@thread

The Guru Meditation channel on Youtube has a rather extensive interview with former Commodore UK managing director David Pleasance in which he discusses the new book we've been discussing here. Check it out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sRQeNWBqSM

-- eliyahu

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Multicore support is still a priority

@eliyahu

Just shoot me. I listened to the entire 3+ hours just to see if my earlier curiosity expressed
in this thread was addressed.

What impression did you get from this lengthy discussion?
Is there an intention here to cover both branches -after- the complete serverance of the two:

Tulip/Nedfield/Yeahronimo and friends/C=Holdings B.V. and friends and other members of the Commodore branch....
and the Amiga branch?

If so I understand his concern about shipping cost. heh.

#6

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This posting, in its entirety, represents solely the perspective of the author.
*Secrecy has served us so well*

@number6

No idea. TBH I just want the book because of the stories Trevor knows about. The Commodore malarky is secondary to me.

-- eliyahu

_________________
Multicore support is still a priority

Quote:

ferrels wrote: You must have forgotten about how he hyped/over-hyped the Xena chipset on the X1000. Looking back now, it was about 2007, so yeah, long time ago. The Xena chipset was supposed to be the end-all of co-processors for PPC Amigas. Turns out it was just a cheap ploy to get weak minded buyers to opt in and buy an X1000 and it was even less than useful because all it did was take up space on the motherboard in spite of the promises made as to the chipset's capabilities. The promised developer library to take advantage of the "massive" power it promised never appeared either. Turned out that an Arduino Nano was more powerful, infinitely more programmable/flexible and cheaper too. Thankfully I didn't buy an X1000 but this has always been in the back of my mind

Xena (XCore) seemed to be mismatched to the hardware all right. The PWRficient PA6T-1682M SoC has 2 powerful yet energy efficient PowerPC cores with VMX (Altivec) SIMD units more than capable of handling all IO and DSP workloads which the XCore is capable of. The XCore is little endian making communication with the PPC cores more difficult than necessary. It was nice adding programmable IO for embedded and debugging use but the addition of Xena only raised the cost and size of the hardware making it less competitive for embedded use. The BeBox GeekPort and Sam4x0 Lattice FPGA with IO connectors weren't popular for embedded use either despite having some appeal (especially the flexibility of an FPGA). The RaspberryPi and Arduino have set the standards for IO as they are in the price and size sweet spot for most embedded use.

Was Xena/Xorro marketing hype any worse than marketing a 64 bit CPU with 2 cores for the Amiga without 64 bit support or SMP? Trevor probably expected support for most of these features from Hyperion who were hyping AmigaOS 4 features they may not be able to add. AmigaOS backward compatibility with SMP likely needs hardware support to efficiently stop all other cores for Forbid/Permit/Disable/Enable functions/macros. This functionality would be helpful for embedded debugging as well. FPGA cores like the Apollo core could do this but there is no interest in adding multi-core support because it is better to have one powerful core than several weak ones in the limited space of an affordable FPGA.

Speaking of the Vampire, David Pleasence mentioned the Vampire as one of the reasons for the name of his new book (1:46-1:48 in the video).

Quote:

And the reason I called it "from Vultures to Vampires" is that in spite of all the terrible things that went on, and there was a lot of terrible things that went on, a lot more than Trevor alludes to, Trevor said it was not as bad as that but I knew it was, people were trying to develop something and then being sent a cease and desist order or you will be in court. And remember, some of these court cases still going, still current, right? The reason, I could see that there was people, as soon as they saw something was becoming available, just like vultures, they were trying to get pieces of the carcass and pick it up, mainly I think for greed. Maybe for profit, if I own this TM I could make money out of it. I don't know how but I'm going to do so. Not many were trying to buy it for the right reasons, the reasons we would like to see it for. I was thinking, they are vultures during that time. Despite all that, we still have some incredible technology being developed. Well my favorite technology at the moment, is the Vampire, particularly the standalone 4 vampire because it is a sensational product, and so it made perfectly good sense to write a book called, "from Vultures to Vampires".

The Vampire's Apollo core will remain niche in FPGA form though. The performance/price is not competitive in any market and the plan for the future is only to move into slightly higher performance FPGAs as they become available. David talked about people with no plan (vision), especially at Commodore. Yet one thing Commodore did know was how to mass produce hardware cheaply. Maybe he should have considered this before naming his book based on the Vampire.

Last edited by matthey on 16-Jun-2020 at 04:24 AM.

@matthey

I can understand that line of thinking about the XCore XS1-L2 124 for the X1000 board, but doubling down on it for the X5000 is another story...

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@matthey

Quote:

Trevor probably expected support for most of these features from Hyperion who were hyping AmigaOS 4 features they may not be able to add.

AFAIK the original agreement was that A-EON will fund and produce the hardware while Hyperion will provide the OS support. At one point this division of labour stopped working (as the software support slowed down too much), so A-EON had to bite the bullet and develop certain key components themselves, including drivers for their hardware and, eventually, ExecSG.

As for Xena, Hyperion at least developed the xena.resource (but having no experience with it I can't comment on how useful it is).

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SAM440ep-flex @ 667MHz / 1GB RAM / Radeon 9250 / AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition

@BSzili

Quote:

doubling down on it for the X5000 is another story

The reason I've heard is that the added cost was negligible, so they probably opted for a system in line with the X1000 feature-wise. That being said, I doubt the Xena will ever be put to any good use.

_________________
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AmigaOne X5000/020 @ 2GHz / 4GB RAM / Radeon RX 560 / ESI Juli@ / AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition
SAM440ep-flex @ 667MHz / 1GB RAM / Radeon 9250 / AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition

@Trixie

I bet it was negligible compared to the total cost of the board, but that's not saying much

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@BSzili

Getting this 10$ chip onto the board might have cost the owners 100$.
In a normal market this would have been lunacy, but the fans didn't care.

Most people where warned about the useless chip when they bought their X1000 but blaming Trevor for this? Well there are so many bad decisions made when it came to the design of AOS4 hardware, but I don't believe Trevor made them by himself.

---

I was surprised how early Trevor was in the AOS4 game before he invested into hardware. The AmigaOS ownership is a mess, contracts where made by people who never wanted to keep them and who where just waiting for their partners to go bankrupt. AOS4 fans are be more on the side of Hyperion, because they gave them an OS when Amiga Inc. gave them nothing, but in the end no one of them was honest. Ans now I saw how Trevor was a player in this dirty game.

Quote:

BSzili wrote: I can understand that line of thinking about the XCore XS1-L2 124 for the X1000 board, but doubling down on it for the X5000 is another story...

The x5000 e5500 CPU cores lost the PPC (Altivec) SIMD units so DSP performance dropped? The e5500 cores without SIMD units can still easily outperform the XCore in DSP processing so I don't understand the point either. If the XCore came configured to handle system IO offloading the CPU then I would understand but then it would be better to have a DMA controller in the SoC for IO.

Quote:

BSzili wrote: I bet it was negligible compared to the total cost of the board, but that's not saying much

It looks like the XCore chip only has 2 cores and was likely less than $10 U.S. in small quantities. Is that cheap? A single chip non-volatile FPGA with flash (no external boot PROM required) could have been added for less than $40 but limited in size and features. Maybe enough for custom chips of most retro computers and consoles?

Cheap is relative. There are guys trying to make processors cheap enough to go on throw away items (a few cents). A TCP/IP capable SoC can likely be made for low single dollars. A whole Amiga SoC including CPU, custom chips and more could probably be made for less than $10. Mass production from the embedded market allowed the Raspberry Pi to be sold for as low as $20. David Pleasance mentioned the embedded market as a possible avenue to mass production for the Amiga but too many Amiga people seem to have their head in the sand.

The Fido1100 CPU32 (subset of the 68020 ISA) communication controller shows that a 68k SoC can be affordable ($9.95 in quantities of 1000). It probably could have been used instead of the XCore as well. It is easier to program, big endian and supports a variety of communication protocols.

https://www.eetimes.com/mcu-targets-embedded-industrial-apps/

Last edited by matthey on 18-Jun-2020 at 12:47 AM.
Last edited by matthey on 17-Jun-2020 at 08:49 PM.

@matthey

Quote:

matthey wrote: ... but too many Amiga people seem to have their head in the sand.

From Vultures to Vampires TO OSTRICHES.

*** THE PLOT THICKENS ***













MRJM

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I HAVE ABS OF STEEL
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CAN YOU SEE ME? CAN YOU HEAR ME? OK FOR WORK

@thread

A quick update on the project this morning from Trevor:

Quote:

I'm really excited to be collaborating with David Pleasance on his second book. I previously wrote the Amiga Retrospective and Classic Reflections series of articles for Amiga Future magazine, so when David mentioned his idea of writing a book, chronicling the Amiga's post Commodore fortunes I just had to be involved. Fortunately for me, David agreed. I already had so much detailed information but, apart from a few interviews, I did not have a lot of personal input from the key individuals involved. In the new book we both want to include interviews with key players involved in the Amiga's post Commodore story. Of course not everyone will want to contribute but I hope most people will want to share their personal story, whether positive or negative. To be honest, as a committed Amiga enthusiast I just can't wait.

-- eliyahu

_________________
Multicore support is still a priority

My dearest friends, comrades, Amiga soulmates in this garden of secrets originally created for us all by David Doyle,

I all of a sudden woke up in the middle of the night in my monumental canopy bed, and as I pulled the gold-trimmed silken duvet over my chest, I realized something:

Why, the almighty Trevor, doesn't just directly chip in for this Vultures/Vampires book?
Why resort to cyberbegging, rattle the Kickstarter tin cup like all those peons squatting on the Internet gutter, when he is invested in 25967 different startups?

Trevor! What are mere 25 thousand United States Dollars for an oilman and investor like you!
Think of the people you're luring into drop that hard saved fiver into this vanity project.

The workers.
The toilers.
The weak minded.
The rastafarian slavs who will buy Amiga stuff compulsively and go bankrupt.
The other, less lucky brothers.

Think of them and repent!
Go sell that solid gold boing ball paperweight, and fund the book yourself.


Humbly yours,
MEGA_RJ_MICAL, Registered Advisor, Coach, and Friend.

Last edited by MEGA_RJ_MICAL on 05-Jul-2020 at 04:09 AM.

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CAN YOU SEE ME? CAN YOU HEAR ME? OK FOR WORK

@MEGA_RJ_MICAL

Hear hear, and Trevor could also take a few items from his immense collection of classic Amiga hardware and borrow, or even dontate, to those poor OS 3.1.4.1.5.9.2 developers, so they don’t have to beg om forums for them.

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B5D6A1D019D5D45BCC56F4782AC220D8B3E2A6CC

@MEGA_RJ_MICAL

Did you donate to the book?

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Sent from my Quantum Computer.

@DiscreetFX

Friend DiscreetFX,
why should I?

It's an atrocious self aggrandizing book with a clear agenda behind it.
MEGA_RJ_MICAL towers well above such miseries!

That, however, doesn't entail I can't suggest to Trevor to skip this one more serving of bad taste and blood sucking (to remain in theme with the book's title), and spare some change from his deep deep pockets. AS DEEP AS AN OIL RIG.

With little hope you'll comprehend any of the above, given repeated proofs of Intellect not being exactly your strongest suit,

MRJM

Last edited by MEGA_RJ_MICAL on 05-Jul-2020 at 10:24 AM.
Last edited by MEGA_RJ_MICAL on 05-Jul-2020 at 05:57 AM.

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CAN YOU SEE ME? CAN YOU HEAR ME? OK FOR WORK

@MEGA_RJ_MICAL

Sure he could, but how long do you think he will stay rich if he keeps throwing 25k USD away every now and then?

On top of that, I would suspect this is mainly David Pleasances project, so if Trevor puts the money, he effectively pays money to David, hence I think it is better to be this way, also to see if the project is viable or not and for marketing reasons etc.

@MEGA_RJ_MICAL

I guess you’ll just wait for the mini-series then.

Sincerely

Written with my finely carved number 2 pencil.

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Sent from my Quantum Computer.

I could write my own book - groups.google.com is still operational with all the usenet activities that were covering the events as they took place, including announcements, scandals...

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B5D6A1D019D5D45BCC56F4782AC220D8B3E2A6CC

Now that the book has been funded, there is a stretch goal for a longer-running version of the film, Viva Amiga. With 3 days left in the Kickstarter, they have about 3,000 pounds UK to go.

Truly,
Robert Bernardo
Fresno Commodore User Group - http://www.dickestel.com/fcug.htm
Southern California Commodore & Amiga Network - http://www.portcommodore.com/sccan