Given x1000 news is everywhere.....but nonchalance prevails

[the_leander]

Not at all, they already have designs with additional parts being integrated in the CPU for TOP models as well (and where do you think this continuous process will lead in the long run? at having everything separated again? get real please).

Certain things are being integrated for sure, on the low end market, especially the nettop/netbook market this makes a huge amount of sense both in terms of cost and power usage. However at the top end there are different stresses - the integration of the memory controller for instance is done to reduce latency. It's unlikely you'll see the gpu moving onto these parts any time soon simply because there isn't the need either on the generic server markets or workstations or high end gaming rigs.

A 2Ghz CPU has the same benchs as a similarly clocked Core2Duo (as posted by Karlos) if you had that power in 2002 lucky you.

As Karlos stated, he was unsure if the Core2Duo benchmark was based on a single or both cores. Regardless, C2D based systems can be had for a tenth of the cost of an X1000. A tenth.

And the Nemo board is still the most "different" motherboard you will ever see in a personal computer from today to eternity, might as well like that a little bit?

Different!=Useful.

There was a post on another thread that I think perfectly summed it up, it said something along the lines of "£1500 to run an Alpha of Firefox?"

I don't remember anything about PC-Risc and doubling of AAA, which means you are referring to something earlier.

Or that you've got no idea what you're talking about. I suspect the latter. Here: Commordores last gasp - Hombre. There was nothing later than this as C= down long before it ever got off of the drawing board.

No it wasn't. It was designed for desktop and server applications.

You don't typically use a 2+ GHz multi-core CPU as an embedded microcontroller.

You do if that embedded microcontroller is a key part of a telecommunications node. That is where PPC is aimed at these days. Not desktop, not generic servers but telecoms. PPC for desktop (and lets face it, generic servers) is dead, it exists only in niche products in niche industries.

You often find PPCs tied with FPGAs these days (thankyou the fella that pointed me to that a few months back) within this market.

[the_leander]

You repeated your reply but not answer my question: where this integration process will eventually and inevitably lead in the coming years considering that Hi-end gaming PCs are selling less and less every year ?

The problem with predicting the future is that any prediction I could make regardless of what it was would almost certainly be wrong, if not in the overall direction but in key details.

It altogether depends on what pressures face the market in the future, right now things are going portable - away from big box systems. As a result space and airflow are at a premium - integrating makes sense in this arena. High end servers/pro workstations and gaming rigs however have different stresses on them.

Big box systems aren't going to to away any time soon and whilst the top end is always going to be a comparatively small part of the market (and smaller still until the recession lifts) it does tend to be willing to fork over truly biblical amounts of cash for the latest and greatest. But even in the mid-range, which will always do a good bit of business there is less of a pressure to include things like a gpu onto the die of your cpu. Perhaps if things go more over to "lifestyle" PCs such as this, then who knows...

You seem to forget that this is a premium PPC machine for AmigaOS developers and users with deep pockets (a lot of them around as they got 150 people that want to beta test) in order for them to expand the platform.

Ah yes, beta testing. That old chestnut. I remember zealots coming on here around the time of the A1-SE's launch saying pretty much the same thing - high price on comparatively poor hardware "but it's for the developers and beta testers". Those prices didn't really come down all that much and in the mean time the community is now a tiny fraction of what was there in 2000.

Sure, a handful of folk will buy one. Then what? You think there is going to be much by way of work done to optimise OS4 for ~200 - 300 customers? Look how long it's taken to get OS4 working on what you already have... Sam sales have all but tanked - almost anyone who wanted one has already got one.

Those that think in your terms are not the target audience, the latter instead DOESN'T think in your terms. This is just a first step, if all goes according to plan newer machines will be done later.

Good luck with that.

Instead it is as I said has the paper i mentioned as nothing to do with Hombre. it was posted many times at AW if you want I can go there and ask for a copy/link.

Hombre was the last thing Commodore ever planned to build. Now whilst there may have been engineers who had different ideas and proposals toward them. Hombre was as far as corporate were concerned the roadmap. End of.

And who says?

The markets primarily. With the exception as you state of games consoles, the vast majority of PPCs you will find today are in telecoms and networking equipment, often married up to fpgas.

The X1000 really doesn't feature outside of a tiny subsection within this community.

[the_leander]

That said i understand you were talking about Commodore "gamish" HW named Hombre (an home console that was never produced basically
while I was talking about their plans about future Amigas (nothing to do with Hombre) :

1)Hombre: an uncompleted project that had nothing to do with Amiga because (Dave Haynie speaking below):
and...(Haynie again)

Yes, I've read the comments. Hell I was on Usenet when he initially posted them.

On the other hand I was talking about the devCon paper done in 1993 more or less simultaneously to Hombre's development starting point which described a similar to X1000 machine:

They're talking about the direction the Nyx AAA testbed was leading to. And if you read up on Haynie he states quite clearly on several occasions that AmigaOS was end of life. Commodore were planning on moving to WindowsNT. Guess where that research lead? Hombre.

I've seen the modular approach that was being taken with AAA and it was kind of cool. You would have ended up with something not unlike a modern X86 Micro-ATX board - fairly basic onboard sound, graphics and networking capabilities with some pci (or now pci-e) slots to plug in much more capable components to suite your tastes.

But to try to paint the X1000 as the prodigal son of this line of thinking... Err no. No more than any other x86 motherboard on the market today, because that is basically all it is. Just like the post newbus PPC Macs were.

As for the glue logic and XMOS... The chip itself within a desktop environment appears to offer very very little, potentially even less than having an fpga built onto the board. It can't access system ram and is limited to 64k. I'm sure some clever programmer could make use of it and do some seriously clever demos with one, but for day to day usage it seems a poor fit into the desktop paradigm.

If you add to that that not even MS can afford to challenge Ati and Nvidia R&D departments, you can clearly see where this all would have led...

MS probably could afford it, the question is, why bother to re-invent the wheel? What would Microsoft gain beyond a constant threat of anti-competition filings from the other two companies?

[the_leander]

The outcry would have been epic

Possibly, but at the end of the day AmigaOS was EOL and the engineering folks knew it. To have forged on would have required either going to windows or making a leap as great as MacOS 9 to OSX.

As with everything Commodore - they chose the most "cost effective" option and looked at WindowsNT on PA-RISC.

[the_leander]

@The_Leander
I'm not saying it's the prodigal son, only responding to "classic" users that there would've not have been any fabled chipset Amiga machine. And by the way, hombre was WAY behind in schedule, Haynie said:

Hombre was a last ditch effort to try to get some value out of AAA which by the estimates of the day would have been at best on a par with PCs of the day and at worst a generation behind. To be clear: Hombre was built upon the ruins of the AAA hardware.

which basically mean all you got there is the AAA situation all over again, too little too late.
The whole chipset idea was to be scrapped as there were graphic processing units manufacturers pumping out new designs every 3 months back then (where there were around 10 different makers).

Look fella, I lived through this. There is very little you can tell me about what I saw with my own eyes first hand. I'm not some johnny come lately who bought their first Amiga around the time of OS3.9's release. I was there from 1989 onwards.

At the end of the day the X1000 is still more Amiga than anything else

Only if you define Amiga as grossly overpriced, underperforming and tied to a CPU arch that the rest of the desktop world ditched nearly a decade ago.

the barebone mobo allow to upgrade several parts in case you upgrade the CPU, (instead of having just a CPU change and keep the old controllers)

And that is different to every PC ever made since the XT, how, exactly?

Xena could lead to nice ideas, it can still produce some nice Int expansions (XMP), and is something more (not something less) that adds in to the fun.

It's a 100Mbit controller with 64k of onboard memory, no control lines to access anything else and being run on a board whose OS lacks the tools to allow more than single threaded operations.

No matter how you put it, old chipsets are (and were) no more and this is as good as it gets for now.

That is a matter of opinion. One which isn't shared by many.

I underlined that, because both Varisys and A-Eon hinted at this being a beginning not an an end, and since we are just a few months after the settlement it's a nice start, way better than anything we would have seen from C= which as you said, it would have been absolutely nothing

I didn't say that. We would have had nice shiny new computers running a bombproof OS (WinNT was a far superior system to the win9x range most people used during the 90's) on extensable affortable hardware,  without a zillion and one fantasists running around ripping off the community left right and centre, backed up by sychophants too stupid to know they were being conned.

( just some Wintel clones running NT,

Which part of they were marrying up AAA with a PA-RISC wasn't clear? Not intel, PA-RISC.

yes no Hombre, as it was already obsolete while in highly unfinished state,

As a games console it might have given both the Saturn and PS1 a damn good run for their money.

and would've been scrapped for some cheaper and more performing GPU)

Eventually probably, or maybe buying out one of the dozen or so companies producing these shiny new wiz bang GPUs.

[the_leander]

but my business were GPUs (I dealt with Elsa and 3Dlabs) so let me tell you, HOMBRE might have been on par with certain options day one if it made day one, even less options after 3 months

Which part of your "gpu business" dealt with the console market, exactly?

Playstation 1, released 1994 was still being actively developed for some 10 years after its initial launch and is one of the most popular games consoles ever to have been sold.

Do you think for one second that the PS1 had state of the art graphics even a week after its release? No, it didn't. Did it make a blind bit of difference to it's success? Not in the slightest.

You've tried repeatedly to conflate AAAs target market (mainstream computing) with Hombres (a games console concept), you can stop now.

What part of "it wasn't completed and thus it would have been surpassed several folds if they continued to drag on it" you do not understand? ()

In the computer market, sure, which is why AAA and your "future amiga" got canned. But as a games console the system would have been a fine competitor. I'm well aware of the fact that Commodore folded, but I'm not the one claiming that the Hyperion (with all the crap they've pulled over the years) and an as yet untested and unproven AEON are better for the Amiga market than Commodore.

Look I'm tired, I will repeat again the x1000 is a premium machine aimed at developers (and Power users with no budget constraints).

Power users? Where? Seriously where are these mystical power users with more money than sense all going to mysteriously appear from? And even if they do, as gazgod points out, wtf are they going to run on it? An Alpha of Firefox and Blender simply do not cut it!

it is not uderpowered at all for an Amiga machine, it actually sports a better than G5 CPU, and when you buy it you are not searching a bargain,+ mainstream is not a target.

If your offering to these mythical power users is an early firefox port and blender, the question then is, why bother with OS4 when you can do that faster for a tenth of the price on a PC?

Let me just say (and I'm finished) that those that will buy it will not do so with your money, so you may relax a little bit

I'm not upset in the slightest, just bemused.

[the_leander]

1st) I was taking in consideration your fabled HP-Hombre WinNT computer (which might have dealt with GPUs very much),
2nd)You might be unaware that GPUs at the time derived from SGI technology papers and that Nintendo64 (same generation-1996) uses one of those GPUs for openGL acceleration.
In 1998 the Dreamcast came out using a PowerVR GPU. (but again I had in mind your "phantomatic" Hombre computer there, read more about consoles below).

And both of those systems were thoroughly pwnt by Playstation 1 in terms of sales.

Going back to the Hombre, the only reason I brought it up at all was because you kept banging on about a canned next gen Amiga from C= whose guts went into what would have been Hombre and how the X1000 was some kind of spiritual successor to it.

And nothing else.

Sure, and I said that it was so late they would've dragged it until it was probably 1 year earlier than DC if C= didn't fold

Citation needed. Note that work had started on the chipset back around the same time as AGA was released, are you seriously going to sit there and tell me it would have taken longer to produce AAA than it did OCS?

I still get the impression you are somewhat exited...

I'm excited about many things. The forthcoming MiniMig-AGA is one of those things. The introduction of relatively cheap dual Atom-ION based all in one units like the Asus I linked to a while back has my interest as well.

The X1000, like every other "next gen" Amiga has filled me with a sense of both dread and pity. Dread because of the inevitable crapfests between the two camps. Pity because in all likelihood the community will get shafted. Again.

Anyway (@Gazgod too) they have already 150 people booked for 100 beta systems so they will have to discard 50 of them, but try to understand once and for all a simple fact: all they plan, is to sell a limited number of machines, get their money back+some and re-invest.

And best of British to them.

That's it.
You should visit other sites every once in a while you will meet many of this guys...(not to mention all those that solely post in their own country due to language barrier).

Lulz.

I understand if you like Aros or Morphos but it is a FACT, not an opinion, that they are NOT AmigaDOS / Amiga OS.

And by any measure you care to throw at either, the same can be applied to OS4.

[the_leander]

Even considering a Hombre PC

How many times does this have to be explained to you? Now sit down, and if you need to get your carer to help you with the big words, ready? Hombre was never ever under any circumstances going to be a PC. It was a games console.

X1000 is as good as anything Commodore would have done if they didn't fold, as they were late with chipsets and due to the ongoing GPU battle (with new designs every 3 months) chipsets would have gone the way of the dodo just the same.

Actually by your own admission there, the X1000 would fail on one key point: Price. X86 is plentiful, PPC isn't.

[the_leander]

man it was you who said C= was going to drop AOS and built a WinNT PC that used both hombre chipset and PA-Risc CPU or i would have never mentioned it.

And the only reason I stated what I did was because of this:

Commodore engineers wrote a long paper as to how Amiga would develop after AAA and if you read it you will see the X1000 is what they describe (I kid you not).

Which is patently untrue for the reasons already given.

Hmm, --edit for your edit---

Most probably there would have not being any new Amiga personal computer at all (just a PA-Risc PC

Again you're not getting it. AAA was history, it was dropped entirely as a possibility. Everything that could be salvaged from it went into the ill fated Hombre project. Amiga was a dead parrot.

so with the X1000 we got lucky, as at least we're getting something.

You and maybe a handful of other BAFs. The rest of the community will be looking toward Minimig, AROS and MorphOS. Honestly and truly I do not get the need for a "next gen" PPC Amiga. It was an ill conceived idea ten years ago and it's a significantly worse one now.

[the_leander]

Am going to leave it there for a bit as we're editing based on edits here now and it's making the whole flow of conversation a bit batty.

[the_leander]

As I told you you should visit AW and other sites, the "vision" Amiga.org is giving you is quite distorted as far as your conception of "the rest of the community".

I refuse to give patronage to sites that actively help in the commission of fraud. I'm kinda funny like that. Oh I'll see the occasional thread over there when it pops up on the bunny, but as far as I'm concerned every single mod who was involved during the A1 debacle aught to have been brought up on charges and the site shut down.

On this my view is non negotiable.

Many did grow up professionally with AmigaOS I had 040-RTG-and more, we want our personal back, we don't think at Amiga as a gaming console as many classic aficionados confine it to be.

I'm too much of a utilitarian to view it as much more than a good way of getting an education on how computers work in both hard and software terms to write it off as just a jumped up game console. But at the same time the view that some people seem to have (that the X1000 is somehow going to make the Amiga a player in the market) just strikes me as a bit silly.

[the_leander]

Amiga.org: 7,155 members.
AW.net: 4,428 members.
Amigans.net: 1205 (of which only 300 visits in a month)

Amiga.org is all about all aspects of Amiga. All true Amigans are here. This site isn't about forcing some view about "what is Amiga" onto people; people here are perfectly capable of having their own views on that. It's a true community site, not a marketing site for one particular product, and thus the most relevant site for all things Amiga.

AW.net was created with the sole purpose to suppress/censor any other views than that everyone should buy products from Eyetech and Hyperion. Deleted posts, deleted threads, deleted user accounts was the way they enforced this "truth".

When Perestroika finally made its way to AW.net, the same clowns that once were behind the "exodus" to AW.net, tried a new exodus to amigans.net, to be able to continue the same policy. And look how well that went.

So don't come here lecturing others about "distorted views on Amiga.org", you child of propaganda. Allowing a multitude of voices, views and opinions is the very *remedy* for distorted views.

Well said sir, well said.

[the_leander]

When was the last account clearance at Amiga.org? I mean removing all the unused for years accounts, like AmigaWorld.net did some years ago?

IIRC inactive accounts were removed with the switchover to Vbullitin but you'd have to confirm that with Karlos.

[the_leander]

First Amigans.net is the only Amiga board that performs continuos inactive accounts clean ups, they were at almost 1300, went below 1000 after many clean ups, and now they are back at 1205.

Define "active". Showing up once a month? Once every 3 months? It's all well and good lambasting someone over accuracy, but if you're going to do so it behoves you to do likewise.

AW.net and Amiga.org however have accounts that are not used since ages (and will probably never be used ever again) not to mention that with past wars, who knows how many trolls built second accounts just to post under different identity (this appens everywhere but these accounts get cleaned at Amigans).

Yes we've all seen first hand the removal of "troll" accounts.

That said, if the AmigaOS4 community en mass, decided to dwell elsewhere, you will still NOT get the whole picture here.

You're right, Amiga.org doesn't get the whole picture. For starters it doesn't have nearly as many of the more hardline screwballs from either camp.

Morover ALL moderators there are NOT AmigaOS only people, most have MOS and fairlanefastback while being an adamant AROS fan, owns all of them.

From what I've seen, fairlanefastback has had something of a mixed reception on AW.

So how can this be the only board an Amigan (of any flavor) should frequent?

Reading comprehension really isn't your strong suit, is it chum?

I believe that you and the_leander have a problem with them

With whome?

Sorry but you do need to visit all boards to get the whole picture, and you cannot speak about the WHOLE community (and say Aos4 supporters are just a few, as I heard here) when you never go out of your usual circle.

And what makes you think even for a second that either myself or TMHG haven't visited these sites?

[the_leander]

Are you saying that is happening in the here and now at AW.net?  Or does your accusation only relate to when the original AmigaOne was introduced?

The latter.

To be clear, I was actually on the original AW.net site when it was just a member page for the IRC channel on Undernet before the exodus occurred.

[the_leander]

TMHG and leander are 2 guys I respect, I believe I own leanders old 3k (nice chain drilling BTW )

You got it from Robert? When I passed her onto him she was all original parts. Although in desperate need of a replacement PSU (it sounded like a camera flash charging up when you turned her on - the caps were that badly stuffed) so not guilty on that one Also ta and likewise

 but you cannot come on here spouting you ill informed views and ignoring the past without winding up the locals. There are certain people that are still in the Amiga world that drove the community to its various camps (at least 2 were at VCF) and they cannot be forgiven for their past actions.

If you don't want to be called up on every post, I respectfully suggest you return to where you views are more sympathetically received.

Hear hear.