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Author Topic: Hyperion/A-EON introduce us to the AmigaOne X1000. A new beginning?  (Read 74539 times)

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Offline Haranguer

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Re: Hyperion/A-EON introduce us to the AmigaOne X1000. A new beginning?
« Reply #29 on: January 06, 2010, 08:15:09 AM »
I'm not expecting it to be cheap.  If it's too expensive, well, I can always get a second mortgage on my house ;-) I would consider selling my family into slavery to raise the money, but I don't think anyone would want them ...

Seriously, though, this is amazing news.  I haven't been this excited since 1985.
 

Offline koaftder

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Re: Hyperion/A-EON introduce us to the AmigaOne X1000. A new beginning?
« Reply #30 on: January 06, 2010, 08:19:18 AM »
Quote from: Haranguer;536715
I'm not expecting it to be cheap.  If it's too expensive, well, I can always get a second mortgage on my house ;-) I would consider selling my family into slavery to raise the money, but I don't think anyone would want them ...

Seriously, though, this is amazing news.  I haven't been this excited since 1985.


Do yourself a favor an stroke it for two jabs and release. We're just getting a new mobo with a faster ppc and some stupid processor on a bus that has 64k sram and doesn't do floating point in hardware.
 

Offline mingle

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Re: Hyperion/A-EON introduce us to the AmigaOne X1000. A new beginning?
« Reply #31 on: January 06, 2010, 09:24:27 AM »
@koaftder,

Don't be so damn cynical - it also has 10 of those new-fangled USB ports! :-)

Mike.
 

Offline xeron

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Re: Hyperion/A-EON introduce us to the AmigaOne X1000. A new beginning?
« Reply #32 on: January 06, 2010, 09:58:23 AM »
Quote from: LoadWB;536621
My biggest concern is hardware compatibility.  Those PCIe ports are great but ultimately meaningless if you don't have drivers for more than a mere handful of obscure PCIe expansions.


RadeonHD cards are obscure? ;-)
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Offline cv643d

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Re: Hyperion/A-EON introduce us to the AmigaOne X1000. A new beginning?
« Reply #33 on: January 06, 2010, 12:19:56 PM »
I am trying...  -really, really hard- not to say anything negative... I really am (believe me) :)

But so far (ok, its only been 1 day), I have not found a single reason why this X-chip will be of any benefit for an end user such as myself, I am no hardware hacker or programmer. It would be cool if you could implement the AGA chipset in the x-chip, but I guess 64kb is not enough for that?

The reason why its better to have a chip than software is that the chip is clock-exact, but I have not found a reason why having a clock-exact chip thingie on the motherboard is good to have when you are a desktop user.

ok.. .  I should not. ..    It's not as if I shit on this new motherboard, It is nice to see progress so that there are more alternatives to running Workbench..  

But if you somehow could implement an x86 core on the X-chip? Then you could run a Wine-like application in AmigaOS PPC "built on the true sources of the only Workbench source", you would be able to run quite a lot of apps then (that was actually one of my main reasons for wanting AmigaOS ported to x86, you would somehow probably be able to run Windows apps such as on the Mac with Paralells).

So, who is going to implement the 3GHz x86 core in the X-chip?
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Offline Tomas

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Re: Hyperion/A-EON introduce us to the AmigaOne X1000. A new beginning?
« Reply #34 on: January 06, 2010, 12:25:34 PM »
Quote from: cv643d;536732
I am trying...  -really, really hard- not to say anything negative... I really am (believe me) :)

But so far (ok, its only been 1 day), I have not found a single reason why this X-chip will be of any benefit for an end user such as myself, I am no hardware hacker or programmer. It would be cool if you could implement the AGA chipset in the x-chip, but I guess 64kb is not enough for that?

Software could be coded to take advantage out of the chip and this would be a benefit to users owning this system. You dont need to be a programmer to get some advantage out of the chip...
 

Offline xeron

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Re: Hyperion/A-EON introduce us to the AmigaOne X1000. A new beginning?
« Reply #35 on: January 06, 2010, 12:33:15 PM »
@CV643D

The biggest advantage is that its a cheap chip, so it won't add much to the cost of the board, so "why not". Since it IS a cheap chip, and any task you get it to do will likely be parallelised, you can scale up your process by throwing more cheap xmos chips at it via the xorro slot for an instant gain.

On the other hand, one nifty thing it could do is provide a Catweasel like floppy controller with nothing more than a passive adaptor from the xorro slot to standard floppy connector, for example.
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Offline cv643d

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Re: Hyperion/A-EON introduce us to the AmigaOne X1000. A new beginning?
« Reply #36 on: January 06, 2010, 01:03:46 PM »
Quote from: xeron;536735
@CV643D

The biggest advantage is that its a cheap chip, so it won't add much to the cost of the board, so "why not". Since it IS a cheap chip, and any task you get it to do will likely be parallelised, you can scale up your process by throwing more cheap xmos chips at it via the xorro slot for an instant gain.


x86 chips are cheap too, so why not add a socket 478 to the motherboard, then the cost of the x86 chip is in the hands of the owner of the motherboard (socket 478 chips are essentially free these days). With a slave x86 chip on the motherboard all kind of exciting things could have been made? Am I wrong here? Why not an x86 socket on the mobo too?

Or maybe you can do it with the x-connector? Ahh... I see now I understand ;)
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Offline Crom00

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Re: Hyperion/A-EON introduce us to the AmigaOne X1000. A new beginning?
« Reply #37 on: January 06, 2010, 01:41:49 PM »
Wish Hyperion all the best and hope to have one of these babies soon.
See yall when product ships.
 

Offline dammy

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Re: Hyperion/A-EON introduce us to the AmigaOne X1000. A new beginning?
« Reply #38 on: January 06, 2010, 02:27:04 PM »
Quote from: Tomas;536733
Software could be coded to take advantage out of the chip and this would be a benefit to users owning this system. You dont need to be a programmer to get some advantage out of the chip...


Exactly what are the benefits for this chip for the average computer user?  If you do not need to be a programmer to get advantages out of this chip, what can it do without code to run on it?  I just don't see it.  It's more like that useless FPGA for desktop that comes with the SAM440.  Best guess for the SAM440, it was intended for embedded and got shoehorned into being a new Amiga mobo.  I have a feeling this X1000 has the same history behind it, it was ment for the embedded market but now is being rebadged for Amiga market.

One has to wonder if the price for this X1000 going to be so high, it's going to increase Acube sales as it may then look like reasonably priced cpu/mobo?  Nice piece of marketing if that is the original plan.
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Offline wawrzon

Re: Hyperion/A-EON introduce us to the AmigaOne X1000. A new beginning?
« Reply #39 on: January 06, 2010, 03:22:33 PM »
sofar i have seen xmos chips might be used to controll lcd display modules, say large lcd displays could be controlled by clusters of these chips. if there is going to be any easy out of the box solution for achieving something like that using amigaos and this mobo (and maybe hollywood) it might be interesting for me. i see no other advantage atm.
 

Offline SamuraiCrow

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Re: Hyperion/A-EON introduce us to the AmigaOne X1000. A new beginning?
« Reply #40 on: January 06, 2010, 03:27:34 PM »
Quote from: wawrzon;536744
sofar i have seen xmos chips might be used to controll lcd display modules, say large lcd displays could be controlled by clusters of these chips. if there is going to be any easy out of the box solution for achieving something like that using amigaos and this mobo (and maybe hollywood) it might be interesting for me. i see no other advantage atm.

With a few custom interrupt handlers, anything interrupt driven will be accelerated by the new Xena chip.  The fact that it doesn't have to store its registers while processing those interrupts will make it preferred over other interrupt solutions.
 

Offline dammy

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Re: Hyperion/A-EON introduce us to the AmigaOne X1000. A new beginning?
« Reply #41 on: January 06, 2010, 03:29:48 PM »
Quote from: wawrzon;536744
sofar i have seen xmos chips might be used to controll lcd display modules, say large lcd displays could be controlled by clusters of these chips. if there is going to be any easy out of the box solution for achieving something like that using amigaos and this mobo (and maybe hollywood) it might be interesting for me. i see no other advantage atm.


Might be interesting to find out who originally produced this mother board and what they intended it to be used for.
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Offline jorkany

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Re: Hyperion/A-EON introduce us to the AmigaOne X1000. A new beginning?
« Reply #42 on: January 06, 2010, 03:37:15 PM »
Quote from: koaftder;536716
Do yourself a favor an stroke it for two jabs and release. We're just getting a new mobo with a faster ppc and some stupid processor on a bus that has 64k sram and doesn't do floating point in hardware.


I guess the intended solution to this is to add more XMOS chips. What I'm not clear on is how this is supposed to happen. You can't just attach a bin and dump a few chips into it, after all. Does XMOS sell a board that plugs into the Xorro slot? I doubt it. PCIe?
 

Offline wawrzon

Re: Hyperion/A-EON introduce us to the AmigaOne X1000. A new beginning?
« Reply #43 on: January 06, 2010, 03:47:26 PM »
@dammy: you imply that it was built as a controller unit already? one way or the other it doesnt bother me much, only if it could be of actual use for me like my a4k's and genlock equipped 1k2's were up till now, without thinkering with it too much.
@ samuraicrow: thats just too much detail for me. im just plain an artist.;/ but i have a friend who is able to build lcd displays, alas an ibm_pc freak. maybe i could convince him to use an amiga for my puroposes if this really had some technical advantage. guess here a-eon hardware prople are the only ones who might answer.

i must say at the beginning i thought this new design might be something what most amigans wanted, but now i hesitate again. i just dont see what an average user could get out of that.
 

Offline MskoDestny

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Re: Hyperion/A-EON introduce us to the AmigaOne X1000. A new beginning?
« Reply #44 from previous page: January 06, 2010, 03:53:04 PM »
Quote from: SamuraiCrow;536745
With a few custom interrupt handlers, anything interrupt driven will be accelerated by the new Xena chip.  The fact that it doesn't have to store its registers while processing those interrupts will make it preferred over other interrupt solutions.

I don't get the impression that it can handle interrupts on the main machine. It can handle changes to its I/O lines in an interrupt like fashion, but since all of its I/O lines are hooked up to the Xorro slot that presumably means that none are hooked up to the rest of the hardware on the board (which makes sense since the CPU is probably a SoC with most of the other harware like the ethernet, USB and PCIe controllers on the same chip). Presumably the connection between the XCore and the CPU is via the XCore's JTAG interface.

As a result, I doubt it will be useful for much without some kind of Xorro card unless you have some processing to offload that will fit in 64KB of RAM.