Lwanmtr wrote:
Because, quite simply..Amiga has always been the best, and it still can do things that pc's and macs cannot.
I not only use a 4000t based flyer, but also a Dual 1ghz Mac, and I can do easier editing on it..and I can do live video switching..unlike Mac and premiere.
This is, of course, because the Toaster can do a lot of work in the 'analog' ('physical'?) domain, while on the Mac or most other solutions, you're stuck digitizing all your streams before you do anything - even basic switching has to occur in the 'virtual' domain.
Perhaps unfortunately, we're entering a world where it's digital from the camera (DV tape, Firewire) on through to the output medium (DVD, DTV), so the Toaster is like owning a really great Hasselblad, Mamiya or Leica - stunning, and capable of great art, but in a medium that's (wrongly!!) becoming even more outmoded than film.
Anyhow, the PowerPC does have a few inobvious benefits, which others have pointed out before. For one, if we *are* resuscitating the AmigaOS while trying to keep true to it, at least it shares the endianness, and a few other porting niceties. Someone once brought up a fairly big inobvious advantage in context-switching latency (something to do with which registers need to be flushed/reloaded when, but I can't recall what... little help?), and Altivec does tend to be an equalizer when considering performance vs. x86.
For the direction we've gone in, PowerPC probably is one of the better matches for what Hyperion is doing... If anything, MorphOS had a greater chance to break away from the 'expensive, underpowered' hardware, but they didn't, for many of the same reasons - endianness, some hope of compatibility/portability with existing Amiga PowerPC solutions, and of course, the teams that became Genesi have been in the hardware game even longer than our current AInc.
Look at it this way - the original Amiga had a 68000, then a pretty 'standard' alternative chip, selected by Apple, Atari, Tandy?!, and who knows how many others. As downtrodden as PowerPC's been recently, it's still the closest viable alternative (and makes sense over x86 for the above reasons). Meanwhile, it *would* be fairly impossible to create a competetive, groundbreaking systems architecture from scratch - you'd need the resources of an nVidia or ATI... to look at it another way, the commodity market has caught up and surpassed "Amiga" levels of performance. So, if you argue that all today's machines are practically Amigas - mindblowing graphics chips, 24-bit audio, PnP buses out the wazoo - that leaves one element left, the OS...
...and you've got two to choose from, plus AROS (on x86!) if that floats your boat. If you could care less, or are happier with Windows, Linux, BSD, Be, whatever... then by all means, use those instead; some of us just still want something more tuned to our sensibilities.
