ARM based Amiga?

[commodorejohn]

Now Microsoft has stated that Windows 8 will be available for ARM, and how willing will Apple be to put its customers through another platform shift?  Apple will be out on a limb clinging to x86 while Windows jumps ship to the Neo-Archimedes!

Actually, I don't think Apple would hesitate to do another architecture shift if they feel it's a better business decision. They've already got an established ARM software base and toolchain with iOS, so migration wouldn't even be as difficult as it was going from PPC->Intel, where they were starting from scratch. I believe they were even toying with the idea not too long ago, though I don't think they decided to make that move yet.

For those that demand a 68k, you're frozen in time. So are the "custom chips" zealots.

Yes, that's nice. I don't really care if I'm frozen in time, I like the Amiga hardware because it's interesting, and I don't feel the need to keep up with the Joneses.

And while ARM doesn't seem to come in a desktop board (that I'm aware of  anyway, perhaps I'm just ignorant), we could have them with similar  difficulty/expense as we get our PPCs in. But ARMs are already in  netbooks!

Are they? I've been waiting for a decent ARM netbook ever since the Tegra 2 was announced, and all I've seen are those cheap-**** $100 things, the Efika MX netbook (okay, but underpowered,) and a handful of tablets with snap-on keyboards (which have one tiny little connector for an obvious point of failure.)

What if, in the future, a movement backward to  simpler programming techniques like coding for the 680x0 was claimed to  be by many programmers, were to become more popular if the hardware was  available to make it competitive with other designs?

You must admit that there were many more "Bedroom Programmers" back in  the heyday of the 680x0 Amigas than there are today.

Bedroom coding is a cultural thing, not a technical one. The reason there aren't more clever one-man assembler developers today is because increasing CPU horsepower has made high-level languages usable even on inefficient compilers, so it's no longer necessary, which means you've only got the hardcore hobbyists doing it :/

[commodorejohn]

Well there is that, plus modern optimising compilers pull all kinds of tricks that you'd have to be super-expert to know about.  But have you ever seen x86 asm?  It is the very work of the Devil.

I still think this "optimizing compilers are better than humans" thing is a load of crap. What they mean is, "optimizing compilers are better than insufficiently educated humans," which is true of any optimization techniques, not just the use of assembler.

And yeah, x86 is ugly. Not as awful as it was in the bad old 16-bit days, but still ugly.

[commodorejohn]

Am I theo nly person who's not particularly interested in ARM? Way underpowered (even ppc looks powerful in comparison) for starters. People already complain about the weakness of ppc hardware, and ARM is another step down the ladder.

Yes, but that's increasingly less true as its popularity grows and more development effort is put into it. (And hey, development dollars from popularity in commonplace crap computers were the only reason x86 didn't stay a poky little 16-bit chip forever.)

And anyway, I honestly believe we're reaching a saturation point for CPU power, at least for everyday tasks. In fact, I think we reached it quite a while ago. I'm typing this on a seven-year-old 1.33GHz PowerBook G4 running TenFourFox, and while it's got its problems for CPU-intensive tasks, basic web browsing is responsive enough that I have a hard time noticing a difference between it and newer x86 boxes.

Each to thier own, but I have no interest in an Amiga system that's so weak. We already have that. The whole, "x86 is  monopololistic evil" thing is, quite simply, a crock. Gimme raw power, nicely designed, cheap cpus anyday over the latest fad (which ARM is).

I don't think it's evil, but I do think it's boring as hell. x86 computers are the unflavored yogurt of computing - sure, it'll work with anything and there's nothing wrong with it per se, but you wouldn't want it for enjoyment purposes. I already have it doing a perfectly satisfactory job of powering my generic machines - why would I want it in an Amigoid system?

(Also, if there's one thing it isn't, it's "nicely designed." The x86 architecture is an ugly mass of kludges accumulated over 32 years of continual slapdash upgrading. It works, largely thanks to compilers abstracting away all the ugliness where most people don't have to look at it, but that doesn't make it nice.)

[commodorejohn]

Sure, its maybe not as elegant at heart as 68k or even ARM, but when I say "nicely designed" I wasnt really talking about instruction sets, but rather the manufacturing perspective.

Well, sure, Intel has the best fabs and processes, but that's not a virtue of x86, that's a virtue of Intel. Any architecture would benefit from their technical capability if it were available. But conversely, using all that manufacturing might to prop up an architecture like x86 is kind of a waste of potential.

(Especially since they don't even do x86 in hardware anymore, the instruction set is all microcode on proprietary RISC sub-architectures anyway, since that was the only way they could get such a kludge of a CISC system to run at decent speeds - and that was all the way back in the Pentium Pro era!)

Anyway, my point wasn't that more computing power is bad or frivolous, it's that I don't see why Amigoid systems should always have to be cutting-edge (or, as happens in practice, trailing-edge.) If I need raw power it's simple enough for me to drop a few hundred bucks on a no-frills i7 system; for pleasure computing (i.e. Amiga,) I'd much rather have something that's elegant from the ground up.

[commodorejohn]

Heh, again I dont specifically mean the fab processes, more just that the progress of x86 is a well oiled machine. PLentiful, cheap, powerful and with nothing really stopping it being the cpu of choice for a desktop system.

Well, yeah, with the force of the entire PC industry behind it, it has to be...

Surely it makes more sense to utilise what is readily available than to spend time and money developing niche systems that offer no advantages?

Plenty of people already doing that, though. Heck, x86 is one of the few general platforms AROS runs native on (general as opposed to specific boards, that is.) Niche systems might not offer any advantages, but they can be fun.

[commodorejohn]

The current mobile fad will subside in time. Already things are close to saturated and more and more people are getting tired of the fad all the time. This isnt to say it'll vanish, but there's not much more scope for extra customers. The market is already predominantely made up of trend followers and same people upgrading thier phones, etc.

I agree completely that the current tablet/smart-phone boom is fad-driven and will subside as the novelty wears off, but it's my hope that thanks to it, with more R&D dollars and real, solid OS development work going into non-x86 architectures, we may finally see the end of the PC's formerly inextricable dependence on one particular architecture - and that's when things will really get interesting.

[commodorejohn]

Personally I think that demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the long term appeal of these devices.

Don't think of them as phones. Think of them as computers that happen to have a small screen and touch screen and phone functionality built in, but that increasingly can be connected to screens and keyboards and all kinds of other devices.

I have thought of them that way, ever since they came out. I keep running up against the fact that a laptop has a built-in keyboard and doesn't need a special mounting case for it (like the one my brother has to turn his iPad and Bluetooth keyboard into a makeshift laptop,) even the smallest ones come with better specs for price than than a tablet, and they have a vastly better software selection. And if you really need a touchscreen there's laptops with them or adapter kits for other laptops.

PC's have regularly shrunk in size. And the last few years the desktop market has collapsed as low end laptops have become powerful enough and cheap enough for people to prefer them to a bulky, stationary computer.

Why would this trend towards smaller form factors, that's been steady since the 80's, suddenly reverse?

Didn't say it was going to, but I think it's fudging the argument to count laptops in with tablets, as they are in all regards much closer to desktop PCs. When tablet evangelists start counting laptops into the mix it comes off like they're desperately glomming onto anything that isn't a desktop PC in an attempt to support their argument. Arguing based simply on physical size is silly; even desktop PCs have been shrinking for decades. The real question is, what kind of concrete advantages does a portable computer with no keyboard have over a portable computer with a keyboard?

I'm not saying there's no legitimate market for tablets; maybe there is, I dunno. But I do believe that the current all-hogs-to-the-trough rush the industry is engaging in is just another fad boom, like that magical period in the mid-'90s when investors were throwing money by the fistful at anything with a .com on it. Booms never last forever - eventually they go bust, and what emerges from the wreckage will be a lot closer to what the actual market supports.

[commodorejohn]

Those would be a big deal if you only ever want to use your computer as a laptop. If on the other hand you sometimes wish to use it on the go, sometimes as a laptop, sometimes as a desktop, a smartphone that can connect to a larger screen suddenly becomes a vastly more interesting choice.

I'm just not seeing this, no matter how many times tablet evangelists repeat it. How is a tablet with a detachable keyboard that you have to lug around separately more convenient than a laptop which has it built-in?

"Power users" that "need" a physical keyboard are a tiny minority.

Since by "power users" you apparently mean "anyone who uses a computer for anything more than YouTube and AIM," I am going to have to vehemently disagree that they are a minority at all, let alone a tiny one.

As the same time, even for many of us that do need a physical keyboard some of the time, a tablet and/or a smartphone are viable second or tertiary computing devices replacing additional PC's and/or can be a primary device with "extras" such as the Atrix or the EEE transformer.

See, this is the difference between "can" and "should." Yes, it's possible to use a tablet with a Bluetooth keyboard in place of a laptop, but that doesn't make it a better option. Separate Bluetooth keyboards require a case like my brother has in order to not be a pain in the ass, and while snap-on keyboards like the Eee Transformer circumvent that, in either case you're just making it into a poor man's laptop.

Which raises the question, why not just a laptop, then? They're cheaper, they're nearly as compact, they have a better software selection, and you don't have to tote around a separate freakin' keyboard if you feel you might need it (or leave it behind thinking you won't and then find that you do after all.)

frankly I can't imagine any situation where we won't eventually get to a product where the screen and keyboards are "dumb" and the computer stays in our pockets unless we want to use a phone sized screen

I can. I recently acquired a 12" PowerBook to play with, and from the moment I switched it on I realized just how tiny an 8-10" screen like my Eee or typical tablets have. My nearsightedness doesn't affect anything at such a close range, and even then I had trouble switching back to my Eee; I can only imagine how older or more visually-impaired users would feel when confronted with a small screen like that.

the appeal is to carry your desktop with you; walk up to a screen and it's all there instantly, with all your data and everything. Having state (data and/or running processes) in a stationary computer if one that fits in your pocket can hold it all just seems silly.

Laptops already provide that, and often with a decent-sized screen into the bargain. (And they don't require a particular docking connector since any decent laptop will have VGA or mini-DVI out and USB or PS/2 ports for a separate keyboard and mouse, if you so desire.)

And while desktop PCs might not be as convenient generally as laptops or other portable computers, they offer full access to all the expandability the market offers, up to gigabytes of RAM, terabytes of hard disk space, and the best CPU and GPU horsepower out there, and that's something no portable computer can claim. Yes, that's probably not necessary for most users, but the set of people who can make significant use of more than what a laptop or tablet can provide is most certainly non-negligible.

Incidentally, it's that dream that gave us VNC back in the day, though of course that was coupled with centralized computers, - Oracle and Olivetti's research lab used RFID badges couples with VNC to bring up peoples desktops whenever they walked up to a workstation

You'll note, however, that the primary use of VNC in the personal-use computing world is to allow netbooks and tablets to access the storage capacity and computing power of desktop PCs.

Both were outsold massively last year by smartphones, and this year they are being outsold *combined* by smartphones.

...

I don't think we're anywhere near the boom phase for either tablets or phones yet.

By your own claims, tablets and smart-phones have gone from their entry into the mainstream with the release of the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad last spring to the new Next Big Thing as far as the entire industry is concerned. That's a boom. They're selling like hotcakes, everybody's making them, and as far as the press is concerned they are Officially Hip. The question is, what happens when they're ubiquitous enough that they stop being cool, and the public frenzy is diverted to some new trendy gadget? They'll be left with only the people who really want them and are comfortable using them, and who knows what percentage of the peak market share that will be?

[commodorejohn]

Mrs Beanbag: It's not a hardware issue, it's a question of software architecture. The Amiga kernel was designed for hardware with no memory protection, so (in a less than perfectly forward-thinking move) they designed it to take advantage of the freedom that allows. Message-passing between processes, for instance, simply involves one process handing over a pointer to the message content to another and saying "have at it," and the other process freely accessing the first's memory. It's blazing fast, but it's also completely insecure.

Thus, there are actual software-architecture barriers to implementing something like memory protection - you'd have to figure out how to work around the existing API, and that's not necessarily easy. "Emulation layers" don't fix everything; it's entirely possible for one process to send another a whole handful of pointers and lots of wild, unprotected accessing of each others' data to take place without the OS knowing anything about it. (Granted, that's horrible coding practice, but when has that ever stopped anybody?) Thus, while I'm not convinced it's impossible, it most certainly wouldn't be easy.

[commodorejohn]

2. run all legacy (i.e. 68k) software in a shared virtual address space.  Legacy applications will still be able to interfere with each other, while new software can be completely secure.

Not too bad of an idea, actually - that's how Classic on Mac OS X does it, it runs a whole OS9 instance as a user process. I don't know what kind of performance impact that might have on a 68k machine, though.

library calls could easily be trapped and Intuition windows and widgets mapped to X windows.  I might look into doing this in fact.

That'd be a lot of work - X is a completely different approach to windowing than Intuition, as I understand it. Still, it would be pretty cool.

I don't see why SMP should be a problem.

I don't know for certain, but I'd guess it has to do with the lack of memory protection, as you can't be sure that two simultaneous processes wouldn't be clashing over memory they're intending to take turns with.

[commodorejohn]

I think there was always space for a console like computer, or a computer like console, and I think there still is.

Consoles have slowly taken on more computer like functions, and the pc's have now become small enough, and with windows8, have an OS that is quite console like.

I half-agree. I definitely think there is room for a console-like computer; PCs have always had trouble because the PC standard completely neglects A/V hardware and everybody mostly follows industry standards and consensus but varies just enough to cause problems, and consoles have been edging towards being computers since the Dreamcast but none of the manufacturers have ever had the nerve to actually make the jump because they're worried about the loss of licensing fees. A truly integrated hardware platform with consistent multimedia capabilities but lax software restrictions would be the best of both worlds, like the Amiga or the MSX, and I could see that being a good solution for a lot of people.

However! I hope to God that "console-like OS" is not a design goal here. Console software is a glorified control panel at best. The Amiga didn't settle for anything like that, it had a real, full-fledged desktop operating system but booted game disks transparently, so that gamers didn't have to bother and anybody who got tired of gaming and wanted to use their computer for productivity purposes wouldn't find themselves hampered by a simpleton OS designed more to not scare console gamers away than to provide a quality user experience. Any platform that attempts to follow in its footsteps should settle for no less than that.

[commodorejohn]

I'm thinking more of a sort of "two-tier" OS, a small OS instead of the PC's BIOS that's enough to boot a game straight from disk instead of having to install everything (i.e. Kickstart) and perform basic multimedia functions like playing DVDs and audio CDs.  The real OS (i.e. Workbench) would boot from HDD of course.  Or a live CD.

There is absolutely no reason to have a standard OS install boot from a live CD in the era of dirt-cheap mass storage, let me say that. It'd cost all of $10-30 to include some kind of built-in boot volume (less in quantity,) whether that be a 128MB flash device or a small hard drive. (It'd be useful to have it on a separate volume than the user's hard drive, anyway, as you could set it to write-protect by default and keep the non-technical users from screwing things up.)

However, I think a built-in control-panel applet would certainly be useful for the DVD/game side of things; perhaps there could be a setting in the configuration NVRAM to select whether it boots into dashboard mode or computer mode by default, and easy access to either from the other. Mainly I'd just want to make sure that the OS proper isn't "hidden" for fear of scaring off users with anything that looks like it belongs on a computer.