Dr. Garry Hare Amiwest Speech

[smithy]

I've just come back from a weekend in Prague (fantastic city by the way) and I've been catching up on all the excitement from Amiwest!  I have some mixed thoughts about it all though, and I think Garry's speech and Q&A session has raised as many new questions as he's answered.

Colin_Camper mentioned that they thought we'd see a version of AmigaOS running on VP.  I think this is possible, but unlikely:  Garry has mentioned the PPC version of Intent, and we already know that KMOS must port AmigaDE to the Pegasos, so it is my belief that we'll see a version of AmigaDE running on OS4/AmigaOne.  Colin_Camper could be right of course - perhaps OS4 will be ported to run on top of AmigaDE.  But AmigaDE must then run on something else.... this scenario (3 systems on top of each other) seems impractical for mobile devices and defeats Garry's unique selling points of small & fast, technically it is unlikely, and from a market point of view it makes no sense either to rely on a third party product while offering a similar service as that third party product.

So this brings us onto the topic of how will AmigaOS run on mobile devices without VP?  The answer is simple, and is the same reason why the whole AmigaDE idea is flawed:  almost every mobile device uses the same CPU.  Symbian only works on one CPU.  I'll repeat:  Symbian is huge, it's massively widespead across billions of devices yet only works on ARM.  There is no port for any other platform.  Fleecy himself brought this everything-uses-ARM point up years ago in an article I read and mentioned it was a threat to AmigaDE, whose USP was based on the mobile world being multiplatform - sorry I don't have time to seek it out.

Anyway, now we know that we don't need AmigaDE to run on a huge variety of devices, it brings us to one logical conclusion - that AmigaOS will be ported to ARM.  We know that OS4 has employed good design practice and has a HAL so it's quite easy to port to other platforms without any big upheavals.  The questions that remain therefore, is how do the teams at Hyperion and KMOS fit together?  Who will do the ARM port?  Who will develop the higher levels of OS4 further?  Will priorities mean that OS4 development slows or loses out in favour of development that will make the system more scalable?

Also unrelated but interesting. Will the ARM port gain greater focus than the PPC version?

[smithy]

It would break binary compatibility, unless that's why KMOS now sees intent to be important alongside AOS.

If they want to run on mobile devices (as Garry has plainly said) then the only other option would be to port AmigaOS to Intent.  But Intent is no operating system, it must be hosted.  So running AmigaOS on Intent on the host's OS on the hardware doesn't seem "small and fast"...

I think there will not be ARM port of AOS in near future.
ARM is not needed. ARM or Xscale is not scaleable and powerfull enough. Today PowerPC fits in "bigger than PDA" sized products (mobile even) and PPC cores are not that much harder to embed. Tomorrow... we'll see.

ARM is more than suitable for mobile devices.  That's why Nokia, Ericsson, Panasonic & co are using it right now to run SymbianOS on their devices.

Symbian has practically a monopoly on the mobile device market - almost all of these devices sold uses ARM processors, there is no reason why this would change in the future.

Compaq isn't going to start producing computers with PowerPC because it doesn't run the OS everyone uses (Windows).

Just like Nokia isn't going to start producing PowerPC phones, because it doesn't run the OS everyone uses (Symbian).

If you want to make a new OS to run on mobile devices, then it must run on ARM.

And I'm pretty sure that KMOS is not stupid enough to go against Symbian&friends with their own cell phone OS, only M$ is.

From reading the speech and the interview, this seems to be exactly what KMOS is doing!  I'm as dubious as you are about how successful they can be....