ARM for the future?

[fishy_fiz]

Personally I dont really care too much for any of the ppc amiga systems, but ARM seems a reasonable successor if there's ever a decision made to change architectures.
What I do find interesting is ARM power consumption growing as x86 power consumption declines. AMD bobcat is already as low as 9w including an intergrated hd6xxx (dx11) class gpu.
Between ARM and x86 there's actually a bit of interesting stuff happening in the computer world at the moment.

[fishy_fiz]

Sure, I have no problems with PPC, or even the PPC amiga options, and it made a kind of sense to use it as the successor to 68k. When I say I dont really care too much I dont mean it in a negative way, Im just somewhat nonchalant. AROS I have a little interest in, but that's declining as well compared to my heavy involvement of the past. The closest thing to an "NG" amiga system Im still quite into these days is Amithlon. For me it's just about being able to continue my amiga hobby of old, with software I know and enjoy, and while I can understand people wanting to use an evolved version of the amiga the new options lose just as much as they gain for my tastes.

Sorry for being a little off topic, I just wanted to clarify that I wasnt bashing PPC. (Im getting pretty darn tired of the arguing about all the typical stuff these days)

[fishy_fiz]

x86 has and continues the brute force approach.
In the old days you had to think long and hard which platform you wanted, because of the low chance of software getting ported.

The only thing you have to think about now is whether you want to buy a locked down nanny you gadget or if you want an open one. There is a high chance cross platform software. Directx coming to Linux is a nice one.

Developers big and small make an effort to port there stuff to both Mac and Windows. On a smaller level also to an iphone.

If you want something bloated you can have Windows or Linux (lite versions yeah got it). It would not be an Amiga experience unless the OS is very lean or very easy to make lean.

My vote is for ARM because you could make it feel like an olde Amiga. x86 PC still seems like a frankenstein monster...You're forever configuring drivers or altering the bios whenever you plug something in or reinstall the OS.

I can only guess you was drunk while you typed this  
DirectX for linux ? Huh? There's wine, but its not directx. You also seem to be confusing x86 for particular oses running on x86. As for cross platform development, the only thing that really needs to be considered is endianness, which doesnt often come up and is mostly dealt with by development tools and apis, and the apis themselves.
As for x86 using brute force, sure it can, but x86 is also quite elegant when it needs to be. In regards to ARM "feeling" more like amiga, that's like saying an orange "feels" more like a grapefruit in regards to the official fruit of argetina,.... completely nonsensical. AROS for example can run on various architectures, and not one "feels" different to the others, be it arm, ppc, x86 or x86-64. All feel *very* amiga like though. Additionally you can run big endian x86 code inside amiga os3.x inside amithlon and it does absolutely nothing to the feel besides improving speed.

Hopefully this doesnt seem too harsh, but your post really was a bunch of jibberish.

[fishy_fiz]

hehe, I must admit that was my 1st thought when seeing Dreamcast mentioned too, but thankfully I decided to do a bit of googling before I responded.
I miss my Dreamcast. Probably my favorite of the "modern" consoles.

[fishy_fiz]

Heh, cool, looks very nice. It's inspirations are pretty clear (some heavy rtype inspired bits there), but it looks to have been done quite well.
What's the story behind it though, is it a commercial game ? Looks too nice to be homebrew  

[fishy_fiz]

Where has Franko gone then ?

So far as I know he decided to take his bat and ball and go home  
Nah, seriously, I think he's just decided to return to a life of solitude and his amigas.

[fishy_fiz]

Nah, it wont. ARM doesnt come close to high end x86 gear. Also x86 of today shares very little in common with x86 of yesteryear, so saying youre sick of x86 since you bought your first pc is like saying youre sick of a different cpu compared to what what is your 1st pc.

I probably shouldnt be surprised to see this kind of garbage on an Amiga site though.

[fishy_fiz]

He might mean to program on. Or maybe he's had a series of buggy computers. You do have to be careful choosing your parts because some, usually cheap mfgrs parts will give you trouble.

Do you remember the old celeron with it's gimped 66mhz bus? At the same time the Pentium II use to cost a fortune. How about all those overclocked and rebadged CPUs before intel and AMD started locking them. Intel did a share swap with RAMBUS and tried to push their serial memory.
I can see how someone could have a bad opinion x86s.

Im more the sort of person who will judge something on it's merrits rather than dislike something because I chose something else. Sure, there has been some x86 cpu's that have been weak compared to others, but that doesnt mean x86 as a whole is bad (incidently the original celerons (apart from the 266mhz version) werent so bad vs. p2's.... thier l2 cache ran at full clock rate vs 1/2 clock rate of p2 and early p3's,.. it was only once coppermine was released that the 66mhz bus started to be a problem, but who ran thier celerons at original fsb anyway ?).

All this is neither here nor there anyway. As I said x86 of today is a far cry from x86 of yesteryear.
Modern x86 cpus have 16 general purpose registers by the way. Sure it's still less than a lot of RISC based chips, but quite a difference to the 4 that has been quoted.

[fishy_fiz]

ARM is better suited as a destination for ports of 68K based OS' and software than X86. Yes, there are no ARM processor that match X86 in computing power, but ARM is considerably more powerful than 68K and has closed the gap in performance it had with PPCs.
ARM can be configured to run with the same endian  structure as the 68K (as can most PPCs). X86 can not and suffers at least a 20% performance penalty because of that. The only reason this is not significant, is that X86 processors are already more powerful than needed to run this software.
Which brings up another point. How much CPU power do we need to run our software?
Both AOS4 and MorphOS can run on CPUs that operate below 400Mhz. Right now cheap ARM boards exist (at under $200) that run at 1Ghz. Clearly there is enough CPU power.

"I probably shouldnt be surprised to see this kind of garbage on an Amiga site though."

Why are you here if you don't think much of our opinions? This discussion was prompted by announcements made by Nvidia that they intended to compete with X86s in the desktop and server market with a new ARM design. I don't think Nvidia's ideas are foolish AND if they think they can create an ARM CPU that is powerful enough to compete in this market, well then we are going to see ARM processors that are
MORE powerful than we need (for our purposes).

Im not arguing that ARM is the wrong choice of targets. As I said already, it makes sense as a migration path for a 68k or ppc based system.
Nor am I sying ARM is bad. As I said already in this thread there's some interesting thing happening in the ARM world. All Im saying is that it gets tiring hearing the same old anti x86 garbage that's based on how x86 used to be.

[fishy_fiz]

I ported both dosbox and bochs to aros, so have used windows on an amigoid system more than a few times already     Sure it's not virtualised, but still more than usable. Without doing any specific benchmarks Id hazzard a guess at bochs being somewhere between a high end 486 and low end p1, and dosbox being somewhere between a high end p1 and low end p2 on my aros box. Dosbox has a jit style emulation for x86 targets, so is quite nippy.

Backtracking a few posts though,...... x86 being at the highest price point the market will bare ? Huh? x86 is by an absolute mile the best bang per buck cpu on the market.

[fishy_fiz]

Im not going to name anyone, but it's amazing to see how many "amigans" seem to be more or less clueless about the very system they defend. It's also disappointing to see others trash amiga based systems they clearly dont use or know about, but will still happily talk rubbish about.

For a "community" that touts itself as being technoligcally savvy there sure is a large portion that is clueless (even if they like to think otherwise).