IBM G5/Power 5 in AmigaOne/Two ?

[Waccoon]

Supposedly the Nintendo Revolution will include a multi-core G5. Hence G5's will be around for another 5 years...

You mean a custom-designed, system-on-a-chip based on the PPC.

But peering into my crystal ball I see an Amigaless future ... personally I think the platform is going to fail (again), it was nice but now it just doesn't have anything at all that makes it standout or give it an edge, just a rehash of ideas that are already out in the world. Major innovation required.

Exactly.  The CPU doesn't matter in my opinion, as the software is just too far underdeveloped.

Thus, the ultimate irony:  the Amiga was made famous for its custom chips, but Amigans today waste all their time with idiotic x86 vs PPC flamewars.  A CPU alone doesn't make a system.

So long as I have to pay $600-800 for a largely outdated "Amiga" that is blown away by a $200 PC and comes with an OS that is based on technology several years old, I'm going to buy a PC.  Windows is frustrating, but not enough to force me to pay obscene amounts of money and deal with hardly any real software.  A community of a few thousand people is not going to produce any meaningful software except for millions of Linux ports, which alreay run on every other system out there.

Amiga should have done what Apple did.  Use an existing OS and built a new Workbench.  Why not?  It's not like Amiga is smart enough to use revolutionary, non-UNIX techniques like transparrent persistence, anyway.

Also, nobody really gives a damn to make a programmer's life easier, except for the virtual machine platforms like Java.  Java didn't become popular because it's fast and bug free, you know.  We need good tools, not a PPC.

[Waccoon]

Hyperion:  It was designed for general multimedia usage, something which the Amiga used to excell at.

Compatibility and support is what bothers me about the glut of console-type machines available -- the Amiga had a lot of problems with that if I remember correctly because developers obsessed more about the hardware than what their software should do.  Today's console maintain backwards compatibility through emulation, either via software or hardware.  If an e-mail program is written for a PS2, how do you run it simultaneously next to a native Cell-based PS3 application?  Emulation will only take you so far, especially when multitasking is important.

Cell wasn't designed to be very scalable, either.  It won't come in a variety of clock speeds like x86.

Besides, multimedia these days more or less means fancy 3D graphics, not things like design, toolkits, scanning, printing, and personal creativity, like, point-and-click apps that let you write your own software.  Even word processors are still in the stone age as far as I'm concerned.

Tell me again that this wouldn't be an excellent solution for an Amiga based system.

What bothers me is that PPC is being persued so agressively.  Anything else is just not an option.  Make them in the millions and they're cheap, but so far the Amiga community hasn't had the luxury of competive hardware.

We'll also need the software first.  So far, OS4 and AA don't come close to the tools made by other companies, and they aren't bundled together, either.

I find it amazing that almost anything designed for a 386 will work fine on a P4 and apps designed for many different generations of hardware will multitask properly.  I suppose people in the console and hand-held market don't really care about that level of compatibility, though, if they can sell you a new version every year or a (ugh) subscription service.  Linux works because, at least, everything can be recompiled again by the user from scratch.  Commercial software has different issues.

If OS4 had been based on a proven OS and Hyperion focused on multimedia tools and Amiga Inc. had delivered their promise of this super-fast, killer virtual machine, I'd be more enthusiastic.  We need more software demos, not arguments over whether Cell is a good CPU or not.