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

[the_leander]

It is definitely out of my price range as well.
But i think it is clearly meets the budget of some amigans considering the prices classic systems go for at ebay.

The difference there is that the classic systems have the benefit of being antiques (or about as close to that as a computer can be). They represented at one stage the pinnacle of computer engineering as well as a first taste of things to come. They are our childhood, our past and fondly remembered.

The X1000 by contrast... Yes, it has OS4 (just about - that was the first time they've ever got it to boot). Yes it's more powerful and potentially of better build quality than the A1's it looks to replace as the top of the line "nextgen amiga". Being new kit it offers very little in terms of nostalgia.

But for my tastes it puts me in mind of the 68060. It's one step too many on an EOL (as far as desktop usage goes) cpu arch. Apple saw the writing on the wall both with the 68k and the PPC, but it seems on both occasions the Amiga has stayed that little bit longer and has been left behind with overpriced and under-performing processors.

I can't help but feel that the Minimig AGA/Clone A/Natami all represent a far more reasonable way of looking at what is essentially a hobby. The X1000 would have made sense ten years ago if you were planning on making AmigaOS a player in the mainstream computer market again. Today however it is hopelessly out-gunned as a serious system (the price of a full X1000 setup puts you firmly into gaming laptop and serious workstation territory) and incredibly hard to justify as a hobby machine, even if we were in good times.

But that's my opinion only.

[the_leander]

Spot the MorphOS fanboy.  MorphOS is not Amiga at all, nor is Aros and neither should claim to be.

Spot the OS4 fanboy. OS4 is not Amiga at all, and shouldn't claim to be.
Works both ways sunshine.

I agree about the price to a certain extent, but so annoying when people come up with unfounded statistics like 99%. =p

Happy to be in the 1%.

Thing is, with each new "nextgen Amiga" that a good portion of the community surrounding it peal off due to the poor price/performance ratio. So right now you're in the 1% of the 1% of the 1%.

Until we know price for sure, there is little point talking about it.

I think Trevor publicly stating the projected price makes it fairly certain. In fact the only real uncertainty is just how far "north of £1500" it ends up being.

[the_leander]

I was there.  They didn't actually announce a price; only hinted.

Apparently Grimsby doesn't teach the same English language as the rest of the English speaking world...

Which part of:

at 5:20 into the video the exchange ls;

Question : "How much is it gonna cost?"
Answer : "I dunno, I really don't know. It's gonna be north of £1,500. Definatly. It can't be any cheaper"

is unclear exactly? Seriously how much more of a flat out statement do you need?

[the_leander]

As an alternative, NATAMI is your future.

Or by the same token - MiniMig.

[the_leander]

What's your definition of "many" in this instance?  ;-)
And I don't mean how many people like MorphOS, I mean of those, how many consider it Amiga?

I like MorphOS..  It's very kual..  But it's not Amiga...  
Inspired by..  Yes.  Partially compatible with, yes...

Which is the same boat that OS4 is in, since in the trial against Amiga.inc, they stated that there was no original code from the 3.x series as the assembler source they had was utterly useless. IIRC this was one of the key arguments that allowed them to continue to develop OS4.

So no matter which way you cut it, MorphOS is as much AmigaOS as OS4 is from a technical point of view. Then all that remains is to answer the question what is an Amiga?

[the_leander]

The benefit of ARM would be small designs which could give us all sorts of interesting compact machines, very low cost and easy accesibility.

Which would be almost entirely outweighed by the fact you'd still be dealing with very small production runs.
 

x86 would be great too, but then, might as well just pour the development time and money into AROS to amp that up more.

Now there is the voice of reason.

[the_leander]

Reason always loses in amiga land. MorphOS developers tend to belittle AROS, claim that it is messy, that it has no apps, that it is mostly broken etc. Yet, where did they go when they needed to get rid of the need for OS3.1 binaries?

Much the same place Hyperion went when they needed a working USB stack I suspect.

MorphOS on old mac hardware might be fun a couple of more years, but not much more. Also, with the lack of modernization of the OS itself, it gets less and less interesting to run MorphOS rather than just using UAE on whatever modern OS there is. So where is MorphOS going?

Thing is I can see much the same argument being held against OS4.

[the_leander]

AROS is no way to go. As long as it is on a normal WinPC, it will never have the special properties Amiga had.

Hate to break this to you, but post newbus macs and the A1 and follow-on systems follow more or less the same basic architecture as a modern PC, the only difference with them is the CPU.

If you want those "special properties" with a modern twist your options are Minimig, CloneA and Natami.

[the_leander]

Is CloneA actually progressing at all these days ?

Last I heard it was still being developed, however I have to admit to not really following it much, especially with the imminent release of the MiniMig-AGA.

@the leander
Well, I  like Natami. X1000 has some potential too,  but it is too expensive if it passes 1500EUR.

If by potential you mean potential to do anything other than bomb, then I fear you are in for a grave disappointment for the reasons outlined in one of my previous posts:

The question then becomes: Does OS4 offer enough incentive over and above something that can run UAE/Amithlon and OS3.9 as fast if not faster for a fraction of the cost? Hell even MorphOS running on a £40 eMac suddenly becomes a serious issue if you absolutely must have next gen software.

For a very select few that answer will be yes, I must have OS4, but even with this the X1000 has to compete against both the Sam440 and 460.

No matter how you try to paint it, the X1000 is in a very very weak position.

This machine is aimed at a hobbyist marketplace but at a cost usually associated with professional tools such as workstations. As a result you have anyone other than a zealot who will naturally compare what they would be getting with other offerings in the marketplace. In that light the X1000 compares very, very poorly.

For "north of £1500" you could get yourself a pretty sweet gaming laptop, a screaming fast gaming desktop or a pro workstation. Against such competition the X1000 simply doesn't cut it.

Again, this is only my opinion but I feel it is a fairly realistic assessment.

[the_leander]

Well  again, it is intended for future opportunities.

It might be because I'm tired, but I'm not getting this.

Could you please explain for me how circa 2002 performance hardware is intended for future opportunities?

[the_leander]

(i still don't see AROS janus uae as a real solution for 68k integration, except for games).

Janus isn't the only option available for integration within AROS. See here for more details.

Regarding the comparison with UAE, the answer is easy: OS3.x is dead, and almost no applications are written for it anymore. The development is clearly targetted for the new OSes.

That'd be fine if it wasn't for the fact that the vast, vast majority of the Amigas software catalogue wasn't made specifically for the 3.x series. Over and above this, none of the three follow-ons have much by way of software.

[the_leander]

Firstly, sorry this is the link I was aiming for originally. My bad.

 This attempt to integrate UAE transparently seems like a very difficult task,

I imagine it is, but no more so than writing a from scratch emulation layer for MorphOS or OS4 I would imagine. The engine at least is already done. Setting up a layer to pass between native and emulated is underway now as can be seen from the screenshots.

and i doubt it will ever reach the level of integration MorphOS or OS4 can achieve.

As far as I know neither MorphOS or OS4's emulation layers offer chipset support. However as with that link above shows there is more than one way to skin a cat.

[the_leander]

We'll see how far this project goes, but let me give a few issues that this UAE implementation currently has (and which might be difficult to resolve):

Note that the second link (which was the one I should have posted first) is much more in line with the emulation layer offered by both MorphOS and OS4.

- different UI style between the native OS and the emulated applications (3.x vs AROS). More generally, the emulated applications don't benefit of any AROS enhancement.

So long as the AROS enhancement doesn't detract from the functionality I don't see that as being an issue.

- No transparent drag'n'drop between AROS and UAE.
- All kinds of notifications (DOS or anything else) won't be signaled between AROS and UAE.
- What if you want to run some emulated MUI application on another screen, how will UAE handle that? What will happen to the other applications that should stay on wanderer screen?
- To be seen if the actual implementation shares filesystem, clipboard and so on correctly too.
- Is network support even enabled in this UAE version?

Best asked of people actually working on Janus.

I could probably think of hundreds of other scenarios where you could have similar glitches. Some can probably solved, but you see the kind of problem this solution has to face with.

I quite agree it is a huge undertaking. But if done right will offer better support for Amiga software than either MorphOS or OS4 in a transparent way.

Of course, the emumiga project would offer a much simpler solution in line with the other two to bring it up to the same level of compatibility.

[the_leander]

Soc is an intelligent way of integrating memory controllers and other circuits inside the CPU, and quite frankly, it's the way of the future, Intel is going the same route adding stuff "inside" the CPU all the time and Soc is their future as well (if you care to disagree call their engineers and explain them why everything should stay separate instead).
In the X1000, the CPU should probably be this one check the whole paper and you will see it is quite similar to other very modern designs: LINK

For the Atom and to a lesser extent their i3/i5 chips yes, more things are being shifted over into the cpu. However, these are primarily aimed at the desktop/nettop/netbook markets. The PA6T was designed from the start as an embedded microcontroller along the same lines as the ARM and MIPS families.

As for "there is nothing" on the mobo that other could not manifacture and sell, I disagree 2 folds, the first is that the way Xena/XMP and system communicate is a proprietary design Verisys will patent for sure, moreover there will be no home computer as "different" as this one from any manufacturer (if you know of a project or if you know why another company might create such a system feel free to fill me in).

Basically it is as different as it gets for modern standards.

I'm sorry what? A bit of glue logic that anyone with access to an fpga prototyping kit could knock up in a few weeks? That's your argument? Dear gods sir you need to lay off of whatever the hell it is you've been huffing. It shares the vast majority of its arch with a bog standard PC. It has a circa 2002 desktop performance SoC sat on top running the show at heavy duty workstation/gaming rig prices.

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).

Only if you're blind. I've read the paper, it includes a move to double up the AAA chipset, adding PCI in place of Zorro and using a PA-RISC cpu.

In short a road map to use as much off the shelf gear as possible as a means to keep down costs associated with development. Note too that AmigaOS was EOL. Commodore were going to be running WindowsNT on those PA-RISC boards.

At no point was PPC a feature on C='s roadmap.

If they had survived long enough to follow that road map and were still around today, they would have ended up being just another beige box x86 supplier as HP dropped the PA-RISC some time back in response to Intels request for the adoption of the abortive Itanium cpu.

[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.