ddalley: I would like to know if the Amiga OS will be made compatible with this new Open Source platform.
Erm... Open Source?
Lando: I don't know whether the traditional sticker is obligatory but if so it may also mean Sony having to place a paper 'Amiga' sticker over the Sony logo on each PS3 sold so that people can pretend there are new Amigas.
What does Sony need with Amiga? If they're serious about an OS, they can make their own. Oh wait... they're just making yet another Linux distro. I guess they don't care. :roll:
minator: The last point is the difficult one as the Amiga partners seem to be allergic to this idea. The MOS team and AROS folks are just plain uninterested or unaware of just what Cell is or can do - Cell has some major architectural advantages which wont become apparent for a few years yet.
Yeah, like tons of vector power, but little scalar power. It would be similar to re-introducing math coprocessors (like what Ageia is trying to do, and will fail) or instead of making a dual-core x86 chips, you would have one puny x86 core and a lot of dedicated SSE cores. I can only imagine how Windows would handle that kind of chip without a major rewrite. :-)
It's a good idea, but the technical makeup of Cell is terribly imbalanced. Note that Sony originally thought they could use multiple Cell processors to replace the GPU. When real-world benchmarks weren't very good, they went with a more traditional layout, and the fanboy hype of distributed computing (and those idiotic schematics) pretty much died.
Nitro: Just download the CELL.library from Aminet and add to the LIBS directory.
Well, hey... there's your coprocessor. :-)
AmigaMance: Ok, i have noticed something in here and in another Amiga forum that troubles me. Why all the pointless and semi off topic threads are draws all the posts and attention while posts about a real Amiga problem does not?
Is this a sign of our times?
Good point. When both the old machines and the new "official" machines are at a dead end, people are going to talk a lot about unofficial new machines.
Personally, I'm more interested in software. But, that can't happen until people stop trying to force the idea of custom hardware. The computer world has always been trying to turn hardware into software. Why a lot of Amigans can't figure this out is beyond me.
Dammy: Like doing OOO? Oh wait...
Case in point. The instructions are the only thing I care about, because that determines what compilers and tools are available and how they are used. I don't care how the processor computes those instructions, becuase that's a hardware issue beyond the control of the developer. If it's strictly a hardware issue, it doesn't involve me, so why should I care? Just make it fast and cheap, and give me clean tools.
SamuraiCrow: Little-endian byte ordering must die first.
We'll be getting our Amiga8000 long before that happens. :-D
minator: Cell dropped it in favour of an architecture which can boost some algorithms by anything up to 10000%.
If you plan to write your own algorithms, you need to know custom VMX coding to use them, though. Older algorithms don't benefit, either, so you have to re-write a lot of stuff. Hence, the high costs.
DonnyEMU: People buy consoles to play games.
Yes. They also buy new game consoles to play new games. Backwards compatibility in the gaming arena is just a plus. Why would the typical PS3 customer be interested in Amiga?
Also, the limit to backwards compatibility is pretty much making things run at the same speed, but (sometimes) with higher resolutions, antialiasing, and the like. The compatibility modes are designed for games as well, not applications.
