Ease off bashing AmigaONE X1000?

[save2600]

X1000 bashing is the only reason I'm even aware the system sorta/kinda even exists.  lol

Too bad the cost of the damned thing (incomplete or missing drivers, under powered specs, etc. aside), will forever keep it and the OS in an irrelevant state to most. Still, it's great to see legacy hardware such as accelerators for the 2000/4000/1200 coming out of the woodwork so people can try to afford one of these beasties.  

[SamuraiCrow]

The path to perfomance in this day and age is parallel processing.  A dual-core CPU in this day and age is pathetic in the grand scheme of things (although I'm still running on a Core 2 Duo on my Mac Mini and a dual-core Centrino for my Windows 7 laptop).  In order to get the level of parallelism out of a CPU, Hyperion's going to need to trash most of the compatibility argument.  This renders their efforts rather futile since Amigans are the only link to the past (other than the Legend of Zelda title  :laugh1: ).

If they were going to do a clean break, they should have done it early on.  Personally, I think that an FPGAArcade can beat the snot out of an X1000 if only its programmers could quit writing code in single-threaded C and instead write it in Erlang and have a compiler render to custom cores using VHDL as an intermediate representation for the FPGA.

FPGAs, despite their expense, are massively more parallel than a CPU can ever hope to be.  They are also more flexible and efficient than a GPU since it is more general-purpose than those parallel-pipelined beasties.  The time for dedicated silicon for specific features is quickly drawing to a close at the hands of field programmable gate arrays.

[cha05e90]

Still, it's great to see legacy hardware such as accelerators for the 2000/4000/1200 coming out of the woodwork so people can try to afford one of these beasties.  

Huh? Where's the A2000 accelerator? And I mean accelerator, not some underpowered completely useless 020 or 030? My last achievement was a used Blizzard 2060 which cost me 2/3 of a new Sam440ep. So much about "affordness".

[Fats]

@fats:
hmm, maybe im recalling wrong, but werent you once playing with an idea of getting an x1k?

Not that I remember but I may be getting old...
It currently is not in my plans but never say never. I have an A1G3SE though with OS4.0, Mac with MorphOS 2.7 thanks to some MOS enthousiasts and developing AROS on my x86_64 Linux machine.

[gertsy]

I've an idea.  If Bill M (He who shall not be named) is not dead, maybe we can get him to implement Olaf's business strategy to produce hardware to compete against the X1K and drive the price down resulting in a price war amongst the 200-2000 or so potential buyers. Market Frenzy!!!

IMO Trevor is a saint who believes in the Amiga and although I now don't have an intention of buying an X1K at least he's off his spotty behind doing something about the Amiga world rather than postulating precipitously about nothing while picking both blackheads and nose hairs complaining about reality. Get over it. move on!  
I'm ranting, sorry need a good nights sleep.

+1 Ease of anyone actually producing something new in the Amiga space.

The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge

[EDanaII]

What some people fail to understand about the X1000 bashing is that those bashing might actually like to be a part of the Amiga experience but are unwilling (too realistic) to pay that price.

I'd love to invest in Amiga again, but 3k is out of the question. Same goes for those Same machines at a 1k.

I happily invested in AROS because it was affordable for the amount of use I'd get out of it. I did the same for MorphOS for exactly the same reason. If that mythical AmigaOS netbook for around 300 smackers had showed had shown up, I would have gladly invested in it.

But 1k to 3k just so I can call myself a "true Amigan?" Sorry, it's not only a bad business strategy, it's just plain stupid and bashing it is perfectly valid.

Two cents...

[vox]

I happily invested in AROS because it was affordable for the amount of use I'd get out of it. I did the same for MorphOS for exactly the same reason. If that mythical AmigaOS netbook for around 300 smackers had showed had shown up, I would have gladly invested in it.
But 1k to 3k just so I can call myself a "true Amigan?" Sorry, it's not only a bad business strategy, it's just plain stupid and bashing it is perfectly valid.
Two cents...

No, its at least 250 euros for SAM 440 board to be able to use it.
Would love if it would be different, but it isn`t. Off course, if you wish
better hardware, cost goes higher.

Well, considering performance on Classics and  lowest SAM 440s of 500-600Mhz net book would be of limited use, even it would be affordable.

But we do hope for better lower end system. My vote goes for building a next Acube board and lowering price of SAM 460 Lite.

A-EON will remain in high end high cost region, kind like MacPros.

[wawrzon]

Not that I remember but I may be getting old...
It currently is not in my plans but never say never. I have an A1G3SE though with OS4.0, Mac with MorphOS 2.7 thanks to some MOS enthousiasts and developing AROS on my x86_64 Linux machine.

i meant to recall that at least one of key aros devs was intending to buy into x1k, maybe it was someone else. not that i d consider it a bad thing if there was aros port for x1k;)

[ElPolloDiabl]

Olaf may be doing things (his something) over on AROS.
I may have brought up the 'port it to another architecture' a few years early.
But in a few years there may be no more PowerPC chips being made. Are you just going finish there?
Why not take advantage of all the things you can do with ARM based systems?

I will wait the 'few years' quietly. I don't need an ARM based Amiga now, but if you get around to doing it, I would buy it.

[wawrzon]

IMO Trevor is a saint who believes in the Amiga and although I now don't have an intention of buying an X1K at least he's off his spotty behind doing something about the Amiga world rather than postulating precipitously about nothing while picking both blackheads and nose hairs complaining about reality. Get over it. move on!  
I'm ranting, sorry need a good nights sleep.

not to dimnish trevors achievements, but olaf is doing his share for the community as well, namely an aros68k distribution. and he was supporting many projects especially taking care of open sourcing essential software to preserve it for us, may sound not like much in comparison, within his abilities he is doing a lot and without any financial return.

we might open another thread about how bad aros(68) is and how messy olafs distribution is but funny enough none cares either way, even though almost all they want amiga on x86 and so on. i would welcome some criticism, because it means interest.

edit: ah, and ive seen critical threads on aros on several occasions, some aros fans may have been offended, but honestly, for me as aros supporter it was always an opportunity to find out problems and initiate improvements.

[wawrzon]

Olaf may be doing things (his something) over on AROS.
I may have brought up the 'port it to another architecture' a few years early.
But in a few years there may be no more PowerPC chips being made. Are you just going finish there?
Why not take advantage of all the things you can do with ARM based systems?

I will wait the 'few years' quietly. I don't need an ARM based Amiga now, but if you get around to doing it, I would buy it.

how often do you want to hear it yet? if you want the above go for aros. it is heading in the very direction you want. if you are not satisfied with aros as is, get involved with it. help out. program. port stuff. report bugs. you are free to do all that, unlike on os4 where you will never be let into the castle. get active instead.

[OlafS3]

not to dimnish trevors achievements, but olaf is doing his share for the community as well, namely an aros68k distribution. and he was supporting many projects especially taking care of open sourcing essential software to preserve it for us, may sound not like much in comparison, within his abilities he is doing a lot and without any financial return.

we might open another thread about how bad aros(68) is and how messy olafs distribution is but funny enough none cares either way, even though almost all they want amiga on x86 and so on. i would welcome some criticism, because it means interest.

edit: ah, and ive seen critical threads on aros on several occasions, some aros fans may have been offended, but honestly, for me as aros supporter it was always an opportunity to find out problems and initiate improvements.

thanks for nice words (even for the "messy" part :-) ). Your part testing AROS 68k on real hardware is very important too. Thanx for that.

the lack of interest is because most 68k fans do not realize how important AROS 68k will be in future. It is a standardized, extensible and opensource 68k platform. It will run not only on classic hardware and emulation (including AROS distributions) but also on new FPGA based hardware. So you can write a 68k software and it runs on all supported platforms. You miss functionality, it can be added. Most 68k fans only see it is it 100% compatible, answer No. Is it running as fast as AmigaOS, answer No. Then they say no interest. That is shortsighted from my point of view but it is how many people think. That will not change before software will exist for AROS 68k that is not available for any other 68k platform.

[Thorham]

Is it running as fast as AmigaOS, answer No.

That problem can be solved by hand optimizing the compiler output, so that's not necessarily an issue. It can also be solved by reimplementing AROS in assembly language (probably the best way). Yes, quite a chore, I know

[OlafS3]

I read from Tony that part of the problem is that GCC 68k is less optimized nowadays what makes AROS slower.

Yes Assembler would make it faster (a lot) but who does that. At the moment only two people with limited time are involved on system level (Toni Kickstart Replacement and Jason AROS 68k).

[wawrzon]

That problem can be solved by hand optimizing the compiler output, so that's not necessarily an issue. It can also be solved by reimplementing AROS in assembly language (probably the best way). Yes, quite a chore, I know

it isnt necessary nor possible to rewrite whole aros in asm to gain speed. aros needs to be platform independent and portable and therefore source needs to be kept in a high language for the most part. but critical parts are in assembly already, or may be yet replaced by such where it is necessary.

also there are initiatives to rewrite and optimize essential libraries in asm, consult eab for that. (f.i. peters keunecke icon.library:
http://aminet.net/util/libs/IconLib_46.4.lha)

however toni wilen confirms that this work on details is mostly of minimal influence for the whole especially in comparison to effort. i can confirm it from own experience when testing and helping alain thellier to improve storm mesa (68k). i dont remember which compiler exactly he has used, i guess it was gcc3.4.0 (which is particularly bad, current 4.6.x versions, used for aros, are better again). alain let out the genuine asm inlines, because they were not compatible with gcc, but it had no negative influence on overall speed afair.

[OlafS3]

it isnt necessary nor possible to rewrite whole aros in asm to gain speed. aros needs to be platform independent and portable and therefore source needs to be kept in a high language for the most part. but critical parts are in assembly already, or may be yet replaced by such where it is necessary.

also there are initiatives to rewrite and optimize essential libraries in asm, consult eab for that.

however toni wilen confirms that this work on details is mostly of minimal influence for the whole especially in comparison to effort. i can confirm it from own experience when testing and helping alain thellier to improve storm mesa (68k). i dont remember which compiler exactly he has used, i guess it was gcc3.4.0 (which is particularly bad, current 4.6.x versions, used for aros, are better again). alain let out the genuine asm inlines, because they were not compatible with gcc, but it had no negative influence on overall speed.

I think he not meant to rewrite whole Aros in Assembler (only critical parts)