Lets talk about A1222 - Tabor

[AdvancedFollower]

What really turned off my enthusiasm toward A1222 after AmiWest was general enthusiasm toward emulation of AmigaOS4.1 as a GOOD method of running AmigaOS. So, what is a point of developing ANY hardware for AmigaOS4.1? That was my impression.

I've been running AmigaOS 4.1 in WinUAE for a while, and I wouldn't call the experience "good". Biggest limitation is slow/limited I/O, and lack of hardware 3D and compositing. In terms of raw CPU performance, my Ryzen 1800X desktop is about 50% of the X5000 performance running Sortbench, but I/O and video are very slow compared to real hardware so the overall experience is slow, choppy and limited.

I think they're just trying to expand the reach of OS4 by having a cheap, convenient method of running AmigaOS 4. Plus the Alice laptop is nearly finished while the A1222 is not.

Of course in theory, emulation could be expanded until it becomes really good. Implement pass-through for the GPU and storage, with the only emulated part being the PPC CPU itself rather than trying to emulate a full A4000 with Blizzard PPC. But that doesn't seem to be the route they are going.

[AdvancedFollower]

Last I heard, NIC and sound drivers still weren't working as of late 2017. Either someone only works a few hours every month on those, or they have taken more man-hours to develop than the entire OS 4.1... :confused:

[AdvancedFollower]

One word explains the delay, DRIVERS! Most AmigaOne machines have historically been released with incomplete driver software for onboard networking chips and even sound chips! This time there is no space for a networking board to be added so the onboard chip HAS TO be supported from day one! This is not something anyone in the Amiga community can deliver quickly. The Prisma Megamix was delayed for months if not years due to drivers and that was just an add on board!

So what about the supposed cost savings from going with a small board without add-on card slots? Sure, this makes the board cheaper to produce, but driver development isn't free either.

[AdvancedFollower]

That is exactly what I was thinking. TWO years (2.5) of waiting for Tabor. There is plenty of LAN/sound cards that could be used. It almost looks like Tabor is dead , but I still hope it will be out.

In some way I like idea of small computers, but Tabor looks like to me, more and more underpowered etc. even for Amiga use.

I wish Tabor had some nice Radeon on-board. THEN that would be a nice, tiny Amiga for years to come.

The contract was signed at the Amiga 30th event in Peterborough, UK in August 2015.

Honestly, 2.5 years is way too long to wait for a NIC driver. The actual amount of code that has to be written isn't that great, and open source Linux drivers could probably be used for reference.

I work at a company that does software development (though I'm not directly involved with development myself), and they regularly complete major development projects in a few hundred to a thousand hours, which when split between a few people means a few months max. If we spent years on a single development project, we'd be out of business.
Either the person responsible isn't dedicating enough time to development (less than a few hours per week), or simply doesn't have the skills and experience necessary for driver development.

[AdvancedFollower]

http://amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2018-03-00028-EN.html

Ouch! I wonder if this is connected to the delay of the A1222...

[AdvancedFollower]

It's getting to the point where I'm surprised people are still interested / still waiting on it.  I've given up on a few other products like that - by the time they finally came to market my interests had moved on.

Yeah, I was really excited about Tabor when I first read about it in late 2015. Now it's 2018 and nothing much has happened. There's just no point in waiting any more, just move on to something else and forget about this pipe dream.