New Hyperion Entertainment Website http://a-eon.com/ - The Mystery Continues

[hazydave]

I have the same opinion. A FPGA could be programmed to emulate AGA for compatibility and other nice stuff. They selected a 400MIPS chip, so based on speed, it is not a big help regarding processing power

Nope. It seems possibly designed for use as an I/O processor, but you can't tell from what they've said if it's actually going that job already, or just counting on someone to provide additional hardware -- as you said, a glorified user port. I don't see hardware development being a big attractor for a machine with effectively zero installed base. This was a hard enough cookie to swallow at Commodore... adding the video slot, CPU slots, and Zorro III slots as a I did. But at least C= had intentions to do something with those, so we could internally justify it, and keeping the interfaces simple enough to allow garage-shop guys using PALs to play helped, too.

At some point, they stated that it could be used to emulate SID.

Well, you need it routed to audio a DAC and audio out path. And heck, there's a SID emulator out for an ATMega 168... that's an 8-bit micro with 16K of memory. I would HOPE a 400 MIPS per core device could do this. But why bother.. you can do this on the host CPU for an immeasurably small amount of CPU. Most current PCs do a full 16-32 voice General MIDI synthesizer in software... that's built in on Windows.

 I believe most of us would expect this chip to be capable of emulating the Amiga chipset, or doing something brand new. (I bet on the last one)

You can emulate the Amiga chipset running UAE on the host machine... what's the minimum speed CPU that does a passable Amiga emulation. I guess you could splt up the emulation between threads... maybe. But you'd have to watch that whole multi-threading thing.

And as well, a forward-moving AmigaOS can't get bogged down worrying about custom chip emulation. Just run UAE. If they wanted to be nice about it, integrate the UAE functionality within the OS, like Windows 7 does the full XP emulation, or OS/2 used to let you run Windows 3.1 windows on the same Presentation Manager screen as native OS/2 apps.

But long run, the goal needs to be to never want legacy apps, or they're doomed to forever be seen as some weird retro machine.

(PS: Oh my god, I'm talking to "the man". It's such an honor)

I'm really not that impressive :-)

[hazydave]

I don't claim to be an Electrical Engineer but from what I was reading on the Titan they think it'll go to 2Ghz at 90nm.

Yeah, maybe you're right... though I think that's after some process tweaking. They seem to be using the Intrinsity technology, or something very much like it, on that CPU. They do a much of tweaking up just the bottlenecks, changing CMOS to NMOS circuity, and some other tricks to get the speed of things up. There are a bunch of CPU companies doing this... for example, Samsung used Intrinsity to get their ARM A8 core running at 1GHz (Samsung has the kind of ARM license that lets them the ARM... and keep in mind, they were the guys pushing the DEC Alpha to new levels, back in the day).

I have no idea, that's from a quote from the marketing on the X1000 page. However, I know the Titan is geared at the Telecommunications/Embedded markets,

Of course it is... that's "code" for "PowerPC" these days. At least some years back, Cisco was putting PowerPC in most every router and switch they made. Thus, PowerPCs grew all sorts of router and switch friendly hardware, like modern memory buses and RapidIO links.

Of course, every CPU that's not an "applications processor" (eg, desktop PC, PDA/phone, etc) is an embedded CPU... they're used in a box or board, hidden away somewhere. For example, I built an R/C controller system. which had two 32-bit ARM CPUs on the main controller, one 16-bit RI MSP430 CPU on the remote, even a tiny Zilog Z8 on an optional tachometer sensor. That's "embedded". So are the CPUs in your DVD player, TV, microwave oven, etc (in case anyone here's not familiar with the term).

The first TiVo used an embedded PPC... not super fast, though, so they had a bit of hardware to decode and encode. Second model used some MIPS CPU, fast enough to decode MPEG-2 in software, but they still needed the hardware encoder.

so you tell me does having an Xena chip with custom I/O socket on board give anyone the opportunity to develop/test Telecom/Embedded systems using this board before moving them onto a physical board or is it pointless with today's virtual circuit design and automatic PCB milling system?

I don't believe anyone building embedded telecommunications gear would bother with something like this. You can get a reference design board for any CPU you're after... all CPU companies either make the boards themselves, or partner with a board company. These are often small enough to fit your target device... in fact, many embedded designs just use off-the-shelf embedded CPU boards -- not everyone wants to design these things from scratch. But you wouldn't likely waste the space of a full-sized ATX motherboard, even for development.

    The question would be, as you point out well, is there any use today for AmigaOS 4 running on what for the OS is a fast system with a Xena processor that would move this to other markets. I don't have a good answer but I for one would love to see AmigaOS get even a small foothold in the market so that it can continue to be developed.

That's the question. I'm not sure just what you'd do with that XMOS chip on its own. It's interesting, but I reject their example of MP3 player... that's well served by $3.00 DSPs these days, probably with a bunch of on-chip peripherals specifically designed for making MP3 players, ultra-low power, maybe even power managed to run off AA cells or a 3.6V Li-ion rechargeable. And they'd have reference designs, software, etc. There's a whole food chain for every microcontroller, which goes by application. Some companies web sites have hundreds of application notes, examples, code, hardware designs, etc.... for each CPU family they make. The fact I didn't really "get" the XMOS chip... ok, I wasn't motivated by "this is work", but you know, I do this for a living. I shouldn't have to guess :-)

     I guess I'm still a dreamer.  8^)  Those crazy Commodore engineers made me into one. 8^) Starting with the VIC20, progressing to the C64 onto the Amiga - they always had a way of pushing the envelope and creating something revolutionary not evolutionary.

None of those guys are working on this, far as I know. And it's a very different world. When we were doing this, personal computing was still very, very young. Right now, not so much.. it has matured. And yeah, it's a little sad, because who gets excited about a new computer release? Ok, maybe a few silly Macheads, but really, the PC you see this year is just a little better than last year. There are occasionally new CPU microarchitectures, but most of the time, it's just small improvements. Same with GPUs.

The reason isn't that no one's trying.. but rather, that many tried, and most ultimately failed. Those who are left are spending billions to incremental improvements, funded by the billions of chips they sell. Mature market.

Doesn't mean there can't be fun, or cool new things. I've been far more interested in the cool computing devices I can put in my pocket, or even my livingroom, than on my desktop. There's just more action in those places.

P.S. It was enough to get Dave to follow the thread so maybe it's at least a little intriguing. 8^) Good talking with you again after all these years. Last time would have been on a newsgroup in the early days of the Internet on my A4000D/030 over modem. 8^)

Ok, I'm hooked in via satellite modem... it's a little faster than dial-up. And many, many times more expensive. But all those dishes on the roof is great for my tech-cred :-)

[hazydave]

I would argue that, technically, x86 is dead.  It exists in RISC emulation layers and x64 is steadily erasing its footprint.

Both of those ARE the x86. Only Microsoft says "x64"... the official name from AMD is x86-64... Intel calls it something else. Regardless, it's all x86. Sure, it's improved... that's been happening, here and there, since 1981. They've got gotten better at it over the last decade... and, well, Intel wasn't always in control.

Now, of course, anyone who's got a religious rather than technical objection against something called "x86"... if they can find they don't hate it when they call it "x64", I say go for it. And while you're at it, stop being insane. The instruction set hasn't mattered since whenever it was in the 1990s that compilers just got better than people (if you want to say 99.9999% of the programmers out there, I'll concede there may be some joker in a cave somewhere who can code better than the compiler... not more accurately, not faster, but better. At least until I change from one x86 chip to another).

And as much as people hate Microsoft, it has done something right with Windows 7: in order to obtain WHQL status for a device, a manufacturer must provide 64-bit as well as 32-bit drivers.

Yes, that was a smart move.. also smart when they required it for Vista, but at least people seem to actually be using Windows 7, not reformatting XP over top.

[hazydave]

Its pretty obvious that x86 is ruling the desktop, and it seems ARM has embedded devices as their big thing. Why did the next gen consoles use powerPC processors?

The main reason is that they wanted IBM as a foundry. Particularly the Cell... there just weren't many chip fabs that could make that when the PS3 came out. The PowerPC, driven for years by Cisco and, a bit, by Apple's desktop use, was (and still is) one of the faster embedded processors. No game machine can really put a desktop-class processor in -- the costs (CPU, heat management, power supply) are way too high.

Also, IBM apparently had the design methodologies in place to redesign the PowerPC at lower costs. And they were taking things down in power, which is always simpler... it would have been much more expensive to add performance, SMP and multithreading to ARM in those days.

Some of it was their design goals, too. Microsoft wanted "anything but x86", since apparently, they were tired of how easily the XBox-1 (which was essentially just a super low-end PC) was hacked. They also wanted multiple threads and cores, based on estimate of how video games were being built at the time. Most embedded processors are single-core only.

Of course, Nintendo had done this, years ago, for the GameCube. The Wii uses PowerPC simply because the GameCube did, and the Wii is only a small upgrade of the GameCube architecture.

There's also this: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2009/01/new-book-from-ibmers-sony-suckered-into-funding-xbox-chip.ars. Some IBMers are claiming that Microsoft chose the PowerPC because Sony had already paid a huge pile of money developing a version of the PowerPC optimized for video games.