If the X1000 sells well and the XMOS technology is innovative and allows 3D rendering to be spead up we will add support for XMOS in Aladdin 4D 6.0 or 7.0. The original creator of Aladdin 4D Greg Gorby wanted to support the Transputer project which XMOS descends from. We will respect Greg’s wishes and take advantage of this cool feature of the X1000.
This would seem like a pretty poor use of the chip. You could possibly get some kind of speedup, but it would be a lot of effort, maybe for 1% improvement. Wrong tool for the job I think. But hey don't let my thoughts stop you, it might be fun to try anyway.
I can't see much use for the XMOS in this machine given it is fixed point and weak, but if I was going to use it, I would probably reserve it for OS functionality where it can increase responsiveness of the machine by not stealing significant time slices from CPU via interrupt routines or threads. Off the top of my head I can't even think of what those would be though where that would also be advantageous as I don't know what OS services take enough CPU to make it worth offloading. Perhaps the sound engine. And I'm not even sure the chip can run independently enough to give a speedup if the CPU needs to constantly page code on to it and stuff.
Perhaps it makes sense to let the chip run classic emulation routines. It might be interesting that the chip can support multiple threads with low latency, might make for interesting emulation of multiple chips at one time so that they almost appear to run concurrently.
Realistically I think any of what I just said is a waste of time though, even if X1000 had a large user base, writing code for the XMOS is probably a dead end because it isn't present in all Amiga machines, nor can we necessarily expect these chips to continue to get more powerful as CPUs do. A 5% speedup in the clock rate of the CPU in the X1000 should be more than enough MIPS to cover anything the X1000 would have done and render it pointless. Plus any code you write for the X1000 is going to be limited in performance to what the X1000 can do - if the sound engine did run on it, it would suck if it just crapped out at 20 channels of audio instead of being able to say handle up to 200 on the CPU.
