Ben Hermans still staunchly against x86

[paolone]

Well if you were an Amiga user back in the day,you may just get why some of us DO NOT WANT x86!

Yes, because 20 years ago they were silly kids that laughed behind Intel x86 processors just because they were "the enemy" to fight. They thought Motorola 68Ks were absolutely superior, while in reality they had just some price/performance ratio advantages in SOME aspects. Processing grunt on the Intel side, however, was superior and you just had to look how a crappy 486sx/25 and a 68030 decoded a jpeg image to see what was the real winner.

Then, those silly kids had grown in oversized losers that, instead of realizing they were simply wrong at the time, continued to fight their religion war. It doesn't matter if their beloved 68k processors went out of production and their line was terminated. It doesn't matter if the next "alternative" choice (PPC) brought them nowhere. It doesn't even matter if NOTHING of the x86 processors of the times still lives in modern ones (just the IA, which has been virtualized on a pseudo-RISC hidden architecture for a decade now), or if they went 64 bits, or if they are cheaper and more powerful: what really matters for those people is just "fightin' da enemy" as usual.

I sincerely hope that all the "count me out if Amiga goes x86" people will really do that, we'll finally get rid of that bunch of fanactics. Thanks to people like them, Amiga turned from "computer for the masses" to "computer for the classes" and now survives in a tiny, forgotten market artificially kept alive by a little community and two heroic companies.

[paolone]

Hm, which companies would that be? Individual Computers and... m3b? Elbox?

Well, actually ACube and Vesalia...

There's something really good Hyperion and A-Eon are doing, but there are also some aspects of their behavior I feel controversial. Nothing against them, anyway.

[paolone]

@desiv
I wasn't implying that I was being censored nor was I trying to be condescending to paolone.  I'm not sure why you'd think otherwise.  I was clearly agreeing with paolone and I was suggesting that HE would be censored/banned for not falling in line with all the 68k/PPC-only fanatics here (AKA Cult of the 68K).  And yes, the correct word is censorship.  Moderators on this forum just in the past 2 days have threatened to ban anyone who makes posts that they deem to be trolling or anti (Amiga, AROS, OS4, etc....).  Can't get them to define trolling though...

Thanks, but I frankly doubt I will be moderated or even censored for this.

Let me be a little more verbose.

I just got sick of listening the same anti-x86 rants for 20 years by the same people who can't simply understand that processors are just like engines. They don't have a soul and are made of silicon. The best processor is not the most optimized/alternative, but the most popular, eve better if this means it's also the cheapest in the cost/performance ratio. A 2,8 GHz 64-bit quad-core CPU like the Phenom II X4 630 from AMD costs (here in Italy, for the END USER) less than 80 euros! Which should mean little more than 100 dollars. How much does ANY hi-performance (with hi-end meaning up to 2 GHz) multicore PPC processor cost? And how much will cost the motherboards to support them?

68K was choosen at the time because it was already popular and reasonably cheap, and able to bring the necessary degree of performance the original Amiga models required. It wasn't chosen because 80286 were scary, plagued or weirdly ill. Nor Intel was seen by original Amiga engineers like an alien devil from the 8th dimension! Would Commodore be alive today, they'd use x86 for the very same reasons (well, now that I think about it... Commodore does exist today... and they are using x86... ;-) ). Or maybe ARM, but surely no PPC. This anti-x86 crusade from Amigans is something that came up from Amigans themselves, and while most people just grown up and understood that's plain stupid, others are still fighting for... what reason exactly? To have a "different product" on the market nobody needs or cares about? Do these clever people really think x86 prices are low thanks to a few PPC processors still surviving on the market?

Please try to understand me: I have nothing against alternatives, I am always happy when some alternatives exist (I'm happy for ARM's success, to be clear), but not if their adoption acts like a boomerang, and becomes counter productive for adopters. There's a boundary between "being different" and "being masochistics" amigans have surpassed long ago.

[paolone]

If jay miner developed the Amiga today, he would choose an ARM processor almost certainly and not a x86 IMHO

Thanks, the day I'll need a medium I'll call you. In the meanwhile, I can only answer that in the early 80s Jay Miner created a straordinary media computer system when regular computer systems and workstation were mute and monochromatic, adopting an amazing revolutionary graphic interface with a RAM drive, when others relied on DOS, floppies and costy hard drives.

Would he be alive today, maybe he wouldn't even care about creating a computer, all in all any regular PC can do everything and more. He would have created something else, but not less extraordinary and amazing, that would have foresaw and revolutionized its market.

[paolone]

What made me decide definitely for an Amiga was look a 486 in action,  it was in ridiculous compared to the unexpanded Amiga 500 so i definitely bought an Amiga 1200

Strange. It was looking how a good 486dx/2 66 MHz PC performed with DOS and Windows applications and games (DooM anyone?), that I took the exact opposite decision, switching from my 68030-accelerated A1200 to a Pentium 90 machine. And, well, at the time I realized that if you wanted to have a PC that looked well in graphics and sound, you'd have to spend a lot more than on a Amiga, but if you wanted to have an Amiga with the same processor power of a PC, you wouldn't have to spend less: even more.

[paolone]

He said in his opnion which you then go on to give telling us exactly what he would have done

That's exactly what I meant to do...

[paolone]

Are you suggesting the Frieden brothers have been working for free of all along,  how could you possibly know? The figure of 130 sales seems a little pessimistic, a recent survey on Aw.net shows 275 members intending to buy the X1000, and of course this doesn't include other non english websites or those that never participated in that particular poll.

Gosh, if the 25:5:1 market theory I've read about longa ago (*) is somehow good and applicable, it would mean that 130 sales would be optimistic.

(*) Many years ago I read a book about product marketing (sorry, forgot title and author), and the 25:5:1 theory states that on 25 people you'll contact, 5 will show interest in your product and 1 will actually buy it. This basically means that on 275 people "willing" to buy a X1000, well... just 55 actually will.

I sincerely hope for A-Eon they will be more, many more...