Ease off bashing AmigaONE X1000?

[Hans_]

They should be building a machine that is better priced, fully supported and easily purchased by the average user to sell more copies of OS4 thus increasing the number of users and making some money at the same time.

That sounds great ... until you start trying to think of a way to make it happen and at least break even. Go on, try to come up with a realistic plan. Once you discover how expensive it is to develop and produce one of these boards, and how hard (and expensive) driver development is, I think that you'll give up. The length of time that it took to get onboard audio supported (both A1-X1000 and Sam460ex) should give you a hint as to how hard and time consuming driver developmennt is. Also, bear in mind that people won't be satisfied with Efika grade hardware even if it's affordable.

This may be slightly off-topic but, given the above, here's some of what I like about "Project Cyrus" (the future A1-X2000):
- Freescale have committed to long-term supply of the CPU, so any work done supporting it will last years
- There's an upgrade path to a high-end quad-core machine (via the P5040) without requiring reengineering of the board, or a single new driver to be written
- Choosing an already supprted sound-card instead of having an audio chip on-board lowers board costs, board design & testing costs, and eliminates the need to create yet another driver (or scrounge around for a supported chip that will remain available long-term)

Hans

[Hans_]

Oh spare me the crap about how hard and expensive it is. I work at intel and see other engineers doing things here all the time for nearly nothing on hardware they just toss together to test ideas. As mentioned if the Raspberry-PI guys can build a machine as cheap as they do I dont want to hear how hard it is to get it done. I see it every single day I go to work.

The Raspberry Pi is built around a single ARM SoC with everything that they need, including GPU. They also took full advantage of available Linux drivers, and manufacturing at higher volumes than we're talking about. If something similar existed in the PowerPC world, then it would definitely be much easier. But, it doesn't.

Anyway, why don't you prove me wrong then. Go and "toss together" a PowerPC motherboard with PCIe & PCI slots, make sure that every bit of hardware on the board has AmigaOS 4.x drivers before putting it on the market, and sell it for a reasonable price.

Good luck. You're going to need it. ;-)

Hans


P.S. The Raspberry Pi is pretty slow and very limited (e.g., slow SD-Card, no SATA, etc.). It suffers (amongst other things) from bandwidth constraints caused by the CPU and GPU sharing bandwidth. Comparing what A-Eon is doing with the Raspberry Pi is a bit of a joke.

P.P.S. Did you factor in the salaries of those engineers at Intel when you calculated that their exploits cost "nearly nothing"?

[Hans_]

So it goes back to my original argument which is if Individual computers are able to deliver products at a reasonable price why is that not possible when it comes to the X1000?

It's quite simple really. As impressive as Individual Computers' products are, their accelerators have a fraction of the complexity of the A1-X1000. They run at lower frequencies which makes design easier; the components are simpler, and they have fewer components. There is no way that you can compare an accelerator for a "classic Amiga" to a full ATX motherboard with a >1GHz CPU.

Hans

[Hans_]

yet again there is two major points surfacing to justify high proce of "amiga" hardware:
1. development costs, especially drivers. supporting further "amiga" develoment.

That's just a reality of the situation, no matter who produces the hardware.

as for driver support. sure i trust, it is a lot of work. but its surely less work to support particular narrowly chosen chipsets like those of sam series and x1k than the whole variety of them (it has been even used as genuine argument against x86 switch). yet there is aros support for a wide choice of devices and aros developers also support os4 and other alternatives with their development. instead hyperion has problems to deliver driver support for its own dedicated hardware and this task has been taken over by hardware vendors (trevor admits it). in all due respect to hans readeon drivers, i cant believe driver development is so much harder for os4 devs than for aros team, lat alone morphos.

It isn't "so much harder for OS4 devs than for AROS or Morphos devs." With AROS there is also a significant lag between new hardware shipping and drivers being written let alone stable. Morphos support for hardware in old PowerPC Macs also took a long time. AFAIK, some Mac hardware still isn't supported yet.

Hans

[Hans_]

Seriously, Jens Schönfeld makes his own HW, he has the competence and doesn't need to invoice the time spent to anyone, he sets his own price on the time spent. Trevor Dickinson doesn't have this in-house competence, hence he paid an enormous price for the X1000 development (can't remember the sum, but it was huge IIRC).

Seriously, even if Jens designed something like the A1-X1000, it would still cost a heap more than one of his accelerators sub-100 MHz accelerators.

Hans


P.S. What you call "an enormous price" is what you can expect designing a modern motherboard to cost.