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Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: Middleman on December 09, 2011, 09:19:19 AM
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...do you think it's possible? Discuss!
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The chip is basically junk. It was designed with the idea of having the gfx processing done on the CPU... But it didn't really work and needed a proper GPU to go with it. At 6 years old, I'll bet the new quad core ARM SoCs would out perform it using much less power.
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In theory anything can be done. In practice, more chance of snow falling upwards. I would be more concerned with the market forces on this issues than the technical ones to be honest and the technical issues aren't small. A CELL based Amiga would be awesome but the only chance I could see for it would be Sony buying Hyperion, I can't see that happening. Perhaps if Sony had left the "other OS" option available on the PS3 then maybe, just maybe.
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The chip is basically junk.
LMAO, not a fan then?
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The chip is basically junk. It was designed with the idea of having the gfx processing done on the CPU... But it didn't really work and needed a proper GPU to go with it. At 6 years old, I'll bet the new quad core ARM SoCs would out perform it using much less power.
The CELL isn't that bad. It's true that they originally wanted to use it for rendering and for various reasons that didn't work out. It's also a bit of a nightmare to make use of all the power available, so most people don't bother. The 360 with 3 of the PS3 CPUs is easier for programmers to get to grips with.
The irony is that the PS1 was successful because it was easier to program than any console that had come before. The PS2 and the PS3 have become harder to program right when Microsoft joined the industry & they know the importance of making it as easy as possible for programmers.
ARM processors aren't particularly impressive, they are low power but they are also slow. I prefer Intel Atom. A trapdoor atom card would be awesome.
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...do you think it's possible? Discuss!
It's not the most impressive chip unless you make use of the SPUs - and these days you would be better off getting a port of OpenCL going and using a standard GPU.
The actual CPU is quite slow per clock, only made up in part by it's high clocks. It might run at 3.2GHz but it performs like a contemporary 1.6GHz CPU. It does have the ability to run two threads at the same time however, but that's not much use for AmigaOS currently.
One thing that isn't considered is that the chip has gone through several shrinks, so it may be able to run at significantly more than 3.2GHz now.
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The chip is basically junk. It was designed with the idea of having the gfx processing done on the CPU... But it didn't really work and needed a proper GPU to go with it. At 6 years old, I'll bet the new quad core ARM SoCs would out perform it using much less power.
Hmm I doubt it. I personally think that there's still some life left in the Cell, especially when its been upgraded to the PowerXCell 8i. Consider that the Zego server is able to display at 4K, that's still something quite powerful and something an Amiga user 'could' put to full use...
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ARM processors aren't particularly impressive, they are low power but they are also slow. I prefer Intel Atom. A trapdoor atom card would be awesome.
Atom - now that's a true bit of junk.
Anyway, Hyperion haven't got the resources to port AmigaOS to another platform, so x86 and ARM are currently out of the question.
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LMAO, not a fan then?
Yeah, that did come across as a bit harsh... But yeah, I'm not a fan, the actual CPU core is pretty weak and of little use for desktop work.
The Xbox 360's CPU is better, but no AmigaOS can handle multiple cores (due to an architectural limitation, that was designed into the OS from the start), so wouldn't be much use either...
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ARM processors aren't particularly impressive, they are low power but they are also slow. I prefer Intel Atom. A trapdoor atom card would be awesome.
The Atom uses quite a bit of power for its performance... I would choose The ARM in almost all situations... Despite the obvious advantage of having x86... That said, I would take either an ARM or Atom trapdoor CPU card :)
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Atom - now that's a true bit of junk.
Anyway, Hyperion haven't got the resources to port AmigaOS to another platform, so x86 and ARM are currently out of the question.
Which is why they don't deserve the IP for AmigaOS.
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...do you think it's possible? Discuss!
CELL is not ideal for OS execution because the SPUs are weak. Xenon (3 main CELL cores) is better and cheaper.
Someone may know this......do IBM produce any regular G5 PowerPC servers (or did so in the past)? Also do IBM currently sell any servers using the Xenon (CELL derived) CPU?
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I actually contacted IBM to inquire about the Cell BE.
In the end, I was exchanging messages with some of the engineers and the head of the department that developed the processor.
IBM position is that the processor has not been documented for general uase, but that they are willing to work with qualified customers on projects that they see potential in.
That said, the Cell's in order instruction execution lowers its performance per cycle when compared to out of order processors and with its accessory processors (the SPEs) the Cell can be difficult program for.
Other PPCs from Freescale and Applied Micro make more sense.
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Off topic alert -
Sin after sin, I have endured. Yet the wounds I bear, are the wounds of love.
God bless K.K. Downing!
Whey hey - Judas Priest fan eh?
One of the most underrated Brit metal bands ever!
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Yeah, that did come across as a bit harsh... But yeah, I'm not a fan, the actual CPU core is pretty weak and of little use for desktop work.
The Xbox 360's CPU is better,
You do know that it's the same CPU? The 360 has 3 of them, while the PS3 has one plus the SPE's. The book about how the CPU was designed is a very interesting read.
But yeah, it's a high clock speed that doesn't necessarily translate into high speed.
The ARM uses less power and achieves more work per clock, but the atom can be clocked higher. Software compatibility on the atom more than makes up for it's drawbacks, especially on a desktop machine where power the power is less of a concern. Even on battery my atom netbook lasts 10 hours, which is more than enough.
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The ARM uses less power and achieves more work per clock, but the atom can be clocked higher. Software compatibility on the atom more than makes up for it's drawbacks, especially on a desktop machine where power the power is less of a concern. Even on battery my atom netbook lasts 10 hours, which is more than enough.
Software compatibility? For AROS, sure, but not for AmigaOS! Other operating systems - Linux is on ARM and x86, Android is ARM and soon x86.
Samsung will have their 2.0GHz ARM Cortex A15 dual-core out early next year - that will outperform even the fastest Atom (event the 2.13GHz ones). The ARM ecosystem is simply far more interesting at the moment.
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Software compatibility? For AROS, sure, but not for AmigaOS! Other operating systems - Linux is on ARM and x86, Android is ARM and soon x86.
Samsung will have their 2.0GHz ARM Cortex A15 dual-core out early next year - that will outperform even the fastest Atom (event the 2.13GHz ones). The ARM ecosystem is simply far more interesting at the moment.
AROS is also available for ARM :)
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Software compatibility? For AROS, sure, but not for AmigaOS! Other operating systems - Linux is on ARM and x86, Android is ARM and soon x86.
Samsung will have their 2.0GHz ARM Cortex A15 dual-core out early next year - that will outperform even the fastest Atom (event the 2.13GHz ones). The ARM ecosystem is simply far more interesting at the moment.
Android has been on x86 for ages.
Next years ARM might beat this years atoms, but next years atoms will be better.
X86/x64 binary compatibility is more interesting to me, so ARM would have to come out with something amazingly better for me to even consider it.
ARM and Linux is fine for devices like NAS or TV etc, running Windows 7 on my A1200 would rock (ideally you'd have a graphics chip built into which ever cpu you had in the trapdoor).
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The sad thing is that the Atoms that have on-die graphics are using some pretty old tech - PowerVR SGX535s or 540s I believe - think iPhone 3 but running a bit faster.
The PowerVR 6 series is far more advanced, as is the ARM Mali T604. You might even get drivers for the latter, good luck getting open source drivers for the PowerVR on Atom chips.
As regards to next year's Atoms ... Cedar Trail is next year's Atoms now, delayed several months already because Intel can't get the graphics drivers right.
Nah, I'll stick with the proven ARM tech myself. I don't need x86 for anything. Windows 8 will come in an ARM variant if you really want to run that.
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I'm no expert on the subject, but the Cell architecture just looks unnecessarily complicated. Software-directed caching means you really need to know what you're doing and have a good compiler - and while that more or less works for a system that's fundamentally only going to be running one program at a time, trying to coordinate that extra complexity across a whole desktop OS's worth of different programs and threads sounds like a nightmare if I ever heard of it.
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Software compatibility? For AROS, sure, but not for AmigaOS! Other operating systems - Linux is on ARM and x86, Android is ARM and soon x86.
Samsung will have their 2.0GHz ARM Cortex A15 dual-core out early next year - that will outperform even the fastest Atom (event the 2.13GHz ones). The ARM ecosystem is simply far more interesting at the moment.
Windows 8 will also have a release on ARM.
But both are to pedestrian compared to £400 i7 PC right now let alone in the future years.
IMO just convert OS4 to x86-64bit and be done with it.
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Off topic alert -
Sin after sin, I have endured. Yet the wounds I bear, are the wounds of love.
God bless K.K. Downing!
Whey hey - Judas Priest fan eh?
One of the most underrated Brit metal bands ever!
Absolutely one of my favorites!
Just saw them in Reading PA.
I was worried that K.K. Downing's departure would really messy up things, but Ritchie Faulkner pretty good (he's not Kenny, but he's really enjoying himself).
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...do you think it's possible? Discuss!
A CELL trapdoor accelerator for an A1200 would be awesome.
Difficult to program or not the SPUs would make up for AGAs missing features! Maybe it could do C2P really fast
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The actual CPU is quite slow per clock, only made up in part by it's high clocks. It might run at 3.2GHz but it performs like a contemporary 1.6GHz CPU. It does have the ability to run two threads at the same time however, but that's not much use for AmigaOS currently.
Bingo, the Cell is significantly less powerful then most out of order PPCs on a per clock cycle basis.
I'm no expert on the subject, but the Cell architecture just looks unnecessarily complicated. Software-directed caching means you really need to know what you're doing and have a good compiler - and while that more or less works for a system that's fundamentally only going to be running one program at a time, trying to coordinate that extra complexity across a whole desktop OS's worth of different programs and threads sounds like a nightmare if I ever heard of it.
I've made that argument before. Standard PPC architecture is basically RISC. Adding SPEs and coordinating the PPE with all those coprocessors makes things way too complicated.
Personally, I want to see Freescale's T5040 (@2.5 GHz or above).
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Cell was designed for heavy duty processing at low cost and relatively low power.
At that sort of thing it was *incredibly* fast. On HPC benchmarks it was getting 30x gains over x86 processors. On FFTs it was beating the P4 by 100x.
On the things it's designed for it's probably still competitive with top end x86 processors.
I have a dual core i7 MacBook Pro and I wish it had a Cell - for the audio apps I use (e.g. soft synths) it'd be far faster.
The PPE is a G4(ish) class processor, it's in-order so performance is rather erratic (it's faster at some things slower in others).
The SPEs are DSP like cores. They require more involved programming but it's not exactly brain surgery (it's a variant of AltiVec code). It's easier to get something up and running on the XBox 360 but to get high performance it's no easier - you use exactly the same techniques you use on the SPEs.
Cell is rather dated now but it fitted into the Amiga model very well. If you remember the Amiga was powerful because of it's chipset. The SPEs would work in much the same way. The main CPU would run most stuff but hand the heavy lifting to the SPEs.
However after Sony's lies about keeping their platform open, there's no more low cost Cells. There's no point even looking at them now.
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At 6 years old, I'll bet the new quad core ARM SoCs would out perform it using much less power.
The Tegra 3 has less compute resources than a single SPE so I think that's rather unlikely.
However, it's not that far away...
The A15 is likely to be faster than the PPE on general purpose code.
On raw compute performance you'll need a GPU. ARM's Mali-T658 has a peak compute rate higher than Cell.
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Windows 8 will also have a release on ARM.
But both are to pedestrian compared to £400 i7 PC right now let alone in the future years.
IMO just convert OS4 to x86-64bit and be done with it.
Maybe, but what about Amithlon?
Apparently there's an 'Amithlon Revival Project' going on right now....
> http://code.google.com/p/amithlon-revival/
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Cell was designed for heavy duty processing at low cost and relatively low power.
At that sort of thing it was *incredibly* fast. On HPC benchmarks it was getting 30x gains over x86 processors. On FFTs it was beating the P4 by 100x.
Thank you for being the voice of reason minator, people have short memories it seems. Cell wasn't designed to be a general purpose desktop CPU, but rather one specialised for certain tasks. Anyone remember the supercomputer clusters being built out of PS3s (when running Linux out of the box was a possibility)? People didn't just do that because they could, they did that because it was a cost effective way of getting a lot of computing power, for certain tasks.
FWIW, I don't own a PS3, I just found most of the posts in this thread devoid of understanding, and was pleased to read that at least one person had some semblance of knowledge.
The irony is that the PS1 was successful because it was easier to program than any console that had come before.
You say this as a games developer do you? From what I've heard, PS1 was not easy to program for, easier than the Saturn, but otherwise not easier than what came before.
Thing is, my view is backed up with evidence. Compare the early PS1 games to the later ones, e.g. Tekken 1 vs. Tekken 3:
(http://www.fightersgeneration.com/np5/gm/t1-s6.jpg)
(http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_a6G8abHacus/THCZXjVfV8I/AAAAAAAAAX4/ibrKzQyJC50/s1600/2.jpg)
Of course, for any console, more of the power is unlocked over time as people learn how to get the best out of it, but the time it takes to unlock this power is a measure of how hard the device is to program for. If the Playstation was easy to program for, then you wouldn't see much difference in the launch titles and the later titles (look at Gamecube or Xbox 1 for an example of this). By many accounts, it took the release of a tool (the DTL-H2700 Performance Analyser, used in the development of games like Gran Turismo) before developers found out how to unlock the performance of the PS1.
Am curious to know how you got the opposite impression, so feel free to fill me in.
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Maybe, but what about Amithlon?
Apparently there's an 'Amithlon Revival Project' going on right now....
> http://code.google.com/p/amithlon-revival/
Not long ago I trawled the internet about Amithlon and found an interview with the creator. Was quite sad he felt the need to wipe the improved update.
Amithlon did more for reviving Amiga in its short life than Hyperion has done to date.
Today maybe it's impossible to genuinely revive Amiga because the software written for real Amigas, like browsers/codec support etc, is 15 years old. Does it matter even?
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...do you think it's possible? Discuss!
Hi,
No discussion needed, next monthe go to http://www.maximumpc.com and go back into their magazine archives, and read the article "The state of GPU computing". The reason I am telling you this, is because I know that most of you are to cheap to buy the mag, so you can read it for free, because they have it in pdf format on their website, why listen to a bunch of think it know it alls from around the world, when maximumpc puts it through it's paces and tells you tested results. In other words it is not hear say from a bunch of know it alls from around the world, some that have a hard time just getting electricity.
smerf
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I heard that Sony's Cell chip is partly inspired from some functions from SPARC and that it's an awkward hardware system.
Hell, I would rather want an upgraded CISC.
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Hi,
No discussion needed, next monthe go to http://www.maximumpc.com and go back into their magazine archives, and read the article "The state of GPU computing". The reason I am telling you this, is because I know that most of you are to cheap to buy the mag, so you can read it for free, because they have it in pdf format on their website, why listen to a bunch of think it know it alls from around the world, when maximumpc puts it through it's paces and tells you tested results. In other words it is not hear say from a bunch of know it alls from around the world, some that have a hard time just getting electricity.
smerf
Thanks Smerf, I'll have a look...
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The reason I am telling you this, is because I know that most of you are to cheap to buy the mag, so you can read it for free
Cheap! Yup, that's me, saving cash to buy the stuff I really want (like Natami). I'll give the link a read once I've had some sleep (only got 3 hours last night).
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Yeah, that did come across as a bit harsh... But yeah, I'm not a fan, the actual CPU core is pretty weak and of little use for desktop work.
The Xbox 360's CPU is better, but no AmigaOS can handle multiple cores (due to an architectural limitation, that was designed into the OS from the start), so wouldn't be much use either...
My thoughts are that If an OS can handle a single core then it can be architected to handle multiple cores. Even if it is via loosely coupled multiple OS instances running in there own segregated resource pools per task, it can still be done. With time and effort. The challenges would be around the integration of display and hardware access. But nothing different than the same challenges on virtual host OSes.
Imagine a multi threaded Amiga OS running on current CPU and GPU hardware and us doing the things that we do on Mac and PC today. Mmmm Power. I'd buy that for a dollar.
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My thoughts are that If an OS can handle a single core then it can be architected to handle multiple cores. Even if it is via loosely coupled multiple OS instances running in there own segregated resource pools per task, it can still be done. With time and effort. The challenges would be around the integration of display and hardware access. But nothing different than the same challenges on virtual host OSes.
Imagine a multi threaded Amiga OS running on current CPU and GPU hardware and us doing the things that we do on Mac and PC today. Mmmm Power. I'd buy that for a dollar.
==Exactly! That's what we need for today....
But what is it going to take for us to get there? The closest thing I can see right now (where we can truly run AmigaOS 'natively' on x86 hardware so to speak) is the Umilator/Amithlon project. But that's been on hold for so long (with its legal issues mainly between Bernie and H&P) it is literally killing the market (and the real future) of AmigaOS...
Sometimes I just wish in my mind all these people would 'grow up' and start acting civil for once. They need to understand that 'greed' is not going to get them anywhere, but only mutual respect, giving what others deserve, and through teamwork ie. collaboration. I look at the issue that because of greed, it has prevented any of the involved parties (H&P, Bernie, Amiga, Hyperion) from making any money the past decade. Have they thought about that? Not the greed itself, but the potential income they 'didn't make' because of a single argument or threats of legal action.
I would daresay the key to all of this mess lies with H&P. Had it not been their aggressive stance, refusal to pay Amiga Inc. and Bernie his dues, we wouldn't be in this mess today. If we were lucky we'd probably even see loads of Commodore retail stores, Commodore-branded tablets, systems and phones by this time now.....
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Unfortunately mutual respect 'aint going to make you rich. People don't want to be in for the long hall and a big R&D investment. Quick return is the way to go.
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Unfortunately mutual respect 'aint going to make you rich. People don't want to be in for the long hall and a big R&D investment. Quick return is the way to go.
The Amiga isn't going to make anyone rich these days. The best bet is to make specific hardware for a certain market and to also make it run AmigaOS as a side-benefit. Hence Linux PowerPC boards that can also run AmigaOS.
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I dunno guys from what I see there will never be a mainstream release of anything Amiga. I have no research to claim this, but I assume at some point... The Amiga must have been flagged as disruptive technology and permanently bought out and shelved from any significant developments.
I have seen this practice first hand where competitors buy out a technology or product or licensing category and kill it rather than try and compete with it.