AmigaOne X1000 booting AmigaOS4.1 Update 3

[Hammer]

@haywirepc

If you want x86 or ARM, you're free to use AROS. OS4 and MOS are just fine as they are on PowerPC, and nothing is going to change that for the present.

I personally dislike the fact that people here feel the need to go to the red or the blue and change them. AROS does what you want, just leave blue and red alone. In the case of Blue, we have a defined roadmap for the present and we arent going to change that. Red, they seem to be more than a little turbid in terms of where to go, but there are sales for them. So, AROS, either buy the needed hardware to run MOS or OS4 or you're free to use what you want on AROS.

Also, there is the Megahertz myth. All things considered, the megahertz have little to do with speed. I can watch 720p video on My G4 mac, it runs circles on computers owned by my computer consultant friend, including his brand new machine he built.

My old AMD Turion MT-34 1.8Ghz laptop can play 720p WMV-HD i.e. Step_Into_Liquid.wmv test file goes beyond 720p.

At a given clockspeed and general application benchmarks, Intel Core 2 Duo (Solo mode) beats your PowerPC G4 type CPUs, let alone Intel's Core I series Nehalem and Sandybridge type CPU cores.

My AMD C-50 APU (1.0Ghz dual core bobcat+Radeon HD 6250M (SIMD Array)) based Acer Iconia W500 tablet plays 1080p H.264 Blu-Rays just fine.

On the Wintel PC and for CPU base decode, use CoreCodec or disable DXVA (check box in Cyberlink's H.264 codecs) or use broken/non-standard H.264 videos i.e. my tablet plays them just fine.

[Hammer]

Yes, I didn't mean that the PPC per se is dead, only its use in the kind of applications that's interesting to us. Apple were the last desktop and laptop manufacturer, and since Apple left, the whole PPC business changed focus. The future for PPC is in various embedded applications now, routers, printer servers, automotive, etc (and by all means, game consoles).

Already at this moment, ARM chips (Cortex A9) are *on par* with PPC G4 performance wise, and upcoming Cortex A15 will introduce a whole new level of performance and features, making it suitable for servers/desktops etc. And in a few years from now, nVidia will release their own ARM CPU's, what they themselves call "x86 killers", especially targeted towards high-end desktop, workstation and server markets. More manufacturers are bound to follow, that's the beauty of ARM's license based business model. And even Microsoft is on the train, and will release Windows 8 for ARM! So ARM definitely has its future ahead of it!

NVIDIA hasn't proven themselves to be "fat" OOO CPU designers and NVIDIA has to be carefull with OOO CPU patents...

On core vs core, Cortex A9 is dual instruction issue per cycle lite OOO CPU that implements 64 bit SIMD hardware i.e. like SSE before Intel Core 2, ARM's Neon ISA is 128bits wide while the hardware is 64bits.. G4  implements 128bit SIMD hardware. The one of the main problem with old G4 is with it's slow FSB.

PS; K8 Athlon implements 128bit FADD SSE1 in hardware. AMD Bulldozer implements FMA4 which is superior to ARM/PPC's FMA3 format.
AMD Bobcat and Bulldozer cores implements pointer based register rename trick i.e. similar to Cortex A9's register renaming trick.

Note that AMD's GCN (GPU Core Next, Radeon HD 7000 series) includes AMD64/X86-64 IP i.e. AMD is building it's own X86-64 based Larrabee.