Amiga One XE Status Update

[HyperionMP]

Well, anybody in his right mind knows (possibly excepting most PC users) that benchmarks are highly misleading, especially across platforms and CPU architectures.

Sure, the Duron 1200 Mhz isn't the hottest chip on the planet but neither is the 7451@800 Mhz (especially without L3 cache at the time).

All we were saying is that we ran the same codebase compiled with the same compiler (GCC 2.95.3) and that overall the 800 Mhz G4 (without the L3 cache) gave the Duron 1200 a very sound thrashing.

This "real life" test measures not only CPU performance but also memory bandwidth and graphics card bandwidth.

This is by far a more telling test than most of those artificial benchmarks.

The same result can be obtained with the 750FX from IBM at 800 Mhz incidentally.

Substituting the Duron by an Athlon is not going to have the radically different results that you might expect as not only CPU performance is measured.

It's clear that the Motorola and IBM solutions will never achieve the economies of scale that the Wintel world has.

But then again, if you take a close look at the power-consumption of your average Athlon, you'll find that it is completely unsuitable for embedded use.

Powerconsumption on the PPC is only a fraction of what it is on your average Athlon/Duron/P4.

Throw in the vastly superior Altivec technology and you have an ideal solution for embedded multimedia solutions.

We need to push the AmigaOS into every possible niche and this is exactly the thing.

[HyperionMP]

Wayne, I agree with you that the A1 is not an embedded system (although I already know two companies which are going to use it in Linux server racks because of the low heat dissipation).

But we have to look at the bigger picture here: AmigaOS development cannot gone on solely on the basis of sales in the tiny desktop market which we only a consider as a stepping stone.

We are keenly eyeing the embedded multimedia systems market which is much, much larger and therefore potentially much more lucrative.

I'm thinking of things like kiosk systems, point of sale systems and STB's.

That's always been the middle to longer term goal.

There, the low footprint of the OS both in terms of memory usage and CPU requirements, it's near Real Time behavior, very fast booting times etc. are ke selling points, especially combined with the content available for it (which is far greater than the content for say QNX).

In this market the PPC CPU family can really shine, especially with IBM now even offering solutions in the low-end of the market which rival StrongARM and X-Scale based solutions in terms of performance and power-consumption.

Very concrete plans are under way in this area but I cannot comment any further at this stage.