What happened to Coldfire?

[Crumb]

@bloodline

Also PPC is a sunk ship now...ARM and x86-64 are where it's at!

That's the reason all next-gen consoles use PPC.

[Crumb]

The PPC part of the Cell is rather unimpressive and the SPEs are totally incompatible with anything Amiga.

And what makes you think that an ARM core for example would give more performance? ARMs run at quite low speeds and PPC clocked at the same frequencies crush them in performance.

BTW, unlike SMP, it would be really easy to add SPE support to AmigaOS components. By design it would work far better than powerUp/warpOS.

It would be fairly easy to replace libraries and components step by step by SPE enabled libraries, just like Itix added Altivec support to PowerSDL (afaik it's the only SDL version with Altivec support). Memory copying functions would be the first ones taking benefit.

Perhaps we saw a native CELL build of AROS in the future :-)

[Crumb]

The design of AmigaOS isn't suited to multiprocessing... If OS4 wants to remain compatible with AmigaOS 3.1... Multiprocessing is really out...

Xenon wouldn't be a good idea for AmigaOS if you plan to run existing software in the other cores but in contrast CELL cpu is perfect because there's no legacy software that has to run on the SPEs so a solution similar to WarpOS/powerUp may be possible with the advantage of no cache flushing on context switches. The "subkernel" that could run inside the SPEs could perfectly support SMP for SPE apps since Hyperion/AROS Team/MorphOS Team could define the new API.

Compatibility with OS3.x is not so important for SMP... old apps would continue locking all the cpus but new apps could use other (yet to do) SMP friendly functions instead of forbid/permit and all in all... use a new API. Running OS3.x apps would simply make the system slower as all the locks performed by the old app should lock all the cpus. Of course, an alternative API to perform the operations that now aren't SMP-friendly should be defined, later the OS components should use it and later the new apps should use it.

In conclusion: Taking full advantage of Xenon would mean a lot of work but allowing coders to use the SPEs and use all SPE units simultaneously would be quite easy.

[Crumb]

@Bloodline

Today's rumour:  http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/851/1050851/intel-design-playstation-gpu

I think that Intel will probably design PSX4 GPU, but I think that the cpu will continue to be a CELL because Sony has always been concerned about retrocompatibility. The article only talks about the GPU, not the CPU.

Another possibility is that they used a x86 core with a CELL chip for the SPEs but that would require a very good and fast PPC JIT. But having everything in the same package saves costs usually so I guess they'll continue with a more powerful CELL.

I expect intel will start making more embeded wins in future with it's new "atom" line of chips... and the ARM can't be beaten for low power consumption and decent performance...

I don't know intel's plans, but ATM they haven't shown much interest in embedded stuff. Atom requires a northbridge with relatively high power consumption and most of embedded chips don't require a northbridge at all. Freescale embedded "G4 like" cpus probably offer more features and a similar speed. The embedded market is not so focused on speed but on low consumption and easy integration and since Atom requires a "power hungry" northbridge I don't think it's a good board for embedded stuff.

AMD Geode isn't very good in performance compared to embedded PPCs and I think the real danger for PPCs are ARMs, not x86. Since the embedded market doesn't require so much numbercrunching abilities and is more focused on low power and features the PPC may have a problem there.

An additional problem for the PPC is that Freescale management doesn't seem to show much compromise with PPC.

Well, I always err towards the Desktop... since the Amiga is a desktop platform... I kinda though that is what we are looking at...

That's right, but keep in mind that a cpu that would be almost useless for inneficient OSes like OSX, Linux and Windows is quite useable on Amiga flavour OSes like AROS/AmigaOS/MorphOS.