ARM based Amiga?

[takemehomegrandma]

Just throwing an idea into the wind here, but with NVidia's Project Denver desktop ARM based CPU threatening to mop the floor with Intel (yeah believe it when you see it), perhaps an ARM implementation of AmigaOS would be a prudent move.

I'm all for it ("AmigaOS" for me being "MorphOS")!

[takemehomegrandma]

And while ARM doesn't seem to come in a desktop board (that I'm aware of anyway, perhaps I'm just ignorant)

I think a http://pandaboard.org/ would make a perfectly capable desktop machine for most everyday tasks.

I think this is a much better working-out-of-the-box option than the pandaboard, and while perhaps a bit underpowered (about on par with/slightly faster than a Sam440) to be called "desktop", this doesn't stop me and many others from using it as such for everyday usage! And I certainly wouldn't mind this turn into this!

And these devices is soon to be upgraded to the i.MX53 CPU, still Cortex-A8, but much faster and more capable in many ways, and they are doing it *really* cheap (which translates into *less* than $49 for the board, no idea by how much less, but probably considerably less; low cost seems to be the main focus of the development).

When it comes to Cortex-A9 (that we see in various products today, like iPad2, Tegra2 based devices etc), current chips performs on par with the PPC G4 processors, which is not bad at all, given the additional power and benefits of the on-chip support controllers and accelerators that boosts performance of many applications in a smart, resource friendly way. A lot of things will happen in this field soon though, both in clock speed (Tegra3 will be a faster dual core Cortex-A9, have better GPU, etc, and GlobalFoundries will demonstrate a 3GHz dual core Cortex-A9 made with their 28-nm processes sometime in 2012, as well as a low-power 2GHz version), and in number of cores (Freescale recently announced their Quad Core Cortex-A9 based i.MX6, and also showed it off running in real silicon, here it's being benchmarked by Konstantinos Margaritis/Genesi. It may get here sooner than many would expect).

Cortex-A15 brings a whole bunch of new features from the desktop/server world, and a whole new level of performance.

Then we have the partnership between ARM and nVidia, bringing real 64-bit Workstation performance, the "x86 killer", while keeping the ISA backwards compatible. I think others will follow.

ARM will be the only CPU architecture running on *everything* from phones to workstation/servers, with many interesting devices in between.

[takemehomegrandma]

Tablets, phones, sure, they need the battery life, but waiting for web pages to finish rendering due to wimpy processors is no fun.

my 70 GBP (~$110) cheapo Android pad with a 700MHz outdated ARM renders web pages fast enough for casual use for me, and is already about 3 generations beyond the curve.

The key, and the philosophy in ARM, is to use "co-processors" in a smart way as much as possible, offloading the CPU. Why should the CPU have to bother with decoding images, audio and video?

[takemehomegrandma]

And a dual-A15 at 2.5GHz will beat out a 1GHz PowerPC 460 by a long way.

You don't have to wait for the Cortex-A15; the Cortex-A9 is already on par with PPC G4 clock by clock, and AFAIK the G4 beats the 460, and faster Cortex-A9's are about to enter the stage...

[takemehomegrandma]

So then how the hell would it be an Amiga? :/

I think what he really meant was rather "backwards compatible"?

OS4 developers have been compromising backwards compatible in favor of new ways of doing things since the beginning of their endeavor, that's *one* view of evolution.

MorphOS developers have had Amiga compatibility as a primary design and development goal, and carefully evolved the OS in order to protect this, that's *another* view of evolution.

Then you can have a *clean slate* evolution (or rather "revolution"?), where the OS would look and feel the same, but with focus on backwards compatibility with old Amiga apps completely removed from the picture (The OS would be/feel kind of the same, but only/mostly new applications will work, the rest have to run under UAE or similar). That way you could quite easily migrate to ARM or x86, introduce things like true memory protection, true SMP, true multi-user, etc. Things that aren't really possible in an Amiga context without breaking... well, the "Amiga" part of it...

[takemehomegrandma]

@Mrs Beanbag

No, there are things that are completely impossible to implement in Amiga in a clean way without breaking the Amiga compatibility, but would be totally possible if you would say "fcuk the old, only new stuff from here on" and start with a clean slate, and create a new API that will incorporate functions like these but without the ambition of running old Amiga apps (or system components for that matter).

[takemehomegrandma]

Such as...?

Such as true SMP and true MP, like I mentioned...