconventional ways (for geek fun), check the specs of THIS 2D engine for example (they are in the description "show more" flap) considering only 2 threads of a single 400 mips core (the X1000 will have 2 500 mips ones directly connected to the CPU) it's not bad

But the interesting part for me is the Xorro slot and the possibility of using NG chips there. Basically a cluster of more powerful 2nd generation chips migh be fitted there and interact with the CPU at PCI-E speed.
Assuming these new chips will have the right specs it could open some interesting possibilities.
I don't know, some kind of cell like operation where the SPUs are on an external board (assuming 2nd G chips will have an FPU or simd unit) might be a nice "proof-of -concept" to be further developed/improved on an eventual X2000 (mass produced at low prices? ).
Or people could find other creative uses, sound fun nontheless...

Last edited by DAX on 16-Apr-2011 at 10:12 AM.

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cha05e90 
Re: Dave Haynie expresses thoughts on Natami and X1000
Posted on 16-Apr-2011 10:37:46
#137 ]
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Joined: 18-Apr-2009
Posts: 1275
From: Germany

@eXec
Quote:
So called , self named "Amiga Elitist" are not thinking on a real
way of thinking. Why would you pay +2000¤ for something that is overpriced
and not even completely supported by AOS4 (XMOS).


Thank you very much for your in-deep analysis of my (potential) thinking. Maybe I'll buy a X1000. And if I'll might do so, why did I did it? Because I want to. That's it. Nevertheless - as a side effect - I would encourage the way of doing things in AmigaOS4-land.

So - if (!) - I would like to see an x86/64 AmigaOS4 then I should *not* buy a X1000. But - not buying, means no money for A-Eon and mere money for Hyperion. Which in turn might be a little hindering a potential port to other processor architectures. Hmm. Now I'm totally lost. What should I do?

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eXec 
Re: Dave Haynie expresses thoughts on Natami and X1000
Posted on 16-Apr-2011 10:43:30
#138 ]
Cult Member
Joined: 21-Jun-2004
Posts: 956
From: Burkina Faso

@cha05e90

Quote:

cha05e90 wrote:
@eXec
Quote:
So called , self named "Amiga Elitist" are not thinking on a real
way of thinking. Why would you pay +2000¤ for something that is overpriced
and not even completely supported by AOS4 (XMOS).


Thank you very much for your in-deep analysis of my (potential) thinking. Maybe I'll buy a X1000. And if I'll might do so, why did I did it? Because I want to. That's it. Nevertheless - as a side effect - I would encourage the way of doing things in AmigaOS4-land.

So - if (!) - I would like to see an x86/64 AmigaOS4 then I should *not* buy a X1000. But - not buying, means no money for A-Eon and mere money for Hyperion. Which in turn might be a little hindering a potential port to other processor architectures. Hmm. Now I'm totally lost. What should I do?


Buy 5 of them if you want... Your decision... Your happiness is the most important to you.
Dave told not just to you but to all of us within this few posts what is with PPC architecure
as a base for desktop computers tn the future. It`s dead.

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drstrangelove 
Re: Dave Haynie expresses thoughts on Natami and X1000
Posted on 16-Apr-2011 10:56:21
#139 ]
Member
Joined: 16-Aug-2005
Posts: 93
From: Unknown

@ALL

I completely agree with the vision of Mr. Dave Haynie, in short, the success of the Amiga platform was simply that it was the best of the best in his time, today is not even close enough to be a computer normal desktop.

In their heyday, even NASA use in many projects. Someone believes that NASA would use the X1000 and AOS4 in some projects?

I personally think that this is not the way.

Fortunately, all is not lost, I had the chance to see the small project running with friends:

(x64 4 cores, 16 GB RAM, nvidia 9600GT)

... and I again had the feeling it gave me my A500, I hope and despair to see the version 1.0 of this real and authentic evolution of Amiga dream.

Last edited by drstrangelove on 16-Apr-2011 at 10:57 AM.

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DAX 
Re: Dave Haynie expresses thoughts on Natami and X1000
Posted on 16-Apr-2011 10:58:45
#140 ]
Elite Member
Joined: 30-Sep-2009
Posts: 2790
From: Italy

@eXec
X86 doesn't mean money automatically, Linux survives because its' free (same goes for other options), if it was going against Windows on par (both commercial) it would be a failed company already.
In a broader sense we could say that today (commerically speaking/mainstream) anything that's not backed by billions is dead no matter the CPU. And that the opposite is true. With enough money you can make a triple core 3.2Ghz PPC system and sell it for ¤150 (ie:x360) more million for exiting developments and some more for national television adds and voilą, you a have a PPC system that non only isn't dead at all, it actually very succesful.

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