Dr. Garry Hare Amiwest Speech

[Glaucus]

Wow. I feel like I'm walking through a street full of burned out cars and debris, and I'm left wondering what carnage and mayham could have caused all this. I always miss out on the full stuff. heh.

Anyway, interesting article, or whatever. So once again the focus shifts back to the DE, is that it? The desktop OS (or shall I say, OS4) will be completed and released by the end of the year, but from what I can tell, there's no indication that there will ever be an OS4.1? I suppose it will all depend on how well it sells (if 100K copies sell in 6 months, they'd be ratarded not to continue development, but what are the chances of that?).

I also noticed no mention of Hyperion. Any word from Ben?

  - Mike

[Glaucus]

Thanks guys, just checked out Ben's comments. Interestingly, he tells us that about 1000 pre-release CDs have been sold, and few mother boards remain to be sold. Anyone willing to take a guess as to what the profit margin is on each system? Think they make $50 per unit? If so, they'd have made no more then $50K net. Ouch.

I think OS4.0 will be far more useful once they get Petunia up and running fully, but the latest advancements in video drivers seems promising! I'm interested to see what the Fredan Bros consider to be "insperational".

  - Mike

[Glaucus]

I thought that, because most of what was going to be 4.1 is going into 4.0, that 4.1 was just going to be a bug fix boing bag.

Well, what I meant by OS4.1 was any future version at all. OS4.0++, if you catch my drift.

My take on Garry's speech is that he wants to develop AmigaOS into a ultra fast, lean and stable OS. The Tao renegotiations speak volumes about the pivotal role intent will have in all this. Prepare for an AmigaOS running on VP!

Well, that is an optimistic view. The pesimistic view would be that he really only cares about the VP, and realizes that AmigaOS 4.X isn't necessary for DE's success on the mobile market. Reality may be somewhere in between.

  - Mike

[Glaucus]

Not sure what the state of VP is these days, but creating a complete OS based on the idea is exciting.

- VP is not PowerPC, it's incompatible. It's a totally different kind of CPU.

Yes, and what you'd need to do is create a low-level hardware interface that is basically the VP run-time engine. The OS would run on top of this. This way, the OS and all the apps would be translated to native PPC, Intel/AMD, MIPS, etc, on the fly.

 

I'm pretty sure that AOS responsivenes&speed can not be fully reached if the CPU is not used natively.

So what. CPU's these days are ridiculously fast. Do we really need a 3.5Ghz chip to surf the web? With chips like that, even a 50% hit in performance would still provide a very satisfying user experience (and I think VP can achieve far better then 50%).

The use of that extreme virtualization would also make it impossible to take full advantage of HW acceleration (like 3D).

3D graphics is tied to the video card, not the CPU. The VP engine would have nothing to do with this. Alti-vec, however, might pose a problem, but there might be ways around this as well.

VP/intent does not support memory protection (MP is planned for AOS4.x) it never will.

Perhaps we need to write a specialized VP system for the OS. Or perhaps, add it to the hardware interface and spawn a new VP instance for each application and keep them all in their own sandbox.

Anyway, I think it's technically possible, might require more resources then Amiga has right now. It would be the ideal system and making an OS that is binary compatible with the majority of systems out there would be a great advantage for the Amiga.

  - Mike