ARM for the future?

[WolfToTheMoon]

For years people have been discussing a potential alternative route to PPC for "Next Generation Amiga", a discussion that has only become more relevant since PPC effectively went dead for all interesting purposes a few years back.

Often has these discussions been focused on x86, but as many people has pointed out, its endianness would probably be a show stopper. Other people feels that x86 is a show stopper in its own merits, because of various historical/"nerd-religious"/emotional reasons.

However, there might be a better alternative, if a new platform jump is to take place; ARM!

I have written a few posts over at MorphZone about this, and I'm not going to cross-post, but point you to it:

http://www.morphzone.org/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?forum=3&topic_id=7675&sortname=&sortorder=&sortdays=&viewmode=flat&order=0&start=0

(Don't miss the video with Windows and Office running on ARM!

So a lot has been happening on the ARM front recently, and a *solid* momentum and future for the platform is being built up.

So what do you think? Would ARM qualify as a new architecture for *miga?

For the current PPC-only AmigaOS derivatives ARM is the most likely choice.
AROS already has a ARM port.
Future Workbench X will be x86 only at first but thanks to it's Linux underpinnings could be made in the ARM version also, should need ever arise.

[WolfToTheMoon]

Now that's funny!
RISC was supposed to be big. PPCs,, I64, Alpha, SPARC, all tried to push this forward.
Will ARM succeed where others failed? Who knows. But no one forced X86s on the market. Apple could have continued to solder on without the switch.
This situation has occurred thanks to continued development that has allowed the X86 to have a performance edge while maintaining a low cost.
The phenomenon is purely market economics in action. No great corporate conspiracies are involved here.

x86 benefited greatly by having AMD and Intel trying to outdo each other on the PC market. On the other side(PPC), there was no market to engage in that kind of competition.
ARM might just be able to outdo PPC there. Windows on ARM might be just what it needs. But it remains to be seen what kind of performance those ARM chips will provide and what kind of animal WinARM will be

[WolfToTheMoon]

Wouldn't it have been great if they would have spent the the time and money that they are sinking into the X1000 on a port to ARM instead?

For a hobby system it would make a lot, lot more sense. Imagine paying 500, or even 1000 $ instead od 2500 or 3000 $ for your next AOS4 machine.

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.

[WolfToTheMoon]

If you are anti everything that is considered by the community as "Amiga", then why in September of 2010 did you join this Amiga community forum?

You are not "known" to us at all.

Well, let's just say I'm a amigan but of different breed to the current amiga community over here.

[WolfToTheMoon]

Then again, the 111 Euro license fee is a little steep.

The biggest problem with MOS and AOS4 is that one needs dedicated hardware to try it out. Especially with AOS4. MOS less so, but you still need  to buy a used Apple machine to even be able to have a go at it. At least with AROS or any other x86 OS one can always check it out and see how things are progressing without any major hardware investment.

[WolfToTheMoon]

http://www.menuetos.net/

Just goes to show how much bloat is in ANY modern hardware system, and that you can still touch the switches (if you're really demented that is )

a 64 bit OS that fits on a floppy.  This project sums up the laziness of the last 20 years to me nicely.

I believe it's the Kolibri OS(a fork of Menuetos) that fits on the floppy.

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

http://www.kolibrios.org/

[WolfToTheMoon]

wow.

care to explain why should anyone write their OS completely in asm code in a world of multicore GHz CPUs and storage that sizes in TBs.... instead of putting up various pictures?

[WolfToTheMoon]

...

takemehomegrandma, care to explain Genesi's relation to MorphOS... I haven't been following MorphOS that closely so I'd like to know more about that. I noticed there's Genesi's subsection on the MorphZone.

edit: Sorry, I've meant takemehomegrandma, not Iggy... but seeing both of you use MorphOS so I guess both of you could also answer me... I guess

[WolfToTheMoon]

But beyond that just because you have multicore cpus doesn't mean you shouldn't or needn't bother with optimising code. The major growth area in terms of development is in portable computing, starting with smart phones and continuing with tablets and netbooks. Heavy, unoptimised programs don't just mean poor performance, but decimation of battery life.

I agree partially, but one should also note that today's compiler's do a pretty fine job of optimizing output asm code. Probably better then 99% of programmers who would try to replace them with a manually written asm/machine code. If one writes a elegant, properly structured program in a higher-level language such as C or JAVA, one will have a responsive program... Simple as that. No need to use asm today.

I agree that Kolibri and MenuetOS are neat projects. But if I wanted to code a OS from scratch, in 99% of situations I'd have to be heavily dosed with a powerful toxic to choose asm over C/C++.

[WolfToTheMoon]

There is no longer any connection between Genesi and MorphOS.  They are two totally seperate things.
 
No support either way any more as far as I know

I wonder if that could change if MorphOS goes ARM. It would be a great thing for MorphOS.

[WolfToTheMoon]

Tell me, when the assembly programmers have finished with you, where do you want me to send the flowers?

There are plenty of instances where being able to use asm is not only handy, but very necessary. Many small industrial micro controllers for instance.

I haven't said I'd get rid of them completely nor have I mentioned microcontrollers... Just that it is not needed to code a OS or applications 100% in assembler.

[WolfToTheMoon]

These would be great to run MorphOS on...

[WolfToTheMoon]

Just because you see no value in the optimization of code for an application doesn't mean the rest of the world shares your view..

I never said that...

In other words, Wolf, I do not share in your ignorance and frankly am shocked by it

I'm shocked you would consider writing an entire OS or any application in asm as a guarantee of better performance or more optimized code. I also doubt many programmers could manually write more optimized code then today's compilers. And ultimatively, spending resources of doing so is questionable in most applications(while I agree it's mandatory in some others).

I never said I'm anti-asm in general.

[WolfToTheMoon]

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...

it sure does

Development computer:
- AMD Athlon 64 3000+ 2,0 Ghz
- Asus K8N
- 512 DDR DIMM
- Radeon 7000 32MB SDR AGP TV-OUT
- Logitech PS/2 keyboard Y-BF37
  - Logitech PS/2 mouse M-SBF96

http://www.menuetos.net/download.htm


and list of tested hardware

http://www.menuetos.net/hwc.txt

[WolfToTheMoon]

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.

I don't get this trashing of x86 that usually happens on amiga forums?

It's cheap, it's fast, it gets less and less power hungry with every new version. Yet, it's still heavily criticized by some amigans, as far as I see, mostly by no other reason other for not being PPC or 68K(that is, not powering any official amigaOS hardware).