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Author Topic: Do you approve of PPC (in some form) as the future of Amiga?  (Read 29609 times)

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Offline nikodr

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We have the problem of endianess http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness it is unlikely that amigaos will ever be ported to x86 and boot natively.That thing wont be an amiga.PPC can change the endianess http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC#Endian_modes but i dont think it would be easy to port it to x86.So x86 is definitely out of the question for me.
Also from the same page Endianness and operating systems on architectures

Little-endian operating systems:

    * Linux on x86, x64, Alpha and Itanium
    * Mac OS X on x86, x64
    * OpenVMS on VAX, Alpha and Itanium
    * Solaris on x86, x64, PowerPC
    * Tru64 UNIX on Alpha
    * Windows on x86, x64 and Itanium

Big-endian operating systems:

    * AIX on POWER
    * AmigaOS on PowerPC and 680x0
    * HP-UX on Itanium and PA-RISC
    * Linux on MIPS, SPARC, PA-RISC, POWER, PowerPC, 680x0, ESA/390, and z/Architecture
    * Mac OS on PowerPC and 680x0
    * Mac OS X on PowerPC
    * MVS and DOS/VSE on ESA/390, and z/VSE and z/OS on z/Architecture
    * Solaris on SPARC

Amiga in both 680x0 and PowerPC is big endian while any x64 and x86 above is Little-endian
« Last Edit: October 13, 2010, 03:01:35 AM by nikodr »
 

Offline nikodr

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Re: Do you approve of PPC (in some form) as the future of Amiga?
« Reply #1 on: October 13, 2010, 03:30:53 AM »
Quote from: Nitrous;584400
For me i think AmigaOS should be ported to x86/x64
PPC is slow, outdated and very expensive.


From http://obligement.free.fr/articles_traduction/itwbarthel_en.php

"The high price of the AmigaOne X1000 seems to be an argument, for lots of amigans, to not buy the machine. A solution to sell lot more copies of AmigaOS could be an x86 version. What is your opinion about that?

In this small market price is always an issue. The kind of power the X1000 provides, for such a small customer base, naturally results in a high price. As things stand today, you cannot make this kind of gear in sufficiently large enough volume to bring down the cost and consequently the price.

I consider the x86 path a pipe dream. AmigaOS has no platform/porting layer: it is hardwired to a big-endian host platform, not just the fundamentals but also its data structures. I would say that the chances to see AmigaOS run on an ARM are much higher than to see it run on an x86 family processor. If you wanted to make it work on an x86 host, you would have to throw out all existing Amiga software designed to run on the 68k platform, much of which is still useful today (I would go so far as saying that it is not just useful, it is necessary). You would have to throw away much of the operating system and replace it.

Even if you were to make all of that happen as part of an x86 port, you would have to make significant sacrifices. I doubt that any of these would result in a viable product."
« Last Edit: October 13, 2010, 03:33:54 AM by nikodr »
 

Offline nikodr

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Re: Do you approve of PPC (in some form) as the future of Amiga?
« Reply #2 on: October 13, 2010, 01:36:27 PM »
Quote from: sim085;584453
Architecturally can the PPC ever reach the performance of the x86!?


What about the ppc in PS3 ?