Do you approve of PPC (in some form) as the future of Amiga?

[the_leander]

I vote for the 680x0.  Since the heart of the Amiga is its unique graphics chipset, that limits the future to FPGA and similar technologies.  As long as FPGAs are affordable, we should stick with 680x0 softcores to make them a compact SoC.  Viva MiniMig, NatAmi, and CloneAA!

Actually it was the the whole FPGA thing that made me pick "other"... Hmm!

BS.

Most of us CAN afford new hardware.

Whilst I get what you're trying to say, I think you're ignoring what he said - which was that they couldn't afford PPC hardware.

And given the cost even of a new Sam, much less the projected price of the X1000, is perfectly valid, even to the point of your own comment being true at the same time.

[the_leander]

Architecturally can the PPC ever reach the performance of the x86!?

The problem is not in getting PPC to match x86 on a given day, IBM have proven repeatedly that they are more than capable of doing so.

The problem is in maintaining parity between x86 and PPC once they meet.

Telecoms don't tend to need ultra fast PPC's as they use SOCs with the grunt work being passed onto specialised bits of silicon rather than a general purpose cpu so as to save power and reduce heat output.

Even the chips in the current games consoles really aren't all that, not that they were that competitive to begin with in raw performance terms.

[the_leander]

And Power series? (power6, Power7 andfuture Power8)

Are where they've always been: Big iron.

[the_leander]

Think about the incredible things created on a quad core. Who wouldn't want a computer with 80 cores instead of 4?

And look at how much of the time 3 of those 4 cores are sat idling away because the processes required by the user can't be done efficiently as anything other than serial operations? Answer: With few exceptions, quite a bit of the time. There are issues inherent in multi processing in that quite a few of our day to day tasks cannot be broken up easily in a multi-threaded manner.

BeOS solved them by forcing everything to be multi-threaded. It meant that things like unpacking a zip archive was slower under BeOS than it was under Win98/2k on the same hardware because of the overheads in trying to break up single threaded operations. OSX does ok but even it's solution is no magic bullet, Dragonfly BSD's proposed solution is to turn multi core chips effectively into a Beowulf cluster.  
 

Useless for a desktop?

For the forseable future, yes. 80 cores has no place on the desktop. You'd be damned hard pressed to justify 8 outside of a server...

[the_leander]

X86 makers:

-Intel
-Amd
-Via?


PowerPC makers

-IBM
-Freescale
-Amcc
-Toshiba
-Agnilux/google?


PowerPC wins

You cannot possibly be this dumb.

[the_leander]

It was half-jokingly.  The problem with Amiga.org is that you can not embed images

Code: [Select]

[img]url to your image[/img]

You'll find that works just fine.

[the_leander]

Porting 3.1 3.5 or 3.9 to x86 would be awesome. I'm amazed that no one ever leaked the source code to any of them.

At one time it was available from an AT ftp server, an "oversight". IIRC it was this that allowed Olaf Barthel to get his copy.
 

A bounty could be started to port it to whatever people wanted.

Yes, because once you've gone so far as to commit copyright infringement, the next stage is to monetize it and potentially put other people in the spotlight along with you...

[the_leander]

Outside of Freescale using lawyers to hinder 680x0 dev. is there any technical reason why 680x0 could not be developed to compete with with todays quad cores?

Only the earth shattering costs of reworking an arch that hasn't seen development in what, 16 years?

That's even assuming that what you ended up with would remotely resemble or be compatible with what you used as a starting point.

Consider the differences between 68k and Coldfire and that is only one step away, what you're proposing is several steps away.

[the_leander]

Also, realize a 1.5 Ghz G4 beats a 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 in general performance, a PPC will give you twice (or more) performance per cycle due to its RISC and ability to execute instructions faster and more efficiently

Tell me, what colour is the sky on the planet upon which you spend most of your time?

A 3.2Ghz P4 is in a whole other league of performance.

Inb4claimsofbias

[the_leander]

So where does the dual core PA6T fall in that chart?

I remember when the X1000 was first demoed and all the Amigans.net and AW regulars came here in droves to big it up that Karlos put up a link somewhere showing that the PA6T wasn't a huge amount quicker per clock than the G5. It's single biggest selling point was it's low power usage compared to the G5.

Either way, it'd be nomm'ed up by anything remotely recent.

[the_leander]

Floating point performance of the PA6T was significantly higher than the G5 as I recall, though. Also remember that the performance was for one core. Of course, until OS4 / MOS get some sort of support for more than one core, that's a moot point.

I seem to recall that the only time the floating point performance really took off for the mac was in a few very select and very highly optimised benchmarks using photoshop.

Either way you'd probably struggle to get a lower performing PC that wasn't an Atom powered lifestyle PC.

[the_leander]

I dunno, I'm used to wielding hundreds of GFLOPS nowadays. All CPU's seem insignificant in comparison.

All hail the power of CUDA.

[the_leander]

With G5, Apple didn't factor AMD's K8 Athlon 64 i.e. refer barefeat.com's benchmarks.

Actually I was thinking prior to the G5's release. The only thing that the Mac offered in terms of performance that was anywhere near close to PCs of the day were those highly focused photoshop benchmarks - on anything else the G4 got spanked badly by both intel and AMD.

[the_leander]

In responds to Apple's G5 claims

http://www.pcworld.com/article/112749-8/64bit_takes_off.html
Athlon 64 vs. Apple G5 Systems: Not Even Close (chart)
Apple Power Macs did well on Photoshop, but the 64-bit AMD-based systems won handily on most tests.


AMD K8 Opteron 264 @2.0Ghz vs Power Mac G5 (two IBM PowerPC 970 @ 2.0GHz).

Benchmark Chart from http://www.pcworld.com/zoom?id=112749&page=8&type=table&zoomIdx=1
The AMD64 boxes debunking Apple's G5 claims i.e. 1 CPU vs 1 CPU and 2 CPU vs 2 CPU.

Intel Pentium IV is an easy target.

Tbh I didn't really follow the G5 much beyond it's launch. It's interesting to see that even afterwards, whilst some of the gap between PPC and x86 was gained, it was still on the trailing edge of performance, except, as before and as you noted: Photoshop.

RE the PIV, a power hungry, hard to cool beast it may have been, but it could still put the kosh to a G4 or a G5.

[the_leander]

The chart shows AMD64 boxes beating G5s systems in photoshop...

FFS... Yes, I know, I read it.

What I said was and I quote:

still on the trailing edge of performance, except, as before and as you noted: Photoshop.

I didn't say the G5 beat anything, just that in that particular test, it didn't perform like last years bargain bin part like it did on every other test. The numbers between the two things are in real terms only a gnats tadger apart.

That is all.