A-EON Technology & Ultra Varisys sign $1.2M agreement for new PowerPC hardware

[takemehomegrandma]

Current "next gen" (PS3 and Xbox 360) uses PPC. But iirc next "next gen" (PS4 and Xbox one) uses an AMD chip which is not PPC

The PlayStation 4 will launch November 15th, 2013 in the United States and November 29th, 2013 in Europe, Australia, and Latin America. This makes it, what, three weeks from being *current* generation! And it's x86!



The PS3 was released in 2006, when PPC's relevance had already gone away and its future on desktop and laptop had already been sealed as a dead end because of Apples x86 migration. I suppose it takes an Amiga fan to call a 7 year old platform that's practically replaced as "next gen"...

:lol:

[takemehomegrandma]

It looks monsterous expensive, but please point me out to any other dual core PPC board anywhere in the world?

OK, here is twenty of them: :lol:

G4 machines with 2 CPU cores (dual CPU):
   1. Apple Power Macintosh G4 450 DP (Gigabit)
2. Apple Power Macintosh G4 500 DP (Gigabit)
3. Apple Power Macintosh G4 800 DP (Quicksilver)
4. Apple Power Macintosh G4 1.0 DP (QS 2002)
5. Apple Power Macintosh G4 867 DP (MDD)
6. Apple Power Macintosh G4 1.0 DP (MDD)
7. Apple Power Macintosh G4 1.25 DP (MDD)
8. Apple Power Macintosh G4 1.25 DP (FW 800)
9. Apple Power Macintosh G4 1.42 DP (FW 800)

G5 machines with 2 CPU cores (dual CPU)
   10. Apple Power Macintosh G5 2.0 DP (PCI-X)
11. Apple Power Macintosh G5 1.8 DP (PCI-X)
12. Apple Power Macintosh G5 1.8 DP (PCI)
13. Apple Power Macintosh G5 2.0 DP (PCI-X 2)
14. Apple Power Macintosh G5 2.5 DP (PCI-X)
15. Apple Power Macintosh G5 2.0 DP (PCI)
16. Apple Power Macintosh G5 2.3 DP (PCI-X)
17. Apple Power Macintosh G5 2.7 DP (PCI-X)

G5 machines with 2 CPU cores (single CPU)
   18. Apple Power Macintosh G5 Dual Core (2.0)
19. Apple Power Macintosh G5 Dual Core (2.3)

G5 machines with 4 CPU cores (dual CPU, QUAD CORE)
   20. Apple Power Macintosh G5 "Quad Core" (2.5)



Of course, the last one isn't dual core, it's Quad Core, but anyway... :lol:

Not that it matters much though, since Amiga isn't (per definition, per design) SMP capable. And it will never be. It can't be, it's simply not possible.

The only way you could make it truly SMP capable would be to break Amiga binary compatibility, and this goes completely against the very founding idea of both OS4 and MorphOS.

Personally, I wouldn't mind if MorphOS would do just that at this point in evolution; abandon the Amiga binary compatibility ambitions, and introducing true SMP/multithreading with real memory protection, making MorphOS a real 64-bit platform, and abandon the 31-bit limit on RAM addressing, etc, etc, etc. But if you are breaking the Amiga anyway, it would be mad to remain on the dead PPC architecture, because then it could *easily* (and relatively fast) be ported to real, 2013 level desktop/laptop HW! This is why all these multicore discussion in an Amiga/PPC context is so darn pointless! The day it will have true SMP, then it's nothing that really prevents it from running on x86 or ARM (or on whatever with a pulse)!

And BTW - "Multicore Support" in the sense of PowerUP or a simple way of using a second core as a dumb numbercruncher by special applications written explicitly for this, is not at all the same as real SMP. It's real SMP people want, and this is what people generally mean (it's understood without saying) when talking about "Multicore"...

 

It can only be compared to its relatives, other OS4 systems

Nonsense, it can (and should, of course) be compared to any and all systems it's technically capable of running on! This because the only single reason to why you will have to amortize your "X1000" to 2018 as you said in another thread (I really hope you joked about that, BTW), is because of a political decision made by a single or a few people, thus resulting in a HW route for OS4 that insane in so many ways. That's the only reason, nothing technical about it!

OS4 could very well have been running on G5's and PowerBooks since a long time ago. Instead you are forced to pay $3,000+ for a system with features that nobody needs or wants (all the "X" crap that just sits there like an inflamed appendix) and features you can't use (multicore) that performs *far worse* than any regular 2005 level Mac desktop system.

Comparisons to other systems that OS4 could technically run on (and should have run on, weren't it for stupid decisions) illuminates this problem, and it is the only hope of making them think differently some day.

[takemehomegrandma]

@cha05e90

AROS was first in the NG scene and has the benefits of being open source and available for platforms such at x86 and ARM. Then came MorphOS and while it only runs on PPC it has the benefits of being Amiga binary compatible, it has a great and very diverse HW base, it's very mature and has the best features of all Amiga NG options. The last one (in all aspects, not just its late introduction) is OS4. It's like MorphOS in the sense it strives for Amiga binary compatibility (at least on paper) and is only available for PPC, but it falls short in practically every single aspect, like maturity, stability, performance, features, availability, Amiga compatibility, price, HW base, etc, etc.

Hence the "this OS dominates that platform" comments above, and the finding that OS4 doesn't really fit into the picture anywhere. Well, one could (as you say) perhaps say that OS4 dominates the "AmigaOS 4" *name*, but that's it!