OS4 moves to x86. What happens next?

[persia]

Yes, I don't think any AmigaOS will ever overtake Linux in terms of popularity.  The reasons behind the idea of X86 AmigaOS are simple.  X86 equipment is plentiful and cheap.  An X86 Amiga would allow you to load a Virtualbox MS Windows/Linux?MacOS system to run software that doesn't exist on the Amiga.  If Wine could be ported you could run many MS Windows programs outside of a virtualbox.

Basically for the price of AmigaOS you could have a brand new Amiga.

[persia]

@ad-rs1600i

But I think we have to realise it's 2011 (almost).  You're never going to be able to out do NVidia as a graphics card. or produce modern versions of any of the custom chips.  Hyperion realise this and support modernish graphics cards.  X1000 runs an Apple CPU, is this somehow more related to Amiga's past than an x86 CPU?

At the end of the day when you modernise legacy, then legacy becomes whatever you want it to be.

[persia]

But HYperion claims to have rewritten OS 4 from scratch using the 3.1 source files as reference.  Surely the OS would be mainly in C with some PPC/UBoot loader in assembler.  So what they would need is a new bootloader that worked with EFI and then fix the fix C code that handled the bits backwards.  OS 9 to OSX  was more complex because it was NextStep based and there had to be a Carbon layer to handle legacy apps.

Does HYperion used any hardware dongles on the motherboards?

[persia]

There's nothing inherently wrong with PPC or superior with X86, it simply was a case of demand driving down the price.  Before the switch Apple was perhaps 4 % of the market, not enough to make a difference to IBM.  When Apple wanted a more powerful PPC for laptops IBM told them to just wait and we'll get around to it, eventually, some day, real soon now. So Apple gave in.  Even the desktop chips, the "military spec" G5s were falling desperately behind X86.  The choice was clear, expensive, slow, rare PPC or cheap, fast, common X86.  The choice was obvious.

[persia]

I don't agree.  I think AmigaOS should be price competitive with PCs.  SAM & X1000 make Mac price/performance ratios look bargain basement.  As I said if nothing else interesting was occurring in the computer world then it wouldn't be so bad, trouble is the computer world is looking more interesting now than it did in the last 16 years.  Tablets, game consoles, the who "i" series of devices, TVs with 3D and built in internet software.  The list goes on.  I simply can't afford 1500 plus quid on one device.

I think you are right.  This means the price of entry for AmigaOS4 is higher than a dirty little PC that runs Windows, but then I bash my head against the wall all the time when I use Windows for all it's stupid idiosyncrasies, and coming back to AmigaOS4 is such a relief!  I'm not unhappy to have paid a higher price of entry...