Given x1000 news is everywhere.....but nonchalance prevails

[Amiga_Nut]

Because not many people seem impressed regardless of price. So what is it people would really want from a new machine bearing the Amiga logo on it?

1 Do you wan't the equivalent of the A1000 ie pricey but technically light years ahead of everything else for the price of a top end Mac/PC octa-core CPUd desktop? A machine so powerful that you could write games in BASIC/C that exceed PS3/360 games technically but will cost a lot.

or

2 would you just like something that fills the role the A500 did, ie play the same sort of games due to similar technical abilities as the most advanced consoles on sale at the time?



So what is it that people want? Many of us here are pretty nonchalant about x1000 for various reasons, and that's probably because it is neither in category 1 or 2 I guess but priced for the worst of both worlds, and prospects to match.

(Remember running high end games are one of the most intensive tasks you can ask of a PC, 99% of laptops sold today can't even execute/startup 2005's Battlefield 2 due to missing hardware that was standard in 2006 on most laptops whatever the price).

[Amiga_Nut]

Very true. Many moons ago I built a machine for my nephew to take to university with him, and as his course was centred around 3D modelling and ray tracing packages it was a monster of a machine.We started out with the specs of the highest priced Commodore gaming PC at the time and then sourced quality components of identical specification. Result was a machine of identical power for half the cost.

Some people have stated that a console quality game equalling machine wouldn't sell, but I suspect if you could buy a computer that did everything a PS3 does for £500 it would sell. Look at the outcry from people when Sony removed the 'Other OS' option from the boot options in the bios updates. 100,000s of people went to the trouble of forcing Ubuntu onto PS3 or YD Linux distro officially sanctioned for PS3 use. It met their needs, a box that played every type of cutting edge media and still did all the usual rubbish people do on a cheap PC for less than the cost of a gaming rig, the top end ATI/Nvidia cards cost more than a PS3 alone.

However to be revolutionary you need to start with revolutionary designs.....yes Agnus/Paula/Denise are a dead concept in traditional custom chip terms for 2010 computers but there is no reason why CELL and OS4 could not work together with minimal tweaking by Hyperion, and remember the PS3 GPU is actually inferior to a 7900GS in some Dell laptops like the Inspiron 9400 series from 2007. How hard is it to outsource the design of a CELL motherboard with a middling GPU and some DDR3 RAM? IBM is only too happy to help companies when asked.

You can still be clever today, without trying to out do what Nvidia/ATI do in their labs. When building a new Amiga you have to apply as much lateral thinking as world class race car designers finding cunning ways to save weight/increase horsepower/create more grip & aero efficiency. Starting with the 2007 vintage CELL CPU is a good start, or Xenon  both are essentially the final evolution of PPC.

Or a G5 based machine for around £750 in a classy looking case would also do.

Depends what people want. It's just that as far as OS4 goes, hardware purchasers are getting seriously little bang for their buck I think. The problem is not traditional custom chips, it's the lack of truly ground breaking engineering ideas.

[Amiga_Nut]

The last thing we need is ARM motherboards running OS4. G5 is fine, only the price is not. Why waste time porting to trumped up controller board CPUs totally unsuitable for top-end hardware?

The only two modern CPU options are IBM CELL/Xenon (for a semblance of PPC compatibility) or x86 and a reference design system with complete rewrite of OS4. Like it or lump it those are the only two modern CPU families worth a damn for 'new' hardware designs costing 4 figure sums.

The first thing the x1000 designers should have done is contact IBM to discuss their fantastic range of PPC compatible modern CPUs

[Amiga_Nut]

So AROS has to run a UAE layer to make it work?  Doesn't sound very elegant to me.

I may be wrong but any classic Amiga program that is linked to Paula/Agnus/Denise has to use some version of UAE on either AROS/MOS/OS4.

[Amiga_Nut]

You mean like the Sam440/Sam460?

The ARM CPU used in the Efika MX Smartbook and the Efika MX Open Client should beat the crap out of the 440EP used in the Sam, so it has no reason to be ashamed.

Much is happening on the ARM front right now, much new stuff is coming, performance is increasing all the time, and even multi-core is being introduced.

The Efika MX CPU, the i.MX51, will soon have a big brother, the i.MX53. It's everything the i.MX51 is, but it does incorporate acceleration for 1080p instead of "only" 720p:

I surely wouldn't mind having MorphOS on this.

But I think it will go x86 instead, which I don't mind either!

New Amiga hardware for me is something that runs OS4 which ARM will never do. And ARM is for lower spec machines in todays 4/8 core desktop machines, hell G5 from half a decade ago is more powerful than the most powerful ARM CPU in development.

If a new Amiga top end model can not exist to compete with £800 DIY i7 gaming rigs of today even on performance alone then I won't be getting my credit card out to support anyone as it's obsolete before launch. Same reason I wouldn't touch a Nintendo Wii with PS2 graphics even if it fell out my breakfast cereal packet.

In 2010 I don't want Amiga limited to doing what I was doing in 2006 on my bog standard Centrino laptop. And that's my requirement

[Amiga_Nut]

Commodore engineers wrote a long paper as to how Amiga would develop after AAA and if you read it you will see the X1000 is what they describe (I kid you not).

To be fair all Commodore decided was AAA was a waste of money and would yield terrible price/performance ratio. Whatever else is written in this paper is limited to technology available at the time. This is a no brainer, two of the most powerful consoles use standard GPUs from either Nvidia or ATI. If Microsoft can't afford funding magic custom chipsets then nobody can

However, had Commodore had the intelligence to dig up VRAM Ranger and forget about AAA/Hombre and other DRAM based crap they could have wiped the floor with the competition in 1990 let alone 1993 when AGA was around.

I remember quite specifically the most powerful video cards for PC were the Diamond Stealth units, specifically the VRAM models. If that's what VRAM did for crappy ISA bus systems in the mid 90s just think how sophisticated a computer designed around a VRAM chipset like Ranger would be. And this was completed in 1987 because Jay Miner said so in interviews.

As for the rest, Commodore never should have considered anything other than PowerPC end of story, in the early 90s PPC was the spiritual successor to 68k series in terms of power (RISC based) and price compared to 32bit Pentium CPUs....the first line of which were pretty damned lame until at least MMX was out. The protracted stupidity of contemplating anything other than x86 or PPC was typical Commodore.....and it sent out a message to the Wintel/Apple world "we are clueless twats still grappling what CPU to use on a replacement for our ageing architecture let alone a complete design"

As for the A2000, don't mention that pile of junk as anything other than typical Commodore cockup. 30 months after A1000 all that we got was A1000 chipset and some slot connectors. Great...the issue was more colours...more sound channels....faster blitting...faster stock CPU like 14mhz 020 mated to chipset DMA on the motherboard.
What was Not wanted was ISA slots and a breathed on A1000 68k design with ROMs not WOM. Ditto for A500...another disaster thanks to some clueless moron at Commodore sacking Los Gatos engineers and hiring clueless teams from West Chester and C= GMBH to design A500 and A2000. No TV modulator, not even an on/off switch on the actual computer for the A500. And one of the ugliest cases ever designed second only to the CD32 probably. Nice.