Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: BIG-IRON on June 01, 2004, 07:39:12 AM
-
The ulimate Amiga one deserves better hardware, like it or not the ppc/g-series is hardly what we shold be depending on. The Athlon 64/Opteron is the future even Intel has adopted AMD64 for its future instruction set, and as for speed the 64 is faster than cpus with almost 2 times the speed.
I worry that by going with the g-series the Amiga has chosen a loosing horse. If you think this is a raw speed choice when I say the 64 I would argue against that, the 64 is quite elegant do some research if you arent familiar with it. The 64 uses less power than the intel making it ideal for laptops and has the 64 bit instruction set, and its cheap at 200 bucks for the 3200. If I had my way the new Amiga would look like this. The parts listed below could be purchased from the pomona computer show for around 1,500 bucks (I actually just built this rig to run XP) so price is not a problem.
Athlon 64-3400
1 gig DDR 400 ram
2 WD Raptor 74 gig 10,000 rpm serial ata hd's in raid 0
1 WD 160 gig 7200 rpm hd for mass storage
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro or ATI X800 video card
Sound Blaster Audigy sound card
52x cd burner
8x dvd burner
Full tower with 450 watt ps
21 inch monitor (viewsonic etc) flatpanels still arent good for games due to slow refresh rates.
-
Intel sux HARD!
Everyone with a brain knows
G4 powerpc's architecture is miles ahead of intel.
they dont have the clock speeds
but they dont need it.
POWERPC kicks intels ass
-
Hello,
Yes I agree! Very powerful 3d graphics engine you got there. Though It reminded me of the first Amithlon came out using AMD CPU and Chipsets.
Price wise too. I'm just not sure if Linux runs best here? Then, Aros would be good running on it as well.
AMD is not INTEL, It is their competitor.
Good day to all Amigans! :-D
-
LOL umm yea and the Athlon 64 isnt Intel.....um did you even read the post?
-
Wooops hehehehe
Oh well AMD sux too.
Poo to intel and AMD.
hehehehehehe
seeee ya later amigans
-
by mikrucio on 2004/6/1 16:07:58
Wooops hehehehe
Oh well AMD sux too.
Poo to intel and AMD.
hehehehehehe
seeee ya later amigans
:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:
-
The ultimate Amiga One (what it should be):
Value for money
Not an overpriced headgehog (donno where that came from :lol: )
-
The ultimate Amiga One (what it should be)
/me thinks you are refering to a PC.
www.pc.org?
-
Also, 64-bit CPUs do not run twice as fast as 32-bit CPUs.
Infact, the move to 64-bit CPUs isn't a particularly required or useful upgrade right now, especially for the average customer. In a 64-bit length of code, some of it is the instruction, and the rest is the data to be processed by that instruction. In some applications, having a long data stream is useful, like say database processing, but for many other applications, small instructions regarding small amounts of data is the norm. Even a well-implemented 64-bit port of an application may not yield signifcantly better performance, because at the end of the day, the amount of 'work' hasn't increased (ie. a bigger calculation isn't necessarily a better thing).
There is also little or no support for 64-bit CPUs, and Hyperion does not have the time or money to take on a project where not only a move from 32 to 64 bit code is required, but a complete change of architecture is also required.
It would be nice if AmigaOnes were better value for money, but personally I would rather see them be more expensive and survive (in a business sense) for longer. I think time has yet to tell for the A1 or Pegasos.
-
I think the decision to make new amiga hardware based around the PowerPC processor was the right one.
I strongly believe these are the best processors on the market, quality wise, and through efficiency and speed.
It is also worth noting to traditionalists that PowerPC is the next natural step up from 68k. If Commodore didn't go under, we would more than likely be running PowerPC based Amigas today they introduced, probably not a far cry from today's Macs in terms of specs.
Secondly it is worth noting that the AmigaOne is not intended to be a mass market machine, it is just used as a machine which is more powerful than the old PPC accelerators which will run AmigaOS 4 and open a new path to expansion - classic Amiga hardware isn't going to be working forever, and I believe AmigaOne is a good machine to get the Amiga started into coming back, and into the 21st century.
These first of the new generation Amigas do not really need to be very powerful, it is just a starting block into hopefully getting the Amiga some commercial market recognition in upcoming years. Once Eyetech believe there is a user base, and indeed hope for our platform (providing we don't all grudgingly hold onto our old hardware and get AmigaOne's sooner or later) then they will start producing better machines aimed at the general public. The current generation of AmigaOne is NOT aimed at the public, it is aimed at the existing user base.
This should hopefully start to happen around the same time that Hyperion start work on AmigaOS 4.2, which is when it is speculated they are going to start developing for people outside the Amiga community.
AmigaOS 4 is just AmigaOS ported to native PPC for existing Amiga users.
And you can bet your bottom dollar Eyetech wont suddenly change processor after Hyperion and everyone going to all that hard work into getting AmigaOS onto PPC! :lol:
-
The X86 CPU has been push way to far and is at the end of its life. The PPC is much more advanced and had lots more room to grow. Its a great procesor when used. I has OSX panther running on a Powerbook G3 Pismo and it just flew. I think the decision still stands as good.
-
BIG-IRON wrote:
The ulimate Amiga one deserves better hardware, like it or not the ppc/g-series is hardly what we shold be depending on. The Athlon 64/Opteron is the future even Intel has adopted AMD64 for its future instruction set, and as for speed the 64 is faster than cpus with almost 2 times the speed.
I worry that by going with the g-series the Amiga has chosen a loosing horse. If you think this is a raw speed choice when I say the 64 I would argue against that, the 64 is quite elegant do some research if you arent familiar with it. The 64 uses less power than the intel making it ideal for laptops and has the 64 bit instruction set, and its cheap at 200 bucks for the 3200. If I had my way the new Amiga would look like this. The parts listed below could be purchased from the pomona computer show for around 1,500 bucks (I actually just built this rig to run XP) so price is not a problem.
Athlon 64-3400
1 gig DDR 400 ram
2 WD Raptor 74 gig 10,000 rpm serial ata hd's in raid 0
1 WD 160 gig 7200 rpm hd for mass storage
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro or ATI X800 video card
Sound Blaster Audigy sound card
52x cd burner
8x dvd burner
Full tower with 450 watt ps
21 inch monitor (viewsonic etc) flatpanels still arent good for games due to slow refresh rates.
Do I hear cursing in the church?
Where's the custom chipset? where's the dedicated h/w? where's the Motorola chips? Where are the innovative attributes?
-
@big-iron:
Writing any OS for x86 hardware is suicidal. If you don't believe me, then count the carcasses. If you only count the number of serious attempts to capture a piece of the market, the results remain bleak. Why is this the case? I have my theory: people tend to dual boot between the alternative and predominant OS on x86 hardware. Eventually, support dwindles for the alternative or the user gets tired of dual booting. In either case, the hardware serves as more of a migration path to the predominant OS than anything else.
The other fatal flaw is hardware support. Just because it runs on x86 processors doesn't mean that it supports the hardware which you would choose to run. Even rather popular platforms, like Linux, doesn't support everything -- and Linux has a large pool of developers and code to work from.
On the issue of speed, I would also argue that the problem is with software developers rather than the hardware itself. Yes, there are a few things which need fast processors (such as video compression and climate modelling). On the other hand, a lot of things shouldn't require much of your processor. (Consider how long it takes your web browser to render one or two pages of material -- if you think bandwidth is the main problem, try using an older computer.) If you don't think software developers are an issue, compare how long it takes to get things done on your 3.2 GHz monster and an A500. Is it really 400 times faster, as the clock speed suggests?
-
Hoya!
I agree with HopperJF.
"Speel
I dunno why but I LOVE your new avatar... ;-)
Be funky
M A D
-
MAD wrote:
Hoya!
I agree with HopperJF.
"Speel
I dunno why but I LOVE your new avatar... ;-)
Be funky
M A D
tnx :-)
I modified the original pic to fit as avatar.
here's the original:
(http://danwho.net/images/1bitch.jpg)
've had a good laugh about it :lol:
(our new lesbian members? ;-))
-
If Commodore didn't go under, we would more than likely be running PowerPC based Amigas
Well... Wasn't Commodore looking at HP-PA RISC? :lol:
-
Well... Wasn't Commodore looking at HP-PA RISC?
That was for the Hombre, not the Amiga and then only as a 3D accellerator.
The Hombre would not have been compatible with the Amiga, in fact the plan was to run Windows NT!
Windows NT??? Yes, many decisions in the later year years of Commodore were downright stupid (i.e. cancelling the A3000+).
-
My dream Amiga (or Pegasos for that matter)
High-end:
ATX motherboard with:
1 or 2 G5 CPU
DDR 3200 slots
AGP 8x port
5 PCI ports
SATA controller
IDE controller
4 USB2.0 ports on the backplate and another 4 on headers
2 FireWire(high-speed) ports
Bluetooth headers
--> £750 (single cpu), £950 (double CPU)
Low-end:
Mini-ITX board
cpu socket for cpu cards of 1 or 2 G4's
ATI 9600 or 9800 chip on board with tv-out)
4 USB ports
on-board 6.1 surround
low-profile DDR slots (angled so you can put the motherboard in a A1200-like case)
SATA controller
IDE controller
--> £650 single CPU, £750 (with A1200-like case, hard drive, DVDrom and hard drive),
£550 single cpu, £650 double cpu (standalone motherboard)
common for all configurations:
BIOS with user-friendly menu
AmigaOS 4 or MorphOS with free upgrades for 1 1/2 year.
..... Iknow I know, Eyetech and bPlan is not Apple :-( ...
-
There not Commodore either!
Come on guys an A1200 style, or even bigger A500 style case would kick ass
With tweaks here and there they wouldnt look outdated at all
In fact it would look very modern compared to horrible towers
-
Come on guys an A1200 style, or even bigger A500 style case would kick ass
yes, or CDTV style :-)
-
Common guys! remember when the amiga 1000 came out? it was revolutionary not just for its os but its architecture! We need an Amiga that we can get people other than Amiga geeks to buy or it will wither on the vine. Try telling a friend to buy an amiga one with a 3 year old cpu, locked at 900 mhz with sdram thats just as ancient and oh by the way it 1400 bucks, I hope I have a camera close by to catch the look on their face! We cant just say that OS4 is state of the art we need to be able to say the whole machine is the art that others are judged by. For you rabid fans of the G series if you did some research you would find out the G5 wouldnt exist as it does without AMD's help thats right IBM went to AMD for a partnership, AMD and IBM worked on SOI, Low K and copper interconnects which now reside in the G5. If you want to stick with the G series for god sakes step up to the 5 or go with the fastest 4 you can get your hands on, throw in ddr ram and PCI express or agp 8X! common guys we can help Amiga come back to life but not with the current rig being offered.
-
BIG-IRON wrote:
The ulimate Amiga one deserves better hardware, like it or not the ppc/g-series is hardly what we shold be depending on.
I agree with the first part, but you're dead wrong on the second. G3 is nice, but lacks the clock speed to do high end workstation processing. Single or dual 2GHz G5 is more like it.
The Athlon 64/Opteron is the future even Intel has adopted AMD64 for its future instruction set, and as for speed the 64 is faster than cpus with almost 2 times the speed.
Huh? Intel has not adopted anything AMD for it's future. Intel has it's own 64bit products.
I worry that by going with the g-series the Amiga has chosen a loosing horse.
Then don't buy one, plain and simple. After all, Amiga is just a name, the AmigaOne has very little to do with the classic Amiga. But, if you want something different from the normal PC/x86 box then something like an AmigaOne or better yet Pegasos II is a nice alternative to a Mac.
-
You are confusing the architecture with the instruction set, up until now most cpus used the x86 32 bit code, that was created by intel. Intel just recently announced that it was scrappin the Intanium 64 bit instruction set and going with the AMD64(thats just the name of the codes) instruction set.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0%2C3973%2C1561875%2C00.asp?kc=ETRSS02129TX1K0000532
Tom Halfhill, an analyst at In-Stat/MDR in San Jose, said Monday that he had compared the instruction sets of AMD's 64-bit chips, called AMD64, with the 64-bit extensions to be used in the Intel Xeon processor and future desktop chips. The smoking gun, Halfhill said, was Intel's choice to mimic a decision AMD made in its early Opteron designs, and later reversed.
-
BIG-IRON wrote:
Intel just recently announced that it was scrappin the Intanium 64 bit instruction set and going with the AMD64(thats just the name of the codes) instruction set.
url (http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0%2C3973%2C1561875%2C00.asp?kc=ETRSS02129TX1K0000532)
Where does this article say that? In fact, there was little collaboration on the part of both companies. Intel may have used AMD's documentation to develop the EM64T for compatibility reasons but that doesn't mean they "adopted" anything.
-
The whole "Amiga should use hardware" argument is pointless. Even the most up to date hardware is old in two months, so it would hardly be the quantum leap the Amiga was in 1982. By the time you got it all ready someone would want a better spec...and a better, and a better... and so on for ever. Hardware just moves on too fast. Forget it.
Second, there's the OS: you can't just pluck that from nowhere. Most Amiga users believe legacy is important, and a x86 AmigaOS is poorly suited to that. If you drop legacy you might as well just use Windows or Linux, they have more software anyway and let you take full advantage of the expensive hardware you just bought before next week's hardware comes out.
Amiga is dead, there is no room for innovation any more and no possible way it would ever compete. AROS, OS4 and MOS are more like tribute systems rather than continuations of the line, and I bet someone will get upset at that statement too, but who cares. It's true. They're not in any way the revolution the Amiga was. Peg and MOS are nice, and my favourite choice of many, but I wouldn't recommend them to the average person.
-
Intel sux HARD!
Everyone with a brain knows
G4 powerpc's architecture is miles ahead of intel.
they dont have the clock speeds
but they dont need it.
POWERPC kicks intels ass
Architecture independence kicks everyone's ass, because you can use any CPU you want, now and later.
Note how many platforms Microsoft supported before they made their big break "giving away" their OS to IBM. MS-DOS was not their first product. Take a look at what they are doing now with XNA. Anyone who is going full-force towards either x86 or PowerPC is insane.
The only people still writing highly native code are GPU programmers, because GPU instruction sets are still dead simple, and nobody really knows the "right" way of doing it, yet. CPU technology has matured over a half-century. The things people are saying today about x86 vs PowerPC, are similar to what people said about C compilers decades ago, and what they said about APIs before 3D accelerators arrived. People don't learn.
In a 64-bit length of code, some of it is the instruction, and the rest is the data to be processed by that instruction. In some applications, having a long data stream is useful, like say database processing, but for many other applications, small instructions regarding small amounts of data is the norm
I guess that depends on the CPU. Don't 32bit integers work much faster than short ints on modern CPUs, even though they contain less information, because they are more "native" to the CPU's operation?
I think the decision to make new amiga hardware based around the PowerPC processor was the right one.
No way. I've been wanting a CPU independent programming language ever since I saw how fast AMOS was compared to pure assembly (also, the fact that it was about a hundred times faster than any other BASIC I've ever used). I think Java bytecode has more or less given CPU independence a bad name due to its low speed and memory consumption. I'd really like to know more about the overall performance of Tao's VP. Not much has been going around about it, lately.
I has OSX panther running on a Powerbook G3 Pismo and it just flew
The OS or the applications? Almost anything works better than Windows on x86, and Linux on x86 is pretty damn fast for its purposes.
The current generation of AmigaOne is NOT aimed at the public, it is aimed at the existing user base.
Unfortunatly, this proves its fate. Any "new" Amiga that comes out in the future would offer little to no support for the AmigaOne. It's a hobby machine. Little more.
And you can bet your bottom dollar Eyetech wont suddenly change processor after Hyperion and everyone going to all that hard work into getting AmigaOS onto PPC!
Well, you have to admit that if you're not going x86, PowerPC is the only reasonable choice. MIPS and SH4 don't even come close in performance as they are designed for different markets.
Still, a GOOD OS doesn't have a particular CPU in mind. Most of the work to making AmigaOS native to PowerPC isn't for the PowerPC specifically, it's to get away from native 68K. After all that work, it probably wouldn't be that hard to make it x86 native. They just don't want to. ;-)
If you don't think software developers are an issue, compare how long it takes to get things done on your 3.2 GHz monster and an A500. Is it really 400 times faster, as the clock speed suggests?
That's the same argument that have driven Java. People predicted a decade ago that Java was insane and would die quickly, if it wasn't already kaput. Today, it's about the only thing that embedded developers use, and is THE language of the web, no matter how hard Microsoft tries to push .NET. Performance isn't everything.
I base my conclusion that PowerPC is a bad idea not because it's technically inferior and x86 is just better, it's because x86 is a more stable market. Windows machines can't defect to PowerPC overnight, so you have to think about what 95% of the industry is going to do when x86 goes belly-up. Shouting about technical supiriority has hardly made companies successful if they are impractical.
Where does this article say that? In fact, there was little collaboration on the part of both companies. Intel may have used AMD's documentation to develop the EM64T for compatibility reasons but that doesn't mean they "adopted" anything.
I heard about that, too. There's a lot of give and take between those two companies, and they have agreements not to sue each other over stuff like this. It's nothing new. It makes you wonder if x86 will ever undergo the same treatment as Sparc.
Hardware just moves on too fast. Forget it.
Some people will just never learn that the age of proprietary hardware is over.
If you drop legacy you might as well just use Windows or Linux, they have more software anyway and let you take full advantage of the expensive hardware you just bought before next week's hardware comes out.
Yup. A new desktop that works like Amiga using a modified Linux core would interest me the most. It's not worth making a unique, new OS when there are no hardware vendors stumbling over themselves to write drivers for you. I really like Linux at the low-level. It's XWindows, Gnome/KDE, and the dependence on the CLI that drives me nuts. A unified CLI/GUI framework for Linux (which removes the need for coding argument parsing yourself) would rock. It's like what HTML and XML did for the web (but more carefully thought-out, I hope!)
Current AmigaOne hardware is better suited for embedded applications, but even those kinds of hardware, like PDAs, are becoming increasingly open, like the PC.
-
The ultimate Amiga One (what it should be)
Yes, I know what it should be!
You see... I OWN one!
Yup, that's right!
And if you want to know what it looks like: It looks something like the one on the left. (http://www.amiga.org/gallery/index.php?n=360)
Near perfect. (or 'ultimate', as you'd put it :)
-
So many things to respond to in this thread. Ok...here goes. I agree with pretty much everything Waccoon said in the post not far above this one, so I won't waste time repeating it. I'll just add information.
You are confusing the architecture with the instruction set, up until now most cpus used the x86 32 bit code, that was created by intel. Intel just recently announced that it was scrappin the Intanium 64 bit instruction set and going with the AMD64(thats just the name of the codes) instruction set.
That is just plain wrong. Intel added 64 bit extensions to Xeon processors. IA64 is still going strong, with HP and Intel pushing it everywhere they can. I am an SE for a Sun reseller (keep your sympathy ;-)) and word on the street is that they are practically giving the Itanium boxes away to large accounts just to get them in use. Given your handle here, I'm a little surprised that you seem to be unaware of how well the Itanium performs in certain big-ironish applications. Its main problem is coding complexity and the enormous expense of the boxes. In addition, Intel didn't learn all the lessons taught to it by the Xeons ie, bus bottlenecks. The Opteron *excels* here in many ways, the architecture is designed so that I/O bus capacity and, especially, memory bus capacity scales up as you add more processors. This is quite the opposite of the way a Xeon box handles more processors. I've got fairly in-depth knowledge of the system architectures in Sun's 2-way, upcoming 4-way and 8-way Opteron offerings...they are quite similar to the way Ultrasparc systems are designed, bus-wise. The important thing to remember about Xeons with 64 bit extensions is they still suffer from all the bus bottlenecks...they adopted ONLY the 64 bit extensions, and none of benefits of the new bus architecture. Itanium even suffers from several of these bottlenecks relative to Opteron.
I heard about that, too. There's a lot of give and take between those two companies, and they have agreements not to sue each other over stuff like this. It's nothing new. It makes you wonder if x86 will ever undergo the same treatment as Sparc.
If you are referring to the SPARC consortium, there is at least a HyperTransport consortium, of which AMD (obviously), Sun, and I think HP and IBM are members. Not quite like the SPARC but it's something.
I loved my Amiga, and my C=64 before that...but when C= went under I admit I quickly jumped ship. And now, although it is very interesting I just don't see myself buying an Amiga One or a Peg. The community still interests me as proven by lurking here for quite some length of time, and I run EUAE on Linux pretty often. Seeing the prices of semi-modern hardware like PPC accelerator cards makes me feel like I made the right choice -- for myself. I don't begrudge those who are still enjoying their new and classic Amigas.
Well that's it, back into the cave I go...I had some posts on the old a.org but I doubt anyone remembers me *mutters and shuffles off*
Failure
-
Ohhhhh my head hurts....
-
Sorry your wrong get your facts straight,I have both industry knowledge and about 500 different posts on various news and tech geek sites saying the same thing. Intel is using the AMD64 extensions like this site here.
http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2004Feb/bch20040218023905.htm
Note it says they are "identical to AMD64"
Or this one
http://www.devx.com/amd/Article/20555?trk=DXRSS_LATEST
Some diehard fans of AMD64 technology have expressed concern that Intel's exact cloning of the technology might be detrimental to AMD. However, Glaskowsky points out that Intel's entry into the world of 64-bit extensions is unalloyed good news for AMD. Prior to Intel's move, AMD's 64-bit extensions had only technical superiority, but didn't have market penetration. Because no other vendor was selling chips with those extensions, conservative purchasers had reason to hesitate.
However, now that Intel has joined the fray, Glaskowski predicts, prospective purchasers will begin examining the technology on a comparative basis. For AMD, such comparisons are good news. As benchmarks have shown, the AMD64 implementation performs very well. We don't know how much better the numbers are than Intel's, because the latter chips won't ship until June at the earliest. However, due to the high-bandwidth Hyper-Transport processor-to-memory bus of the Opteron architecture, AMD will likely retain a significant performance edge. (See Transport Your Application to Hyper Performance.)
In support of the position that these developments favor AMD, we can see that the uptake of AMD64-based processors in server systems has advanced considerably since the Intel announcement. Hewlett-Packard has announced new product lines based on AMD64 processors, while IBM and Sun have expanded their offerings.
It is clear that Intel's adoption of the 64-bit extensions is a major boost for the architecture, and will actually help drive adoption of AMD's Opteron and Athlon 64 processors. And it's clear that as both companies continue their decades-long battle, buyers will enjoy the benefits of ever richer feature sets and amazing performance without having to worry at all about compatibility.
http://news.com.com/2100-1006-5159067.html
Or this one
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103_2-5160169.html?tag=zdfd.newsfeed
-
Speelgoedmannetje wrote:
Come on guys an A1200 style, or even bigger A500 style case would kick ass
yes, or CDTV style :-)
http://cybernetman.com/default.cfm/DocId/602.htm
-
Common guys! remember when the amiga 1000 came out? it was revolutionary not just for its os but its architecture!
The industry was ripe for such a venture at that time. It is not now, not without billions of dollars available.
All the leading players however are doing what Hi-Torro did, designing custom chips (for example, ATi, NVidia, Sony). Those that don't fall behind very quickly (Nintendo for example).
PPC's only hope is IBM, and will need Apple to help get PPC CPUs into computers in a wide enough scale.
Eyetech is a seller of hardware, not a maker. Hyperion is a small software company which doesn't happen to be made of money. Genesi is in a similar situation.
The only thing I feel that Hyperion/Eyetech should be doing but apparently aren't is to try and drum up support/attention for software development for OS4, though OS4 is probably needed out in the field in order to make the effort look more substantial.
-
sir_inferno wrote:
Speelgoedmannetje wrote:
Come on guys an A1200 style, or even bigger A500 style case would kick ass
yes, or CDTV style :-)
http://cybernetman.com/default.cfm/DocId/602.htm
a lot nicer looking than that though, thats just boring :-P
-
- edited by mikeymike: trolling -
-
- edited by mikeymike :-) -
-
All I want is AmigaOS4 for my pegasos2 ;)
-
daniel_r wrote:
All I want is AmigaOS4 for my pegasos2 ;)
I doubt it is going to happen. If Amiga Inc went under, it might.
-
Sorry your wrong get your facts straight,I have both industry knowledge and about 500 different posts on various news and tech geek sites saying the same thing. Intel is using the AMD64 extensions like this site here.
Where did I say that they weren't? The first line of my response mentions these extensions.
The only place you are wrong is that Intel is NOT dropping Itanium, which is a good arch but not very successful in the marketplace.
Finally, it's not necessary to cut-and-paste articles. I can follow links just as well as the next guy.
Failure
-
Perfect amiga for me?
Ok, lets start.
Dual G4 @ 1,5 or more
1 GB of DDR ram
On board gfx card (something from ATI of course) with its own memory
and that finishes it.
Id like for Amigas to have only the option to upgrade Proccesor and RAM.
Why?
Well If you have a closed system you never can wory about drivers, compatibility issues, making it to complex....
Making it simple should be a goal. I hate PC's just because of that. To much modular structure makes it obsolete fast. I have an old i-mac with G3@500Mhz and Im stilll satisfied with that while I payed over four times the buying price on my PC just to upgrade it and keep it with touch in time. What I just told may seem confusing and I dont blame you. I am not certian myself If I wrote stuff exactly as I ment it.
-
Isowyn wrote:
Perfect amiga for me?
Ok, lets start.
Dual G4 @ 1,5 or more
1 GB of DDR ram
On board gfx card (something from ATI of course) with its own memory
Did you actually knew that the Atari Jaguar contains as CPU only a M68000 clocked at 13 mhz and 2Mb memory, doing approximately the same as a high-end 486 (clocked at 66-100 Mhz) with 16Mb memory?
-
The OS or the applications? Almost anything works better than Windows on x86, and Linux on x86 is pretty damn fast for its purposes.
It's interesting that some of AMDs SPEC marks are different depending on the OS used, it's not a big difference (<10%) but this is on a test suite in which your OS will only take around 1% of the processing power.
No way. I've been wanting a CPU independent programming language ever since I saw how fast AMOS was compared to pure assembly
How did you measure this?
Good pure assembly is very difficult to write these days.
There are plenty of CPU independant languages out there BTW: Perl, Python, Squeak etc.
I base my conclusion that PowerPC is a bad idea not because it's technically inferior and x86 is just better, it's because x86 is a more stable market. Windows machines can't defect to PowerPC overnight, so you have to think about what 95% of the industry is going to do when x86 goes belly-up.
The problem is if you try to get into the x86 market with Eyetech or Genesi's volumes you'll have zero sales due to the price difference.
So, you drop the hardware and do an OS only. This puts you up against Microsoft: Game over.
Intel may have used AMD's documentation to develop the EM64T for compatibility reasons but that doesn't mean they "adopted" anything.
Intel have their own 64 bit CPUs in the Itanium, they could have designed their own 64 bit extensions to the x86 ISA but didn't, they used AMDs instead.
Amiga is dead, there is no room for innovation any more and no possible way it would ever compete.
Sure there is, you just have the imagination to do it and know not to target the existing desktop market.
Read up on Sony's Cell architecture, there's nothing like that anywhere right now. It is truly revolutionary.
It's not just a new chip either, it's an entire dristributed parallel processing architecture for both software and hardware.
The industry was ripe for such a venture at that time. It is not now, not without billions of dollars available.
Depends what you build, nobody would build a completely custom system from scratch in this day an age.
All the leading players however are doing what Hi-Torro did, designing custom chips (for example, ATi, NVidia, Sony). Those that don't fall behind very quickly (Nintendo for example).
I wouldn't say ATI or Nvidia make custom chips as custom means it's done for one customer. ATI and Nvidia do commodity graphics parts but they do design them themselves. That wasn't so difficult in the A1000's days, these days an average custom chip costs $15,000,000 to develop - ATI & Nvidia's chips are costing something like $400,000,000 to develop.
Nintendo and Microsoft didn't even attempt to do their own chips, both are using modified parts from ATI.
Sony can do what they want and not only develop their own chips (actally co-develop with Toshiba and IBM) but are building their own fabs to make them in - at $2 billion each.
PPC's only hope is IBM, and will need Apple to help get PPC CPUs into computers in a wide enough scale.
What about Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft? They are all planning to use PowerPC.
BTW, to those who don't believe there's any innovation left go read "The future of computing" series I wrote: links here (http://www.osnews.com/search.php?search=blachford) - Warning, long!
My next article has a similar theme but describes how to build a new platform using technology which is either already available or will be soon. The idea is to combine multiple technologies in a single box to create something completely new.
The A1000 did pretty much the same, the custom chips were an evolution from Jay Miner's previous work at Atari, multitasking existed before, so did the GUI, so did the 68K. Nobody had put them all together before the A1000 and it took the rest of the industry years to catch up.
-
Isowyn wrote:
Perfect amiga for me?
Dual G4 @ 1,5 or more; 1 GB of DDR ram; On board gfx card (something from ATI of course) with its own memory; and that finishes it.
Seems a little overkill. I always wonder why people would need that much memory and CPU power. I only stretch the CPU and the memory when playing games and doing heavy-duty scientific calculations. For the rest of the time, it's just twiddling its thumbs, waiting for that organic processor in my head to come up with some keyboard or mouse input.
Id like for Amigas to have only the option to upgrade Proccesor and RAM. Why? Well If you have a closed system you never can wory about drivers, compatibility issues, making it to complex.... Making it simple should be a goal. I hate PC's just because of that. To much modular structure makes it obsolete fast. I have an old i-mac with G3@500Mhz and Im stilll satisfied with that while I payed over four times the buying price on my PC just to upgrade it and keep it with touch in time. What I just told may seem confusing and I dont blame you. I am not certian myself If I wrote stuff exactly as I ment it.
Please, no more closed systems where the only thing you can upgrade is the memory or the CPU. At least not for desktop PCs.
Then I notice something odd. You are happy with your aging iMac, but are not with your PC. You want the latter to be in touch with time, so you complain about the amount of money you have had to spend. Those are two different things. If you had kept the iMac in touch with time, I'm sure you'd have had to spend more money on that too.
Besides, the whole 'keeping in touch with time' argument is losing steam very quickly these days. On hardware forums, people are basing each other's heads in over equipment whose soul function is to boost complex game performance to even more dizzying heights---so high in fact that you don't notice it anymore. People are not testing performance of new hardware on regular applications: posting a 1% increase in responsitivity is simply neither sexy nor marketable. However, post the same percent in terms of frame rates (say, 100 to 101 Hz, well above the normal refresh rate of any monitor), and all of a sudden game junkies are wetting themselves to try out the 'new experience'. Regular applications don't change very quickly over time, so the entire 'keeping current' argument in my humble opinion is a load of psychological marketing fluff.
I bought my system two years ago, and only now are there slowly games appearing on the horizon which it cannot fully cope with. Their number is so ridiculously small that I will happily use what I have for at least another year, and quite possibly two.
-
@Speulgoudmannegie
You wrote:
Do I hear cursing in the church?
Where's the custom chipset? where's the dedicated h/w? where's the Motorola chips? Where are the innovative attributes?
You'r dammed right, you know.
On a general view: there is no such a thing like STANDARD HARDWARE. All hardware, except mechanical parts in general, are proprietary to some extent. *ALL* video chips are designed for the x86 architecture. PCI busses and its derived successors were invented by Intel, hence out-of-the-box suitable ONLY for x86 architecture. x86 probably is the only of the LitleEndian variety, all other rely on Big Endianism. PCI is therefore suitable only for LitleEndian based systems without inflicting a loss of performance.
If one wants that socalled Standard Hardware, which, simply put, is absolutely nothing more than proprietary hardware for one single kind of processor and only one family of OS's, then one should stick to that hardware/software-kludge !
The ONLY way as I see it is the use of specific hardware, built to do the job as the OS intends it to do on the processor it is designed for! Do like Wintel: go for proprietary hardware! Only that way you can show off the potential of the H/W & S/W combo.
If it is all to expensive for you than go for the Wintel solution and be content with it, but than don't complain of its sluggishness, its incompatability with former releases, the nesseccity to upgrade every now and then, the need to stamp out virusses and trojans and their ilk 24/7.
But when you want something very different, be in the vanguard of the computing scene, than be prepaired to pay a stiff price.
Standard hardware. There ain't no such a thing! Keep that in mind.
Regards,
Tjitte
P.s. Speelgoedmannetje, I'll buy you a beer someday. Hefe-weiss bier wasn't it?
-
HopperJF wrote:
sir_inferno wrote:
Speelgoedmannetje wrote:
Come on guys an A1200 style, or even bigger A500 style case would kick ass
yes, or CDTV style :-)
http://cybernetman.com/default.cfm/DocId/602.htm
a lot nicer looking than that though, thats just boring :-P
firstly, i've played with one of those, they're actually quite stylish in real life, except their keyboard's are really crampt...but then again i am used to a natural keyboard...
oh yeah, and wtf would anybody go for an amiga type thingy, when they could have that thing, and get windows xp on it. supply [new company's] must meat demand [idiots who don't know the first thing about computers but want to go on the computer and talk on msn messenger; i.e. microsoft makes all computers and software, aol "owns" the internet]
-
Failure: IA64 is still going strong, with HP and Intel pushing it everywhere they can.
BTW, how much of the server market is occupied by Itanium right now? The CPU architecture itself means little to me so long as the compiler works out the nasty bits.
Isowin: To much modular structure makes it obsolete fast.
Supply and demand determines when hardware becomes obsolete. Nothing else. The Kodak mini-servers I used to use at work had dual 400Mhz Xeon processors when a single 3Ghz P4 was state of the art, but the company kept right on selling those old systems for $5,000 each, because they considered them adaquate as a photo processing station.
I hate Kodak.
Speelgoedmannetje: Did you actually knew that the Atari Jaguar contains as CPU only a M68000 clocked at 13 mhz and 2Mb memory, doing approximately the same as a high-end 486 (clocked at 66-100 Mhz) with 16Mb memory?
The CPU is only a bridge between the core processors, Tom and Jerry. It really doesn't do anything. Jeff Minter once said it was only good for reading the joypad ports. :-)
Minator: How did you measure this?
Sorry I don't have a reference, but someone once wrote several programs to do basic math, and had both the assembly and AMOS sources available, doing the same basic calculations. AMOS is obviously slow, but not as slow as I had imagined it would be. It was a real eye-opener given that I grew up with the C64 and ABasic, which was as slow as programming could be. AMOS was quite impressive, and showed me that sacrificing speed for usability is perfectly feasable and the way of the future.
I'd expected compiled languages to be obsolete by the year 2000. Things are moving slower than I'd expected.
There are plenty of CPU independant languages out there BTW: Perl, Python, Squeak etc.
None of them are structured well enough for serious programming. I've used plenty of Perl, and it is a joke, thank you. PHP isn't that great, either, but at least it's easy and makes sense.
I'm a C and Java person, mostly.
The problem is if you try to get into the x86 market with Eyetech or Genesi's volumes you'll have zero sales due to the price difference.
Hmm... a modern x86 machine that only runs AmigaOS, or a outmodeled PowerPC that only runs AmigaOS... that's a tough one.
Please note that the CPU isn't the only problem -- there's the chipset, as well. The AmigaOne needs registered memory, too, doesn't have SerialATA...
This puts you up against Microsoft: Game over.
Yeah, yeah. I'm sure Windows users are all stubling over themselves to buy an Amiga. Microsoft isn't the only company that uses x86, you know.
Read up on Sony's Cell architecture, there's nothing like that anywhere right now.
Any good references on Cell? I'm still confused as to whether the Cell chip does graphics or if it's just a muticored CPU. Most of the stuff I find on Cell is just hype.
What about Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft? They are all planning to use PowerPC.
Yes, but they don't use the desktop-class CPUs used in computers, they use the embedded versions to cut costs. MIPS powers the PS2, and SH4 powered the Dreamcast. Neither of those CPUs are known for awesome desktop performance. Apple still gets the prime cut by default, limiting supply of "top tier" PowerPC chips to everyone else, while there are still plenty of low-end PowerPC chips to go around.
BTW, to those who don't believe there's any innovation left go read "The future of computing" series I wrote
The fear that all good ideas have been exhausted is nothing new. I'm just concerned that people don't use the technology that we already have intelligently enough, before moving on to the next big thing. I consider myself an interface designer, and it amazes me how people continue to ignore good design over an impending fad.
I like those kinds of articles, so I'll read some later.
The idea is to combine multiple technologies in a single box to create something completely new.
I tend to lean away from hardware altogether. Good design, new standards, and a solution to bridge the CLI and GUI would be a big help. I don't really care if the CPU can mutiprocess or if your next motherboard will have HD audio built-in. Usability is a mess on modern computers.
Cymric: Please, no more closed systems where the only thing you can upgrade is the memory or the CPU. At least not for desktop PCs.
They integrate because it's cost effective. What else do you want to upgrade on your motherboard? A plug-in southbridge upgrade wouldn't sell because it would cost too much as a module, and most any new connections, like SerialATA or Gigabit Ethernet, can be added with a PCI card.
Even in my own PC, the only cards I have are my ATI card and Audigy. I have no use for PCI expansion since it's all built-into the mobo. I criticize he AmigaOne because it costs more money but offers no benifits over x86 machines, not because it isn't a ultra-supercomputer.
Cymric: You are happy with your aging iMac, but are not with your PC
A common snipe amongst Mac users. It might have something to do with the fact Macs have very few games. When it comes to regular, mundane computing, even an old Pentium will suffice. It's entertainment that really pushes a computer to its limits. Windows machines are designed for games, so the upgrade itch is stronger.
I would never buy an iMac, just because I don't believe in throwing out an entire computer when I want something better. I'd rather upgrade a bit at a time rather than all at once. The fact that the PC became so popular is proof that most people want that, too, and are often willing to trade the supposed benefits of quality proprietary design for the sake of choice. The IBM PC was hardly a technical marvel when it was introduced. Technology isn't everything.
People are not testing performance of new hardware on regular applications: posting a 1% increase in responsitivity is simply neither sexy nor marketable.
That depends on the market. It really bugs me when Intel releases a new CPU that's 5% faster than AMD in some benchmarks, and costs twice as much, and then hoards of people are screaming that AMD has lost it and Intel is the King of CPU Manufacturers. Video cards are also where mere percentages will throw an industry into chaos.
Now, given that my current P4 cost me $400 for a mobo, CPU, and memory, and runs circles around the G3 AmigaOne, that's pretty significant.
Their number is so ridiculously small that I will happily use what I have for at least another year, and quite possibly two.
Oh, at least a year! God forbid if I have to use THIS piece of junk for more than TWO YEARS! :-D
Upgrading every 6 months is pretty crazy, but being forced to use a Mac for 5 years before you can afford to buy a new one for $1500-$2000 is a bit extreme, too. An upgrade schedule of $500 every one or two years is reasonable if you want a decent machine.
Jettah: Standard hardware. There ain't no such a thing! Keep that in mind.
So, if you make a PCI card today, it won't work in a motherboard made next year? The whole point of a standard is compatibility.
Having dealt with a LOT of HTML and CSS as of late, I can tell you all about bad standards! :pissed:
-
As a consumer, we should stick to the basics of things here. Our needs. Just like a car. Heck it's just a car. What standards does it need to be just a car. Its still got 4 wheels, engine and others to run it... Anything else extra would only be luxury.
For me the 'Ultimate Amiga1' would be able to run on any given standard/s and to get a simple job done right. As long it focus on consumers' needs. I don't care if its PPC AMD INTEL... as long as the ultimate Amiga1 is sold to more consumers and get more attention/exposure it truly deserves. :-)
The 'ultimate amiga1' is !PEOPLEWARE!
Good day to all Amigans!
-
First i'd like to thanks mikeymike for his anti-troll duties! best i've seen on any message board yet. Second is it just me or does Sir-Inferno look like one happy {bleep}? Lastly what a rousing thread! great brain power in this group I do believe. That doesnt change the fact that I'm right....hehehe hugs and kisses to ya all!
-
You're going to hate me for saying this........Sorry in advance.....
If I was AmigaInc or KMOS.... I would be licensing XBox2 technology, porting OS4 to it and slapping in an Amiga box like the Amiga Fantasy. Problem solved..... All the games you could want on cheap powerful hardware, as well as the ability to load up AmigaOS if you want. Just like the original Amigas, slap in a DVD Game and go, they never used to hit the OS anyway.... Of course the bootscreens would be Amiga specific......and boot you straight into OS4.
Maybe we shouldn't be fighting MS but merging to survive?
If you can't beat'em join'em.... At least in terms of hardware...which they make a loss at.... AND you would get your ultimate games machine too.. All in one box...OK... if you license the hardware you can't sell it at a loss like MS... but at least you'd have the specs, and the games compatability, and you could always increase the specs too. What you have is an emerging computing architecture.
AmigaInc/KMOS wins by selling OS4. Lets face it... Its a lot more than we're going to get today, so what is the harm? License the hardware technology and buy into their XNA.. It can only help the platform...So what if its a schizophrenic system.... Most Amigans loved the Amiga because it was a kick ass console come microcomputer.... Added to this.... Imagine the homebrew games that could be developed on top of AmigaOS on the same hardware... Awesome....
The only problem would be convincing MS that this is a good move....
Maybe, they're so dead against their main rival Linux, that they may allow it....
You know, if you failed to woo MS.....maybe Sony would be interested in developing such a licensing scheme to keep up. They don't have an OS, but they did actually produce a Linux derivative for their hardware. Imagine convincing them to allow an Amiga derivative....They may be able to head MS off at the pass... OK.. they'd probably only go with Linux.....
What does Amiga gaming mean? If you use the hardware and don't touch the OS is it still an Amiga game? Most of the games in Amiga's heydey probably never touched the OS and hit the hardware, which is reticent of the current batch of consoles... In an odd way, converging with a console manufacturer and producing a compatable kick ass console come computer, is kinda going back to roots.....
The more I think of it... the more I think that Sony would go for it.... They too, only make money off the games, and they've never wanted those games to run on a PC. So now you have the situation where MS is attempting to flood the console arena with XBox compatables to outnumber Sony. They'll be releasing first for the same reason. If Sony did the same an licensed out PS3 production then we'd have AmigaOS on cutting edge technology(for a while) and even be able to up the specs on our own version. OS4 has HAL and could keep up with subsequent console releases.
Obviously, the XBox is a trojan horse for Windows. Sony has everything to gain by supporting a rival OS..... Frightens me if they went with Apple actually..... But Amiga has always been THE game system..
Let's face it....we are unlikely to get ANY major games as it is.... OS4 on consoles, does not come with the "oh, I'll just dual boot into Linux or Windows" problems of an OS4 port to PCs. Going this route does not preclude games development for an Amiga necessarily either. When are we going to realise that the Amiga is a hobbiests machine/OS and that it will never be number 1 again? We can only get more market recognition by becoming a parasite(OK.. value add) on another system. PCs are distasteful and unhip..... Lets go with a console manufacturer and back to ROOTS!!!
I would like to say that the A1 board is a required step for the OS and fairly safe for now... However going forward, wouldn't it make the most sense to try and license established console hardware and go from there? C'mon, they'll even be HDTV compatable out of the box... WTF....
Eyetech will do a sterling job, but lets face it, THEY WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO KEEP UP WITH OUR EXPECTATIONS. Only a console company driven to keep up their specs could possibly sustain us. We don't even know if Eyetech have any future plans...OR even what their current plans are for that matter.
If Eyetech owns all the rights to hardware for the Amiga platform..then....Well, they've shown that they can work with MAI so why couldn't they go work with MAI with Sony's specs rather than VAI specs. I mean, they gotta realise by now, that no one if their right mind is going to license Amiga specs from them when MS is doing the same, and probably offerring incentives to do so...not to mention XBox compatability.
Hell, I completely forgot that Nintendo is another possibility....
My suggestion of licensing console technology from an established console player would solve all the problems you are listing....and provide your wish list.
Their specs are better and evolve faster than ours do....
Everything about the final Amiga that would be produced by such a means would be awesome...
Where is the flaw in the plan?? Except convincing a console manufacturer...
Your future Amiga should be a highly specced console... with either the basic XBox2 or PS3 or Nintendo next gen as its base hardware configuration.
The Amiga brand would be the Supercharged console/computer of their line-up, with more RAM and HD and maybe a higher clock rate.
If you can't beat'em join'em....
How do they lose? How do we lose?
Eyetech, KMOS, Hyperion and AmigaInc would all win with this.
MS might not like it, but Sony and Nintendo might go for it.... if they could be bothered.
OK...... I'll go back and hide in my happy place now..
-
ALTERNATIVELY!!!!
You know, if Eyetech could somehow make the hardware stackable then your specs would be as high as you could pay. People would purchase multiple A1s for the speed they feel they require. More A1 boards would be sold and the price therefore would come down.
Incidentally, it appears that Commodore was considering a similar approach for the original Amiga but dropped the idea because it was too expensive. I think they were going to be stacking peripherals though rather processor boards but the idea is the same.
I would like to see the microA1, which is decent enough, as a brick in an Amiga cluster. Of course you would have to modify the OS to take advantage of symmetric multiple processing(did I get that right?). But its the coolest way to bridge the specification gap at the moment, and its innovative in the sense that no other PCs are doing it, at least in the mainsteam. Its a press worthy item also. Perhaps the 3d on the boards are decent enough to effectively work together also, rendering a part of the screen. There may be issues with the means of doing this but they are not insurmountable.
Imagine boasting about this machine!!! We'll start measuring speed in units of A1s.
"I'm going 5 A1s what are you?"
Is this really such a difficult thing to accomplish? Isn't it also what the embedded market might appreciate? Creating such a board is a "get out of jail" card free in terms of specifications. Really, Eyetech should really be looking into providing at least the capability of SMP for multiple MicroA1s, and we'll get the support in the OS at a later date.
If you can't make them stackable, then just create a big box Amiga with slots for all the A1s to talk together. Then WE WOULD HAVE SOMETHING TO BOAST ABOUT!!!
Then we could take on practically every platform on earth!!!!!!!!
Mahahahaha!!!!
Quick!!! Do it before the Wintel world hears about it.
We should petition Eyetech to do it!!!
Even if the microA1 is the last Amiga we would be able to keep up with other platforms forever. Eyetech simply wont be able to keep up with the PC platform speed increases and this will prevent us from falling behind if we don't want to.
Who's with me on this.... We really should bring this to Alan's attention. A little effort now could go a long long way for the Amiga's future.
-
Waccoon wrote:
Cymric: Please, no more closed systems where the only thing you can upgrade is the memory or the CPU. At least not for desktop PCs.
They integrate because it's cost effective. What else do you want to upgrade on your motherboard?
Note that I specifically added 'desktop PC'. I realise there is a market---and a large one at that---out there for simple mini-ITX-like systems. I couldn't use one: I want to have a better graphics, sound, and an extra Ethernet card in my PC.
Windows machines are designed for games, so the upgrade itch is stronger.
Yet if you ignore the marketing buzz and shop wisely, you can make your machine last a long time. My upgrade path is about once every four years, and like I said, only now are there games (Doom 3, Half-Life 2) appearing on the horizon which my system would have trouble with. Fortunately for me, I don't intend on buying either when they come out. I have plenty of other games to while away the time with.
-
BigBenAussie wrote:
You're going to hate me for saying this........Sorry in advance.....
If I was AmigaInc or KMOS.... I would be licensing XBox2 technology, porting OS4 to it and slapping in an Amiga box like the Amiga Fantasy. Problem solved..... All the games you could want on cheap powerful hardware, as well as the ability to load up AmigaOS if you want. Just like the original Amigas, slap in a DVD Game and go, they never used to hit the OS anyway.... Of course the bootscreens would be Amiga specific......and boot you straight into OS4.
Absolutely, but i think Sony would be the best bet.
-
Imagine boasting about this machine!!! We'll start measuring speed in units of A1s.
"I'm going 5 A1s what are you?"
I already measure speed in A1s right now I'm playing Hitman3:Contracts on my 4-A1 Laptop :-)
-
Any good references on Cell? I'm still confused as to whether the Cell chip does graphics or if it's just a muticored CPU. Most of the stuff I find on Cell is just hype.
The cell is an entire system, mode up of processing elements called "cells" which can be in anything from PDAs to servers. The system puts computations into to a "software-cell" which can run an a hardware cell.
The cell hardware is made up of 8 vector (like Altivec but probably not compatible) processors running at 4GHz having a theoretical top performance of 250 GFlops, if you set them up as stream processors (ie each vector unit feeds each other) they may actually get close to this performance. A lot of compute intensive applications can be streamed - video, audio and graphics rendering.
It looks like Sony are planning on putting 4 cells per chip so these things are going to be seriously powerful.
The only good detail I know of it is here in the
Cell Patent (http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/search-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=20020138637&OS=20020138637&RS=20020138637). It's long, very confusing but very detailed.
Yes, but they don't use the desktop-class CPUs used in computers, they use the embedded versions to cut costs. MIPS powers the PS2, and SH4 powered the Dreamcast. Neither of those CPUs are known for awesome desktop performance.
I was talking about next generation where Sony and MS both will have CPUs just as good as anything on the desktop.
I'm just concerned that people don't use the technology that we already have intelligently enough, before moving on to the next big thing
Yes, it's amazing how many good ideas have either never taken off or have been forgotten.
Good design, new standards, and a solution to bridge the CLI and GUI would be a big help. Usability is a mess on modern computers.
I completely agree, 100%.
I'd add it's a lot better on some systems (i.e. OS X) than others but nobody has it perfect.
A common snipe amongst Mac users. It might have something to do with the fact Macs have very few games. When it comes to regular, mundane computing, even an old Pentium will suffice. It's entertainment that really pushes a computer to its limits. Windows machines are designed for games, so the upgrade itch is stronger.
Apple seem to be actively targetting high compute applications these days (audio, video, movies) so at least in the Professional area these users will need the fastest machines.
Oh, at least a year! God forbid if I have to use THIS piece of junk for more than TWO YEARS!
Upgrading every 6 months is pretty crazy, but being forced to use a Mac for 5 years before you can afford to buy a new one for $1500-$2000 is a bit extreme, too.
My PC had it's last big upgrade in 2000 when I got a CPU which was low end even then (800MHz Athlon). I have no need to upgrade it today because running BeOS it goes like a bat out of hell - I can understand an XP user wanting an upgrade though cos it runs like a dog in this thing, God only knows what it's doing though.
Macs are different as their upgrade cycles tend to be a lot longer. However OS X is getting faster with each release and many of the upgrades, a Mac purchased a few years ago will actually be faster than it was when new!
For you rabid fans of the G series if you did some research you would find out the G5 wouldnt exist as it does without AMD's help thats right IBM went to AMD for a partnership, AMD and IBM worked on SOI, Low K and copper interconnects which now reside in the G5.
Erm, No. You got that the wrong way round.
IBM made the first Athlons because AMD hadn't got the process right yet. When they went to make the Opteron they paid IBM $54 million to help them out, IBM also made the 90nm Opteron prototypes.
IBM have been leading silicon process development for years. For the last few years AMD have been a process developed jointly with Motorola, that process was originally licensed from ...IBM. IBM have been the company getting the most patents for the last 10 years, many of these are silicon process related.
AMD have recently partnered with IBM that's true but probably only to save them paying IBM even more...
IBM are also helping out Sony for the Cell (both in design and process) and have licensed their current process to a few companies - including Samsung who incidently are now making the IBM G3s.
-
I already measure speed in A1s right now I'm playing Hitman3:Contracts on my 4-A1 Laptop
Never knew IBM made POWER4 laptops...
i.e. There's a difference but it not of that scale.
I rekon a Opteron 150 *might* get a 3 A1 against a G4 833MHz given the right test, a tail wind and the right phase of the moon :-D