Bloatware AmigaOS?

[AmiGR]

they go stick bundles of applications INTO THE OS DISTRO itself. Often WITHOUT the option of NOT installing them. This is a real putoff!

Eh? Which distro does not give you the option of not installing the bundled apps? I've worked with RedHat, Debian and Gentoo and I selected what I wanted to install in all of them.

[AmiGR]

I must disagree with you here, if the last 12 years has taught us anything it is that it is IMPOSSIBLE to build an amiga at a competetive price using off the shelf parts.

Huh? All the problems associated with building an Amiga with off the shelf parts are due to no serious company trying. It's even more impossible to build an Amiga with custom chips than it is with off the shelf parts when you're producing anything less than 100,000. Remember Phase5? They needed to sell 20,000 PPC cards to get even and they sold half that and their boards did not even have custom ASIC's. Imagine how many more you'd have to sell to get even with a fully custom chipset.

[AmiGR]

Exactly. Phase5 by not using custom logic was forced to pay far more per-board than if they had ASIC'd the parts together, to reduce the overall cost of production. That is why the VIC-20 could price-undercut the TI-99A so much, Commodore custom-made the chips, resulting in lower cost to produce. Yes, the R&D and initial cost is higher, but the end-price is far lower.

According to Laire, the licences to use the VHDL synthesis software were half a million. Plus R&D, they really would have no chance to break even, even if they used ASIC's. At the numbers they sold, the cost savings of the production would not outweight the R&D and setup costs.

The MiniMig, don't forget, uses a "custom made" single chip to replace 4 chips, which themselves were custom made to reduce the cost to produce the original multi-thousand-chip Lorraine unit. Your arguement about cost is a paper tiger, the cost of producing is nothing when compared to the cost savings by having reduced the overall number of parts in the product.

That is true when we're talking about numbers but look at the post I replied to and tell me, what would be the chances of the AmigaOne, for instance, being cheaper had it not been based on off-the-self hardware? This market does not really have the numbers to allow companies to produce and sell enough to cover the cost of custom hardware and make profit.

[AmiGR]

Actually, very good chances. I did a cost breakdown for a similar move at about the same time, by migrating to a fixed ASIC and integrating as much as possible, saved almost $45 on production costs. The toolup would have cost approx $37000, mind you, so you'd have to sell 825 boards to break even. But this would have eliminated the whole Mai-supply issue, and given you a faster chipset to boot.

And if you add the costs of hiring someone to design and test such a chipset? It's not as if Eyetech had anyone with the skills of doing that, they tried to hire Escena to design a custom chipset (on FPGA, iirc, but that's a different story) but failed.

[AmiGR]

Note, I can make as good a case for using commodity chipsets in such a solution as well. I just don't like seeing both sides of any arguement dismissed so casually, as most likely the best solution would be a mixture of both.

Agreed. I won't pretend to have any real-world experience with chipset design or that I've produced any at any point myself anyway. ;-)

[AmiGR]

Xilinx offers free cores for a few functions, including a HT module and PPC bus. Take those, add a DDR2 controller, and viola, you now have a fully functioning module that can substitute for an AM2 Athlon on a motherboard. Using the CPU fan mount for support, you can even fit it into an existing socket. Now, the performance wouldn't be worth the work, but if you swapped out the BIOS with an OpenFirmware, you'd have a fully functional PPC based machine w/o needing to develop a new motherboard beyond custom making the firmware, which would limit you to a specific motherboard or a limited selection of motherboards, which you retail for a slight markup.

I like the idea and I'd be willing to bet that the performance, worth the effort or not, would be better than any ArticiaS machine. ;-)

[AmiGR]

The amiga is/was a very special machine, we do not want a pc clone by another name.

I find Downix' argument far more convincing. What is a "PC clone" supposed to be? Computers are standard nowadays, no matter what OS they run.

Whilst it is possible that apples OS could replace windows (if they let it), it is more likely that most macs will be running vista eventually.

You really do not understand Macs then. Macs are not Wintel PCs. They can run Windows, yes, but I know of no single person who has bought a Mac to run Windows exclusively. I know of people who used to use bootcamp to run a few apps and they are now running their Windows apps on virtual machines alongside MacOS and even in patched Vm environments that make Windows applications appear as windows on the MacOS desktop. No-one spends the money to get a Mac to get a Vista machine, people can buy cheaper and more powerful Vista machines elsewhere.