Two New Full Systems Based on Sam440ep-Flex

[runequester]

Aren't the SAM boards for embedded industrial stuff originally?

I imagine the OS4 stuff is a side business, but if it's moving some product, why not?

[itix]

I think ACube get most of their money from the OS4 community and the embedded systems combined. I don't know - or pretend to know - what they're doing, but I do know that if the 440 hadn't been a success, there wouldn't be the current run of 440s, let alone the 460.

Success in embedded industry sales or in OS4 sales? This could be n'th batch but it could be only small fraction is sold to OS4 community. I dont know. And it is not even important. But I wouldnt gauge it with marketing buzz words.

[Iggy]

I'd rather get the 460.

Seconded, the 440 is just too underpowered.

[Digiman]

Price per megahertz the x1000 seems better value to me

[Duce]

How many people claiming the 440 is too underpowered have even tried one?

I mean it's no powerhouse, but I've only ever had ONE SINGLE time where I wished my 440ep had more grunt, and that was with Blender.

Then I realized that buying a PPC board to do actual production rendering tasks on would be complete stupidity, and I rendered the scene on my PC within 1.5 minutes.

I'm quite happy with my old 440ep with dual SATA SSD's, but I guess I don't ask a heck out of a lot of it.  It runs my BBS and compiles code like a champ, and is cool and quiet as a churchmouse in the process.

[spirantho]

Exactly. My Sam 440ep is a lovely little machine. It's slow running Timberwolf, but that isn't finished yet and it's well known there's no speed-up optimisations in it, so of course it's slow. You can have a lot of fun with it.
What gets me is the irony... in the past I always had to convince PC users that you didn't need a lot of megahertz to have fun and get things done, and they didn't understand. Now it seems like many Amiga users are the same as PC users, despite the fact many of them have classic machines up to 50MHz that they still enjoy. The main reason for buying super powerful PCs is to play games ... but we don't have those games anyway so we don't need the power. Yes the power is nice, but it's far from necessary.

You don't need a ton of power to enjoy computing- the Sam range is good evidence of this.

[itix]

@spirantho

When I had my Amiga 1200 with 040 clocked at 25 MHz it was not slow until I got a taste of Peg1 clocked at 600 MHz. Just like when I got my first full HD capable monitor for Amiga there was no way going back to smaller resolutions.

[WolfToTheMoon]

Exactly. My Sam 440ep is a lovely little machine. It's slow running Timberwolf, but that isn't finished yet and it's well known there's no speed-up optimisations in it, so of course it's slow. You can have a lot of fun with it.
What gets me is the irony... in the past I always had to convince PC users that you didn't need a lot of megahertz to have fun and get things done, and they didn't understand. Now it seems like many Amiga users are the same as PC users, despite the fact many of them have classic machines up to 50MHz that they still enjoy.

I think the real problem is the price, rather than performance. If it was 200-300 euros, than it would make sense. 1000 euros is just too much, given the performance and age of the machine.

For that money you can have 2 Open Pandoras, which are not mass produced and are made in Germany, so are well suited for comparison. And the latest 1 GHz model is probably even faster than SAM440. Remember, Open Pandora has an LCD screen and a battery, making the comparison for SAM440 even worse.

[slayer]

Doesn't everyone own 3 SAMs?

How strange

[Digiman]

I already have a 500mhz PPC Machine (Mac Sawtooth) and it is too slow to even play Youtube videos. That machine cost me £5 so what would I do with a £800 machine that can't even be used to list up my ebay auctions and watch the odd Commodore gameplay video let alone record them and convert them to FLV for upload myself.

For £800 I expect enough CPU grunt to play 1080p video and 5.1 AC3 sound together @ 24fps. I expect it not to hang itself as soon as a complex webpage is loaded on a modern browser. I expect it to run Super Stardust AGA in 48khz 16bit quality upscaled audio without dropping a single frame in 1280x512 in 24bit colour mode on the desktop.

*pass*

[Duce]

Don't care for 'em, don't buy one, lol.

As far as requiring being able to watch HD video, it could also be argued that virtually any free with contract smartphone can do that better than any Amiga-like OS variant/hardware can.

I've got an AROS box, a MOS box, and OS4 box - and my Galaxy S2 ($0 on contract) work phone can watch youtube vids at 720p better than any of them...

[Cool_amigaN]

If you are going to compare (any) AOS4 system to general computing in terms of price and performance, it will always be expensive. No matter whether it costs 1.000 or 100 euros. Because there are devices that feature more horsepower (let alone software) in most technological sectors (from desktop to netbooks). It's kinda of unfair, imho. Of course, the same remains up to a point for MOS as well, the main difference is that there is a huge internal price/performance difference between OS4 and MOS. But strictly speaking, when it comes for the exact ratio that bangs the buck, AROS is the only answer.

Now, for the people claiming that 440ep@667Mhz is enough, I got news for you. My 5 years old mobile phone (!) (MotoZ6) plays in a much better fps rate prBoom and almost all emulation packages. Let alone having Opera mini browsing in bloatware websites in contrast to the ****ty TW that renders pages in 56,6k times.. Even Battle for Wesnoth shutters/crawls when moving on map >15 units... and I am not even starting to name the notorious 3D performance (LOL).

[Crumb]

Are these good news? Sam440ep is:
-expensive (more expensive than Peg2/G4 when it was released)
-slow (much slower than Peg2/G4 when it was released)
-old (Sam440 was already quite slow)

It's amazing ACube still tries to sell such an old machine.

[ElPolloDiabl]

AROS gets a lot more bounty money. It has a lot more developers working on it.
Why not switch?
The retro collectors are happy paying a thousand for an Amiga with low power, but people trying to use them are as sad as can be. (Because of limited software or incompatibility).
I flipped off Windows Vista and Windows 7 because I can't stand them and there was incompatibility with a lot of my software.

You should consider porting the handful of programs that you need to AROS.

Even if Power PC trundles along the market is so small the machines will continue to be very expensive. To me not worth the money.
I can have AROS on my x86 machine (free) and also a powerful classic Amiga no more than $500 in cost (with 030 or 040).

[A1260]

Aren't the SAM boards for embedded industrial stuff originally?

I imagine the OS4 stuff is a side business, but if it's moving some product, why not?

who is this mysterious embedded industrial buyers of the sam hw?...

i have always wondered that.... the money aint coming from the os4 community and the less than 100 people that have bought the sam and the x1000.

[Rob]

who is this mysterious embedded industrial buyers of the sam hw?...

i have always wondered that.... the money aint coming from the os4 community and the less than 100 people that have bought the sam and the x1000.

If you can get access to the OS4 sales figures it shouldn't be too hard to find out who their embedded customers are.