the Micro-ATX A1 is, propably, the sucessor to the current ATX A1, which will arrive when the development costs have been covered by the sales of the current A1 and the future MicroA1.

But speaking about something completetly else, that extra IO board for the MicroA1 to be specific. Does anybody ecept me suspect that they'll make a custom riser card for the bog standard Theron Mini? That way they can ceep the costs down by using a standard motherboard, gain easy acces to the PCI bus of the MicroA1 and at the same time leave room for that PCI slot to be left unused.

Thoughts?

Quote:

On my next visit I intend to make further inroads into SE Asia by the usual methods of public transport, hire cars and possibly the odd rickshaw.

Love it !!

I particularly liked -

a) the bit about Asynchronous operation of Articia S in the A1 (ie: non-blocking of memory operations) that make it faster than (allegedly) vastly greater specced x86 h/w. nice !
b) I nearly wet meself when I read they are hoping Earlybirders (such as meself) might be allowed thier grubby paws on OS4.0Beta. Froth Dribble gimme gimme !

that calls for a big nana dance !

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XH558 - the worlds last flying Vulcan.
ok, its actually XL426 in the picture but you know what I mean.

I HATE IBM!!!!!!!!

According to answer 6, ibm DOES NOT WANT to sell computers to the general public.

WHY, oh WHY, were they bragging about their CPU (970) in "Scientific American" and "Wired" magazines with 2 page ads like 2 pages from the front cover, if they aren't going to be selling them till October 2004??????

Let's see a P IV should be available then that runs at 5.7 GHz!!!!!!!


AmigaTwo! Coming to a desktop near you, Jan. 2006.

Maybe one of you Arm chair chip designer can wxplain to me how TWO devices (CPU and IDE) can read/write a single devcie (Memory) at the same time. it's not posible. Fleecy where are you?

@drebben

Maybe you ought to send an email to Mai.

@Athiest

Chill out.

Dave.

Interesting read

The whole Eyetech / StellarDreams stuff bothers me as a UK customer.

When will Eyetech stop selling direct? Or has that already happened?

Quote:

Poster: DaveP Date: 21-Nov-2003 18:01:20 @drebben Maybe you ought to send an email to Mai.

You are not fleecy!!!

@drebben

Your point? You are posting on a forum that is public
with many people here. This means that others may
chip in as they want. Note also that you addressed your
question to "armchair chip designers" ( which is slightly
derogatory ) in general, not Fleecy. Your question about
Fleecy was "where is Fleecy".

If you want a dialogue 1-1 with Fleecy Moss then send
him an email. If you want an answer to your "question"
then I suggest you go to the horses mouth and talk to the
folks at Mai.

Finally, concurrent access to shared memory is a feature of
many IBM hardware designs, so it is not "impossible". How
the Articia-S feature works is up to Mai to explain.

I do not understand what appears to be a bit of an aggressive
attitude on your part. Again, if you ask something in a
public forum you cannot dictate who answers it.

Dave.

Quote:

But speaking about something completetly else, that extra IO board for the MicroA1 to be specific. Does anybody ecept me suspect that they'll make a custom riser card for the bog standard Theron Mini? That way they can ceep the costs down by using a standard motherboard, gain easy acces to the PCI bus of the MicroA1 and at the same time leave room for that PCI slot to be left unused. Thoughts?

Anybody?

Quote:

But speaking about something completetly else, that extra IO board for the MicroA1 to be specific. Does anybody ecept me suspect that they'll make a custom riser card for the bog standard Theron Mini? That way they can ceep the costs down by using a standard motherboard, gain easy acces to the PCI bus of the MicroA1 and at the same time leave room for that PCI slot to be left unused. Thoughts?

I doubt it, I expect he is talking about a PCI card to fit in the one slot. If that is the true, then there seems little advantage to buying the MicroA1 (Unless the price is really good)

To be honest good Sir Atheist, the current chip industry will not be continuing it's current trend of ramp up the megahurtz, and everything is ok, AMD has been for a while doing better architectures to get rmoe speed, hence their PR ratings, Intel's new centrino, again is based around, better architercture, low power, low megahurtz, performance.

In todays indutry, raw megahurtz is mattering less, as there are other issues coming into play, the issue is not megahurtz. We want more performance, and performance, is never alone, there is always performance, vs, price, or performance, vs, power consumption, or performance verses temperature etc.

The megahurtz wars are over, and no one has really won, except perhaps the consumer, who has now got more possible options, and better products to choose from.

At the end of the day a system is not measured by how much memory it contains, or how many megahurts it can manage it is measured by how well it performs it's intended task. Amiga itends to do well by doing that, and so we may not be able to wear lycra posing pouches and shove the latest nvidia graphics cards down our pants, but we will be able to smile secretly, as our solution outperforms all others, because it is efficient and elegant.

I guess in the end, size doesn't matter, it's what you do with it that counts.

Quote:

AOS4 availability: beta planned to be available before Cristmas, great, I would be interested in BETATESTER Amiga system.

The solution is simple: buy an Earlybird.
Really that simple.

I believe that I have already heard that a RISER can be used in the Mini (Micro?).

Have a look at the A3000's ZorroIII implementation. . . . .

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-vortexau, who's A1 XE-G4 remains at half-RAM !
A2000HD (from 1991) 060 64Mb PicassoII with OS3.5 . . . still working.

Hi DaveP,

I apologize for my outburst, BUT:

I want what you want; the public at large to get the chance to own an Amiga!

But ibm is sitting there (using the same tactics they always have, i.e. pricing themselves out of the market (heck, any market)).

Let's see, "We have this really cool, ultra super chip (and it is), but, well, you see, it's expensive, we don't provide you with control chips, you have to custom design a board as well, you can't get it till later because we're filling huge orders to someone else (with deeper pockets) first, come back in a year at which time we reccomend it as a professional/server market chip (by which time the playstation III will come out with a chip that MAY be as powerful as the 970! Oh, and the professional/server market may have been saturated by the other company we've been selling the 970 to for a year now, so sorry), oh, and did we mention it's expensive?"

So, Hyperion'll start writing the 64 bit OS in Oct. next year, because, where are the boards it will run on?


AmigaTwo!

Well I guess you have to be a big enough fish to get attention from IBM on the 970 front. Apple is a big enough fish. Eyetech aren't.

The current Intel Roadmap calls for 4Ghz in 2004 with the new Pentium Prescott core. However, that may change.

I personally am a little bit disappointed that Eyetech isn't more agressive in hitting MAI up for an improved chipset with more modern features like DDR, AGP 8X, USB 2.0, etc. Sure, those are buzzwords. But they are also the buzzwords that sell computers.

To me I will get an AmigaOne most likely because of OS4. But, the hardware OS4 will run on is unimpressive and expensive. It just makes it all the more difficult to push the platform-- especially when you have someone like Genesi heavily competing for your initial target market with overall better hardware buzzwords (I'm talking of the soon to be available pegasos II board with DDR and Gigabit ethernet) and a comparibly good and compatible operating system.

If I were Eyetech...slipstream in minor improvements to the board design (like fixing that green tracewire on the motherboard to start), getting in the new Artricia chipsets (its taking MAI an AWEFUL long time to release an update to Artricia S...) and get that Micro and Mini A1 out ASAP.

Good show that they are pushing to geta beta version of OS4 out to Early Bird Adopters...They certainly deserve it after waiting so long for OS4 and having to fight through a buggy linux setup.

PS - Are the prices going to come down now at all? The A1 board is still very expensive...

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AmigaOS 4.x Beta Tester - Classic Amiga enthusiast - http://www.hd-zone.com is my Amiga Blog, check it out!

@Athiest

IBM sells through vendor chains as well as its own solutions, the
rating that you see on the 970s at the moment may not be the
same rating that they will be by 2Q or even 3Q this year by the
time that low volume resellers get a chance with them.

IBM /wants/ to sell chips, if there is a delay providing those
to some resellers it will be due to supply/demand priority issues
rather than any attempt to artificially throttle the market.

Finally, parts of IBM are as interested in OS4 and the new range
of low end PPC boards as you are

Dave.

@HammerD

Just in case anyone gets confused

Quote:

compatible operating system

MorphOS is not compatible with AOS4 and would require
a huge amount of work before it could be.

Dave.

Also IBM has apparently been having problems with it's fabrication process, not suprising as it's a relatively new area for them, so this may be causing a reduction in the number of 970's that they can produce.

Dave, you are correct. I was of course referring to OS 3.X 68K apps.

HammerD

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AmigaOS 4.x Beta Tester - Classic Amiga enthusiast - http://www.hd-zone.com is my Amiga Blog, check it out!

Doh!
Mental note: remember to ask "open" questions in the future.

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