PC still playing Amiga catchup

[Dandy]

The Amiga as we all know and love it is long dead as a serious platform. CBM saw to that back in the early 90's.

Hmmmm - how do you define "a serious platform"?
Unix workstations?
Wintel PCs?
Playstations or Wiis?

My POV in this regard is that Unix workstations and Wintel PCs (basically) are professional systems that companies need to get their work done. That's what I'd call "a serious platform".

But since more and more people bought Wintel PCs for their homes (fully understandable, as they needed compatible systems where they could continue to work on their job-related projects at home), they laid the foundation stone for todays quasi monopoly position of the WIntel platform by helping to pay the development costs of that platform that initially aimed at companies.

Playstations and Wiis exist to attract all the gaming kids to pull the money out of their pockets - I see them as "gaming platforms".

For me personally the Amiga platform represents the long forgotten "home computer".
I can't estimate if there is a chance today to "revive" the concept of "home computers".
It would require a powerful, cheap hardware (in the C64/Atari/Amiga-tradition) and a smart OS like AmigaOS 4.x - and most importantly it would have to provide full compatibility to the predominant office apps from the professional camp - be it that it just supports their formats, or that it offers a way to run that professional soft.
On the other hand - who wants to enhance a "home computing" platform today in that way that it's capable to do all the office stuff PLUS what people like to do at home - who has the money for it, given that the "professional systems" of today already underprice the "home computers" from back in the eighties by far and have long surpassed even the capabilities of the most promising of those "home computer" platforms - the Amiga?

Yes - the AmigaOS is by far better understandable and more clearly arranged than Windows from a users POV - but does this weigh out the enormous effort it would require to "revive" the concept of "home computers"?

I don't know...

[shoggoth]

Hi, you may or may not know about DisplayPort, it is designed to replace the DVI and the analogue VGA display interface. Here is a link to an article explaining it:

http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2007/10/22/displayport_a_look_inside/5

The best part is, it allows you to do picture-in-picture and split screen displays.
If Amiga was still running things we would have had that ability from the get go.

It makes you wonder what other things we missed out on in a PC (and console) dominated world...

Dude, even an Atari can do split screen, and all of that has been available to PCs since forever. Even the ET4k chipset supported hardware scrolling, the Mach 64 had a sophisticated blitter (think the ET4k had one too, albeit not as capable), and this was like - what - 15-20 years ago.

Take a look at modern PC architecture. Separate busses, accellerated graphics subsystems, bus master controllers, nifty DMA solutions. It's not like all sane hardware concepts died with the Amiga.

Having said that, of course the Amiga is a wonderful machine and is still useful to date. It should however be viewed in it's rightful context.

[Karlos]

I doubt you have hundreds of processes running your PC.

No, you are quite right, there were only four at any given instant in time, one for each core*. However, a quick ps aux wwwf | less showed over 150 launched processes at the time I wrote that post.

*not including the 24576 GPU threads that were also active:

[Karlos]

Oh by the way, PCs do slow down to a crawl because so much viruses/spyware comes into the PC easily because no one knows exactly which file is meant for what and whether it's in its original state or tampered.

Right. Do you even understand the difference between a PC and PC running Windows?

[meega]

What is a BIP?

[buzz]

karlos: that would never happen though, as it would require them to open their eyes, remove the fingers from their ears and stop humming.

[Karlos]

What is a BIP?

In the context of that display, "Billions of Interactions per Second", an "interaction" being the calculation of the change in velocity of a particle as a result of the gravitational force exerted on it and another particle.

The simulation is an all pairs n-body simulation. Each particle is simulated by a thread, all threads running concurrently (24576 being the maximum number of threads that can run on my GPU before it has to start switching between them).

[meega]

So, it's really a GIP...

[Karlos]

So, it's really a GIP...

Well, not really. I am reworking said example code into a charged particle simulation where each particle has a charge and mass. The force calculation then will be the Coulomb attraction between them. Unlike gravity, this force can be repulsive.

Also, the calculation is a bit more complex as I need one which has a maximum force potential at a distance equal to the sum of the radii of a pair of particles that becomes strongly repulsive at any distance less than that, regardless of the force potential (repulsive or attractive) at a distance greater than that.

I'm interested to see if such simulated charged particles of a given sets of mass, size and charge auto arrange in the way that ionic lattices do.

[meega]

The presence of GFLOP/s argues that BIP should be GIP (for consistency).

Is this one of your own coding projects?

[Karlos]

The presence of GFLOP/s argues that BIP should be GIP (for consistency).

Is this one of your own coding projects?

The example image isn't, it's a code example provided with the CUDA devkit. The simulation I just described is, however. I'm using the n-body gravity simulation as a starting point.

[meega]

Cool.

[Karlos]

Cool.

GPU Gems article here (pdf)

[AmigaHeretic]

GPU Gems article here (pdf)

Well, as a user of AROS, Windows XP/Vista, OSX, I have to wonder sometimes what Windows and OSX are doing sometimes.

You guys can laugh at that guy and make jokes all you want, but I think most everybody has the same experience on Windows/MacOS sometimes.  The experience where by you don't really have any of 'your' apps open, other than standard stuff running in the background, and you go to launch an app and while it's loading 'for whatever reason' the computer slows down.  Or you are just browsing the web and you go to launch another app and in Windows you go to the Start button, but it won't click, screens "freeze" i.e. where the shape of the windows is there, but the image is a partial of the last window that was behind/infront of it.  

I use Maya on OSX and while Maya is a fairly large program I often have to wait a "while" for firefox to start when I'm not even doing anything in Maya.


There's no argument,  I mean I've been around computers a few days.  Everyone experiences, certainly in Windows case, the randomness of the computer slowing/freezing for a few seconds when you are seemingly doing nothing.  

It obviously not that hardware.  I kind doubt it just sort of bottle necks it self for 10 seconds every now and then.  ;-)

But I've never seen any explanation for it.  


Sort of off topic, it's funny how we have delay built into things and we don't even realize it.  For example I got a new stereo for my car a month or so ago.  A Sony, nothing fancy, just a CD unit, plays MP3 discs, etc.   The tuner has 6 buttons for Radio presets, pretty standard.  But what is strange is when you hit the button, the next station plays instantly.  No 1/2 second silence then the next station.  It's just, push the button and there the next channel.  Kind of interesting, I never really thought about it.  Car stereo in our other car, home receiver, etc, all have a slight delay.

[Speelgoedmannetje]

In the context of that display, "Billions of Interactions per Second"

It means buttocks in Dutch, though....

[Karlos]

It means buttocks in Dutch, though....

That's good to know