ARM for the future?

[commodorejohn]

I'm a 68k diehard as far as the Amiga goes, but I am interested in the growing popularity of ARM-based systems - the PC market has been x86-dominated for so long now, and I'd very much like to see some diversity again. I've been pondering a BeagleBoard for a while now; think I might order one in the near future...

[commodorejohn]

ARM doesnt come close to high end x86 gear. Also x86 of today shares very little in common with x86 of yesteryear, so saying youre sick of x86 since you bought your first pc is like saying youre sick of a different cpu compared to what what is your 1st pc.

x86 is fine for performance, and it's true that it's come a long way since the 8086, it's still ugly as hell under the hood - the "four sort-of-but-not-really general-purpose registers" approach was obnoxious back in the day, and it's downright inexcusable now, with not only modern architectures but even the original 68000 providing a full complement of interchangeable registers. And it hasn't improved, either - they've just kept expanding the register width. Granted, a compiler can work out a good approach for shuffling values into and out of the registers, but for those of us who like assembler, it's pure aggravation.

[commodorejohn]

In fact, I can honestly say even I, a known anti OS4/MOS/AROS/OS 3.1 person:), would consider buying such a machine because I could justify the expense.

So, uh, what Amiga operating system do you prefer? Amix? Minimalist demoscene bootloaders?

[commodorejohn]

Okay, my mistake. Are they really general-purpose, though? Looks from that excerpt like it's more just the gradual integration of specialized coprocessor hardware into the CPU than actual additional registers.

I'll still take either the 68k or ARM for assembler programming, in any case.

[commodorejohn]

Haven't tried it...

[commodorejohn]

A nice project. But with today's resources at hand, completely irrelevant.

Elimination of waste is never irrelevant.

Also, real mode 8086 isn't that bad - if you think of it as an 8-bit processor kludged up to 16-bit. The biggest problem is the 8-bit-style "not actually general-purpose" register file - they're all interchangeable for basic math and logic, but the minute you start on any of the special-purpose instructions (by which I mean "basically everything else") you have to start keeping track of which registers can do what and juggling accordingly. People complain about segmented memory, but that's far less annoying.

[commodorejohn]

Crap code is the refuge of corporations with customer bases willing to pay repeatedly for deteriorating performance and non-existing feature improvements.

This.

[commodorejohn]

There are no "guarantees" in anything.  The performance is demonstrably better.  An OS that will run a DVD on a 386.  Display 16M colors.  Play MP3s

Are you sure on this? Menuet/Kolibri run on a 386, but the site doesn't seem to say what kind of hardware those screencaps were from...

[commodorejohn]

So why discount x86? The heart of which is a RISC core and has been since around the time of the Cyrix 5x86. As far as I'm aware all currently produced x86 and x86-64 processors take this approach.

This is true, but it's still a RISC core tethered to a CISC architecture that's gotten very kludged up with legacy cruft over the 32 years it's been around. If they'd open up the internal architecture for program access, new software could use the full power of the RISC core.

[commodorejohn]

You guys say it has all kind of apps. Are you talking about RiscOS apps? I think RiscOS is VERY attractive. But does it run "legacy" RiscOS software like Lemmings, for example?
It if can run Lemmings, I consider it a full-featured computer

Sounds from the Wikipedia article like there's a RISC OS port underway. Assuming Lemmings doesn't rely on twiddling bits in the Acorn hardware, that'd probably be a "yes."

clearly this is sci fi. but let's play dreaming:
Why don't recompile all ppc stuff to x86 instead of doing it for arm?

Why do they have to be mutually exclusive? If the code isn't directly dependent on the hardware architecture, what's to stop anyone from compiling for all the above?

[commodorejohn]

Come back?  It was never big as a desktop platform.

But if we don't pretend it was the universally-beloved market ruler that was cruelly assassinated by Microsoft and Intel, we won't have any absurdly unrealistic standards for success in new-school Amiga system efforts! And man, if we didn't have those, why, we might start enjoying small-scale efforts that preserve what people liked about the Amiga even if they don't measure up to the raw computing horsepower of modern PCs! We can't have that!