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Author Topic: Is Amiga NG underpowered?  (Read 10556 times)

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Offline whabang

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Re: Is Amiga NG underpowered?
« on: May 13, 2015, 01:15:54 PM »
PPC is dead from a consumer perspective. While there's nothing stopping it from being a hobbyist platform, it's expensive as hell and there's not a lot of hardware to choose from.

X86 is well-supported and cheap, though there's a zillion different hardware configs. Getting it to run on everyone's PC's can be tricky because of this.

ARM is cheap as hell, and there's plenty of real cheap hardware available (the omnipresent Pi and boards like it). The hardware is a bit more uniform, but performance is lower than X86. Still, it's cheap as hell.

I'd prefer a Pi port, but that's subjective.
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Offline whabang

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Re: Is Amiga NG underpowered?
« Reply #1 on: May 15, 2015, 11:25:55 AM »
Quote from: itix;789263
PPC Macs are cheap and powerful :)



From those two x86 (x64) is more powerful. So if performance is your goal you choose x86 platform. If you want to go mobile then ARM. Or both. Dump idea of having native code and compile everything to 68k target and have 68k emulator built-in.



Actually RPi is one of the worst ARM offerings. There are cheaper and faster ARM based boards available but they are less famous and people always think there is only RPi...

PPC Macs are definitely available, but they're not being produced anymore. If we'd base everything on them then we'd actually be planning to use a dying platform (which is irellevant, because we're discussing Amiga, but anyway).

I'd prefer the Pi because of it's popularity and not because it's performance. AmigaOS is designed with even weaker hardware in mind so I doubt it would pose a problem.

Mind you, I wouldn't have anything against support for multiple ARM platforms. It would still be easier than trying to support x86.

As for using emulation to achieve everything, well, we can allways make an OS using an emulator running on Linux, or use some kind of universal binary that will run under any OS that has a VM for it... ;)
« Last Edit: May 15, 2015, 11:28:53 AM by whabang »
Beating the dead horse since 2002.