ARM or x86 with FPGA emulator

[OlafS3]

I do not feel "retro" like some of the "NG" fans always insist. For me "68k" is only a compiler target and running in emulation beats many of the so called "NG" options. Aros Vision f.e. inherits the same limitations that all AROS versions have. It is part of a bigger family :-). So for me "68k" is not retro and has the advantage to run almost anywhere.

What are the advantages of NG except faster 3D (if drivers would exist)?

[OlafS3]

Once again, yet another idiot trying to convince us Amiga users to resign from the powerpc.

We Amiga users use powerpc because it is the fastest and COMPATIBLE solution.

Powerpc exists, it works, anyone can buy and use.

As in 1997, so 2014.

x86,ARM are cool but because it is low endian they are incompatible,
and therefore useless.

And as in 1997, in 2014 emulators on x86 is still slower than powerpc.
It is boring this whole %&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@! "powerpc is evil".

Years of bull%&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@! but with no effects, powerpc haters can only talk but they are too stupid and too lazy to do something.

Powerpc is the best solution in the same way 17 years ago and now.

And that's why we Amiga users will still use powerpc.

Lately it seems that AmigaOS supporters seem to prefer harsh words

People are not "hating" PowerPC, it more seems to me that some people take every critic or preference as personal attack

PowerPC is not a bad architecture but it has lost the race. Everything is about money, developing new processors is time consuming and expensive. Today money goes either in something Intel/AMD or ARM related so these both platforms develop, there is not much money going in PPC and because it is not used for desktops anymore there is no money going in processors that are capable, money goes in processors either for embedded systems or servers. It is simple economics, no market means no money to earn means no investment. Even PowerPC geeks cannot deny basic rules of economy. With existing options the market (1000+ user) can exist for a while, that is all. The platform will lag more and more behind, first class will be just the price. When you are happy with that it is ok, at the moment it is pure hobby market with no money to earn. If you want to change that PowerPC is the wrong choice.

[OlafS3]

Yes, but as far as I know there are differences between the parent POWER architecture and the PowerPC architecture, no? In addition, I'd think the cost to produce a MIPS or SPARC processor would be less.

If someone can build a NUMA/DDR3/PowerPC board and AmigaOS 4 is fully 64-bit on it, I'd be willing to pick it up at a price point of $1200 or so. I'd pay more if they donated boxes to the BSD projects though.

Currently the X1000 I would not pay over $600 for considering its specifications. Not to insult anyone but I can get a used HP C9000 PA-RISC for $300 that is as fast as a G5 but has SCSI on it ( I prefer SCSI for build quality )

not to insult you but whom do you want to sell it. It is even more obscure than PPC today, I would even say PPC is almost mainstream compared to MIPS or SPARC and hardware nobody knows is more difficult to sell exept you would have a kind of "killer application" where the hardware is not important. And what would be the advantage dropping some of the advantages of PPC like the 68k integration and change from one obscure to a even much more obscure platform. Then why not using ARM or X86/X64?

[OlafS3]

No offense taken! I realise my opinion may not be the norm at all.

PowerPC is not very common in the consumer market, same goes for SPARC, MIPS et cetera. However in the server market SPARC and POWER, the parent architecture of PowerPC are both well known. MIPS is currently embedded but has server grade and consumer grade designs available such as R10000 and derivatives.

The reasons I'm opposed to moving to x86 are simple: It is a pedantic, relic architecture which uses dirty hacks and workarounds to overcome the design limits of the original 8086, which by all accounts is a terrible processor. x86 is very orthogonal compared to all but a few mainframe architectures in common use today, but beyond that I've ran servers for 3-4 years and in that time my x86 boxes have died catastrophically, one caught fire and destroyed two XServe in the same cage. The build quality is just atrocious and delicate. I run computers hard and for a long time at high load ( I have computers I loan out for remote access and compiling ) and I've had no RISC system fail because of that. Therefore x86 ends up costing a consumer a lot more in time and money as one has to continuously replace broken hardware. Not the case for my RISC boxes.

I'm not opposed to a high performance, 64-bit ARM design at all, but those do not seem to exist. 32-bit is an engineering dead end, 4GB RAM just doesn't cut it. Need I remind anyone about the Y2038 bug that will render most old UNIX and similar systems inoperable? 64-bit is the future, even at the cost of compatibility.

Current offerings from ACube and AEON are overpriced and underpowered, so why not move to an open architecture and mature the operating system at the same time. MIPS is being widely produced in China and Japan which means low production costs, SPARC has open designs as currently stated as well. The PA6T chip is pretty much a dead end, newer POWER ISA chips are expensive as hell so I don't see a future here.

You already wrote that some X86 caught fire, I personal never experienced that and not heard from anyone else but it might be that this can happen when a device has heavy load over long time but it also depends on what parts you use for that.

Regarding dirty hacks and not a clean architecture might be true but for almost anyone that is more or less a academic question. The application developer use tools with modern compilers that hide all that. I for example develop with Visual Studio and Delphi on Windows, I do not care over architecture there. And the user even cares less

if you want to offer it people know Intel (or AMD), they even know ARM if you say it is also used in Smartphones but only few know SPARC or MIPS. And if you say it runs 10 years without problem, that is fine but people replace their hardware every couple of years so a PC running 10 years is not needed. You can regret that but try to sell people a five or eight years old system. Mission impossible :-) No if they would ever make a ISA change (what I do not believe for a number of reasons) they should take something "mainstream" and not something exotic again.

[OlafS3]

I'm using the same method and tools other people are using so there is no point other than my method is console based and doesn't have a GUI. I'm not using an ancient compiler: the oldest compiler I've used is from 2006 - and it works fine with the C 99 standard. An IDE is just a graphical front end with proprietary or compiler specific libraries which hinder portability... Tell me again how that makes a programme any better?

Processor architecture does make a difference because RISC specific compilers like MIPSPro are designed to directly compile highly optimised code for use on their architecture. There is a reason -O3 is recommended in the documentation of Nekoware, an open source suite of software for SGI MIPS systems running IRIX.

Kremlar,

Its been a while so I don't remember the brand, but it was a dual Xeon server refurbished from the manufacturer. It failed three days after me and one of my friends who shares the cost of server cage space verified it for its 90 day evaluation. Everything was working fine on it. We had scarcely had it two years when the fire occurred. The fact is not that it was x86 that caused the fire, it is the fact we paid for a server grade hardware solution and got cheap rubbish instead. Nobody here I think has run their servers as hard as we did, and we do it because the servers are marketed to take this. Now we run increasingly more MIPS hardware converted for server use. No matter that some of it is 20 years old, our Sun and SGI racks have not had a single failure of a server in the same time that various servers running x86 and x64 hardware have given up the ghost. Luckily most just stop working, but there is a reason our hardware is now segregated by type: makes it easier to contain costly losses. The fact is I can get a few racks of SGI Origins for dirt cheap and when craylinked properly I get all the performance I need out of them and most of the time if there is an issue, it is an easy fix like a fan replacement or a cable reseat.

As I said it is more or less academic to me. I develop and sell a own-developed software + different services to small companies, time is rare and I have to live from my work so I do not want to care about implementation details or (even worse) hardware architecture, I use classes (partly added as components visible and invisible) to add functionality and am happy if I do not need to care about it. For example event management is automatically managed by the environment so for me programming on amiga is a big step back. Most people are now using such tools for development so if we want more programmers and more software we would need such tools but that would be another topic. What I mean here as a application programmer I want to concentrate on my product and not too much on API details and not at all on hardware architecture. And user do not care about OS or hardware at all.

Using something more "mainstream" has other advantages too because you can more easily port components/software. As a example you can add a JIT to OWB because there is a X86 version, I do not think that this exists for SPARC/MIPS. Both are only known to me (by name) as processors for workstations and servers and not for typical end-users so changing to them would mean disadvantages regarding loosing parts of the 68k integration and still have the problems of being exotic. Then I would even say better stay with PowerPC despite the known problems.

[OlafS3]

@Linde

Maybe I'm not understanding your question, because I've been trying to answer it. Let me try again:

I prefer working with an architecture at a low level. The reason I give two %&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@!s is because I actually would like to code some for Amiga down the line. Reason I don't now is simple: I am learning 68k assembler and that is one of the most tedious and pedantic languages I've learned because all the current compilers for C are too old and broken for OS 3.9 for me to use. I have been coding on a UNIX style C compiler such as Clang and that's how I intend to do this. GCC is a load of junk though so I may be forced to build my own compiler >_>. Anyways, back to my point: If the Amiga were to become x86 based I'd probably say screw it and not code for it because I have long given up optimising programs on x86 properly. Nothing about the tools I use exposes anything, rather, it is how I treat C as more flexible assembler. I like to be aware of the underlying hardware. With that said I'd probably stick to RISC boxes running BSD or some other UNIX if Amiga moved to x86.

@OlafS3

Ive got much different goals in mind than you: I never intend to make money off the code I write. I therefore could care less about what a user thinks. As a sysadmin as my day job I don't handle users or interact with them so I generally speaking don't care.

I'm just upset because I'd like to do some NG work since the toolchain and OS have a lot of expansion, but acquiring new and high performance hardware is impossible. I suggested a switch because it seems AEON and ACube are utterly incapable of building units at a reasonable cost/performance ratio. I could buy a whole rack of Onyx 350 IR4 graphics for the price of the X1000 and wipe the walls with it, especially since OS4 is a 32-bit, multiprocessor blind system.

AROS doesn't count for me since I dont own any powerful ARM or PowerPC hardware

@biggun

I REALLY don't appreciate being called stupid subversively. Currently there are plenty of more performant MIPS and SPARC chips available than most PowerPC gear. The R16000 of MIPS fame is faster despite being clocked lower, and a Sun Ultra 45 wipes the walls with a G5 and a PA6T. We're talking 10+ year old designs: It doesn't cut it! And if they adopt faster CPUs for the next NG Amigas, PowerPC ones I can expect the systems to be even more expensive.

As previously explained I could give a flying freak whether or not it would break binary compatibility. Sure other users care, but I care more about having a 64-bit OS with a CPU that can perform well today.

Don't feed anymore bull, you can look up the dhrystone measurements and other benchmarks yourself, but do keep in mind all of these systems are 64-bit and SMP capable so they're going to beat any slow uniprocessor 32-bit mode OS

AROS runs on almost any hardware available except SPARC and MIPS including X86/X64/PowerPC/ARM and 68k. If you search for something running on your two favorites you will have no luck.

[OlafS3]

You always circle around your two favorites but it will not happen. I do not think for different reasons that A-eon or Hyperion will ever change ISA and drop PPC but "if" they did the new platform would need big advantages compared to PowerPC to justify the expenses they need and the sacrifices that would needed f.e. dropping the existing 68k integration and the efforts needed to run old PPC software. And do not forget that the main programmers (the Frieden brothers) are paid for it and if the expenses can be regained after is unknown and a risk. And why do you think A-eon (one person) is interested to pay for a ISA change? I only know that he is prefinancing new PPC hardware. Hyperion wants to get paid for porting it by the hardware vendor, who do you think will be willing to do that?

[OlafS3]

Then you just supported my point that you're here to troll and nothing more.


All that needs to be done is increase the cost/performance ratio of the hardware, I have lost faith in POWER considering the cost of an IBM POWER server, and the lack of top of the line designs from POWER6+ and up.

Yeah, because everyone should be like Apple. Bunch of garbage they produce since Leopard. No, just no. That will fail just as hard.



MIPS and SPARC aren't obsolete.

I am a 68k fan too, a troll how you call it. My main computers are PCs and I also earn my money with them using Windows.

What Kremlar wanted to explain is that NG (AmigaOS and MorphOS and AROS) are only used by a minority of Amiga users right now. I myself use my own distribution based on Aros 68k in UAE, I do not expect it to replace Windows or Linux, it is just fun to play around with it. A new generation of FPGA devices would have that fun and geek factor for many amigans too, none of these devices will beat a modern PC or your workstations by specification but nevertheless it would be fun to use and I am convinced that even people outside the community will buy it.

Regarding SPARC and MIPS, AROS is the only platform that has proven to be portable, if I remember right only one developer ported it in 3 months to ARM in his spare time. So if you want to get something ported to new platforms set up a bounty and convince people to donate, perhaps even some from outside. I can make a bet with you that neither AmigaOS nor MorphOS will ever be ported to MIPS or SPARC.

I see that you very much dislike X86 (or better hate) but as long as you cannot show benchmarks where SPARC or MIPS outperform the big platforms by magnitudes it will be a hard sell. I also told you that it would be expensive (expecially for Hyperion). Regarding Trevor (a-eon) I do think that investing money to make profit is his motivation, he creates his own personal "toys". Profit, market share and so on is certainly not important for him otherwise he would not act like he does. Besides it is a little funny that you are talking about that he should do this or that to sell more because I do not have the impression that you are thinking in economic terms.

And regarding supporting obsolete technologies, that is the difference between someone only being in contact with machines or with the real market. Not long ago one of my customers still used a MS-DOS application. Microsoft supports obsolete technologies not because they are retro but because customers request it otherwise they will not buy new versions of Windows.

[OlafS3]

I didn't call 68k users trolls.

I do realise NG platforms are a minority use. As far as the people using the legacy AmigaOS gp, they're free to do what they want. I've got a 3000, but I don't do much with it.

Anyways, SPARC does pretty well versus Intel, but I don't know enough about hardware to articulate it. I was an electrical engineer in college but quit due to academic issues so I don't know how to exactly compare them properly. The only reason Intel/AMD CPUs are so powerful is the amount of money poured into them. It is like putting a V12 in a Geo Metro. You can do it, but you'd be better off going for system properly designed. A lot more sustainable than modding the hell out of a Geo Metro.

As far as the future of NG Amiga goes I'm unable to participate until that cost/performance ratio goes down, and if I'm not gonna be able to do that on RISC, then I'm going to stick with platforms that show more promise to me on RISC.

CISC just doesn't make sense anymore and there is support for this in the simplicity of RISC. Look at anything else engineering related and you'll see that generally the simpler solution is better.

CISC vs RISC
AR15 vs AK-M
Systemd vs rc init
PlayStation vs Saturn
Gasoline vs Diesel engine

As I said Aros is very portable, if you want something on SPARC or MIPS set up a bounty for it and convince people to donate to get it ported. That is the only realistic advice I can give. Or directly contact Trevor D., he is a kind person, perhaps you can convince him to finance the port of AmigaOS (but I have high doubts there). But of course you must offer more than emotions but hard facts and advantages that outweigh the disadvantages of such a change.

And if you do not like AROS and do not want to buy a AmigaOS system you could still buy MorphOS and a used Mac. If none is interesting for you but only AmigaOS ported to SPARC/MIPS it becomes difficult.

And why does CISC make no sense anymore? They are very living and except ARM there is nothing that plays a role at all.