Ease off bashing AmigaONE X1000?

[Blizz1220]

Even in the Commodore days, Amigas were considerably higher than that price for the low-end models. The only reason MorphOS is so cheap is because they're all mass-produced but obsolete second-hand models (and I mean that literally, not in a derogative sense).
Comparing Apples and Bananas again here.

No I don't think they are that much different ...

Motherboards based on say Sis 745 chipset or on Intel 945GZ chipset
are all the same even if they are produced by Asus,MSI,Epox,IBM or
anyone else ... PPC Chipsets in those old Macs are almost the same
thing as chipset used in AmigaOne x1000 ...

When you pay 3000 $ for it you are not supporting AmigaOS 4 developers , you are not supporting Trevor or Acube , you are supporting Freescale
and Varisys with that money because they will get the lion's share of
that price ...

I can see the need for having custom case,keyboard,mouse or even better having some cool piece of hardware like Catweasel or FPGA card designed
to give you Amiga experience , but I can see no rational reason why you
would want to reinvent the old Mac in the form of Amiga motherboard ...

[itix]

That motto was true just for lower end Amigas like A500,A600 and A1200 but they were always crippled for pro use unless heavily expanded, and prices of expansion and high end models were for the classes.

Actually Amiga 500 had better expansion options than Amiga 1000 that flopped due to its instability issues and high price. Expansion boards for Amiga 2000 were not that common and in practice it was on par with Amiga 500.

After all Amiga 500 received wide range of expansion options and they were relatively affordable.

[Blizz1220]

Actually Amiga 500 had better expansion options than Amiga 1000 that flopped due to its instability issues and high price. Expansion boards for Amiga 2000 were not that common and in practice it was on par with Amiga 500.

After all Amiga 500 received wide range of expansion options and they were relatively affordable.

Amiga 4000 was half the price of the 040 Mac and it was slighly less
expensive than 486 PC with the same speed with monitor hd sound card
and everything else ...

Amiga 500 which you could use without monitor,hd or sound card was
the cheapest thing available at the time that could be compared to
PC and Apple ... Except humble Atari ST with which you also got
a free monitor for the price of Amiga ...

[gertsy]

...Expansion boards for Amiga 2000 were not that common and in practice it was on par with Amiga 500....

Wha?

[gertsy]

Amiga 4000 was ...... and it was slighly less
expensive than 486 PC with the same speed with monitor hd sound card
and everything else ...
...

Not saying the statement's not true but comparing a plain hamburger from one shop against a hamburger with the lot from another shop and saying their price is the same is another "wha?".

[wawrzon]

yet again there is two major points surfacing to justify high proce of "amiga" hardware:
1. development costs, especially drivers. supporting further "amiga" develoment.
2. comparison to somehow interpreted prices of genuine amiga in its greatest age

ad.1:the development costs for such a board are considerable, no doubt, therefore it should be avoided. and in case it must be developed it should be best developed by genuine amiga-related companies like individual computers or perhaps acube (although it seems acube designs are based on reference designs anyway, correct me if im wrong). as someone else pointed out, "supporting further development" argument is not valid in this case. paing high prices we support uk military companies, not "amiga". thats where money goes (as example: the rediculous price of remaining stock of pasemi cpu).

as for driver support. sure i trust, it is a lot of work. but its surely less work to support particular narrowly chosen chipsets like those of sam series and x1k than the whole variety of them (it has been even used as genuine argument against x86 switch). yet there is aros support for a wide choice of devices and aros developers also support os4 and other alternatives with their development. instead hyperion has problems to deliver driver support for its own dedicated hardware and this task has been taken over by hardware vendors (trevor admits it). in all due respect to hans readeon drivers, i cant believe driver development is so much harder for os4 devs than for aros team, lat alone morphos.

ad2: amigas may have been expensive, still not so expensive in comparison to other systems of its age, considering their possibilities, others have told that. as soon as commodore amiga has lost its price/performance advantage and has been left behind the wide audience left, and even hardcore fans left one by one. trying to justify current prices by this failed politics that has lead to the decline of genuine amiga must be taken as a cruel joke, sorry. it only suggests it all being a dead end anyway.

i hate to repeat this over and over, but since others repeat their mantra too im left with no choice, sorry.

[Blizz1220]

Not saying the statement's not true but comparing a plain hamburger from one shop against a hamburger with the lot from another shop and saying their price is the same is another "wha?".

You're absolutely right and I should have posted in another thread ...

But I don't think it's that much different , computer is a computer and
040 was actually faster computer system than 486 (unless you bought
100 Mhz 486 with fast and expensive Edo RAM) and AGA had better
graphics capabilities than most VGA cards on the PC and it was just
as good as any Nubus Mac ...

Mac even got sued for claiming that Quadras (i think) had million of colors
when all it had was 256 out of millions (or thousands I can't remember) ...

Amiga 4000 was most advanced thing on the general consumer market for it's price tag when it came out ...

I will stay with post like this one out of this thread from now ...

[Megamig]

So the X1000 is the (Apple) Lisa of Amigas?

I agree that Individual computers are not the first to produce an Amiga accelerator but to imply that the ACA is not a 'new' design is ridiculous.

Jens is not producing Amiga products for charity and stores such as AmigaKit are not selling them at a loss.

So it goes back to my original argument which is if Individual computers are able to deliver products at a reasonable price why is that not possible when it comes to the X1000?

[Hans_]

So it goes back to my original argument which is if Individual computers are able to deliver products at a reasonable price why is that not possible when it comes to the X1000?

It's quite simple really. As impressive as Individual Computers' products are, their accelerators have a fraction of the complexity of the A1-X1000. They run at lower frequencies which makes design easier; the components are simpler, and they have fewer components. There is no way that you can compare an accelerator for a "classic Amiga" to a full ATX motherboard with a >1GHz CPU.

Hans

[takemehomegrandma]

Oh spare me the crap about how hard and expensive it is. I work at intel and see other engineers doing things here all the time for nearly nothing on hardware they just toss together to test ideas. As mentioned if the Raspberry-PI guys can build a machine as cheap as they do I dont want to hear how hard it is to get it done. I see it every single day I go to work.

Good. We are all eager to see someone (you) producing competition, a PPC board of any kind that will be supported by MorphOS/AmigaOS 4, including software support afterwards. Its always easy to say something someone else is suppose to do is easy.

"PPC boards" is a problem, not a solution!

[Hans_]

yet again there is two major points surfacing to justify high proce of "amiga" hardware:
1. development costs, especially drivers. supporting further "amiga" develoment.

That's just a reality of the situation, no matter who produces the hardware.

as for driver support. sure i trust, it is a lot of work. but its surely less work to support particular narrowly chosen chipsets like those of sam series and x1k than the whole variety of them (it has been even used as genuine argument against x86 switch). yet there is aros support for a wide choice of devices and aros developers also support os4 and other alternatives with their development. instead hyperion has problems to deliver driver support for its own dedicated hardware and this task has been taken over by hardware vendors (trevor admits it). in all due respect to hans readeon drivers, i cant believe driver development is so much harder for os4 devs than for aros team, lat alone morphos.

It isn't "so much harder for OS4 devs than for AROS or Morphos devs." With AROS there is also a significant lag between new hardware shipping and drivers being written let alone stable. Morphos support for hardware in old PowerPC Macs also took a long time. AFAIK, some Mac hardware still isn't supported yet.

Hans

[takemehomegrandma]

So it goes back to my original argument which is if Individual computers are able to deliver products at a reasonable price why is that not possible when it comes to the X1000?

It's quite simple really. As impressive as Individual Computers' products are, their accelerators have a fraction of the complexity of the A1-X1000. They run at lower frequencies which makes design easier; the components are simpler, and they have fewer components. There is no way that you can compare an accelerator for a "classic Amiga" to a full ATX motherboard with a >1GHz CPU.

Hans

"the A1-X1000 complexity" is a problem, not a solution!



Seriously, Jens Schönfeld makes his own HW, he has the competence and doesn't need to invoice the time spent to anyone, he sets his own price on the time spent. Trevor Dickinson doesn't have this in-house competence, hence he paid an enormous price for the X1000 development (can't remember the sum, but it was huge IIRC).

The Xena/Xorro probably didn't help. It definitely increased "the A1-X1000 complexity" (bigger PCB, possibly more PCB layers, more components, longer development time (all paid for!), more time for testing (also paid for!), etc, etc). And for what exactly? Nobody knows, not even Trevor as it seems. It was just a "cool thing" (really?) that nobody has found any use for.

Less is more when it comes to complexity!

[utri007]

It is true that 030 accelerator for A1200 is not comparable to X1000, it would be almost as expensive if Jens would do PPC accelerator with same prosessor.

But there is a point, it would be perfectly possible to produce Sam440ep Flex level mobo and sell it less than 100€. It would require order minium 10000 mobos to get price that low. I belive that  440ep CPU is less than 15€

[Hans_]

Seriously, Jens Schönfeld makes his own HW, he has the competence and doesn't need to invoice the time spent to anyone, he sets his own price on the time spent. Trevor Dickinson doesn't have this in-house competence, hence he paid an enormous price for the X1000 development (can't remember the sum, but it was huge IIRC).

Seriously, even if Jens designed something like the A1-X1000, it would still cost a heap more than one of his accelerators sub-100 MHz accelerators.

Hans


P.S. What you call "an enormous price" is what you can expect designing a modern motherboard to cost.

[wawrzon]

@hans
jens, judging by his posts on a1k, considers ppc cpu as not reliable and therefore not worth to base designs on. it might be suspected an excuse to cover his lack of development skills in the more complex and higher frequency area, but i dont think that it is.

jens has lately proposed (quite obvious) a concept of hybrid fpga/foreign cpu (in his case mips soc) accelerator/amiga. fpga taking care of amiga chipset legacy core, the foreign cpu running 68k emu/jit (?). his estimation at parts costs were 20 eur.

eh, edit: and observing jens development threads on a1k he is for one very responsive to public, his politics of disclosure and information is very convenient, there is almost never any flaw in it, and where it is it is being discussed openly. secondly one can see he is very reasonable about every single resource, he is considering every aspect of design, every development cost and every necessary and unnecessary part to keep his expenses as well as the retail price of the product down.

[takemehomegrandma]

Seriously, even if Jens designed something like the A1-X1000, it would still cost a heap more than one of his accelerators sub-100 MHz accelerators.

What you call "an enormous price" is what you can expect designing a modern motherboard to cost.

The Pegasos and the Pegasos 2 was dead-cheap compared to the X1000, heck, if memory doesn't serve me wrong it was even cheaper than the Sam (while being more powerful, and several years earlier). Those designs were complex and full-blown motherboards.

Just like Jens/Individual Computers, Genesi/bPlan also has in-house competence. But the thing is - not that many years ago, Genesi offered the community to actually *pay for development* of a new PPC motherboard!

The end product would have been:

   - Flex form factor - MPC8610@1Ghz (or faster if it is economically feasable)
- 4x SATA 2 connectors
- 4x USB2 ports
- 2x Gigabit Ethernet ports
- Sound ports (Audio Out, Mic In)
- 1 PCI slot
- 1 PCI-e slot 1x
- 1 PCI-e slot 8x

The financing of the development would take place through bounties over at power2people.org, it would be 6 phases (IIRC), the result would be completely open sourced and community owned. The final cost of all stages would be $60.000 IIRC (or was it EUR? Doesn't really matter for the sake of the discussion), and this would also include a Freescale sponsored developer program with free boards donated to interesting development projects (like Genesi/Freescale has done on several occasions before).

IIRC the general opinion in the community was that this was way to expensive, few people chipped in. Yet it would only have taken ~20 people paying the X1000 end-user price to finance the entire development cost. This wasn't a charity project, it was something Genesi would "invoice" the community, because they didn't want to invest anymore in PPC themselves.

And the X1000? Well, "Trevor said that it cost over US$400,000 to develop the X1000."
http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=36690&forum=2&start=80#685861

I see a difference!

And frankly, I am astonished that the plug wasn't pulled on this!

:confused:

(But I'm perhaps even more astonished that the Xorro/Xena is being done all over again!)