Do you approve of PPC (in some form) as the future of Amiga?

[minator]

Who wouldn't want a computer with 80 cores instead of 4?

Anyone who's heard of Amdahl's law.

Useless for a desktop? Are you on drugs? Can I have some of them?

Actually that processor is useless for pretty much anything aside running linpack benchmarks.

It's an experimental chip used to see how they could get something like that to work.  The cores are simple VLIW things that run no existing software.  There is a newer 50 core version with Atom like cores but even it's a bit of an oddity, it's not SMP so you have to run an OS per core - unless you are using a specialist cluster based OS.

[minator]

Wrong! A medium sized and priced fpga should allow an enhanced 68k processor to achieve around 150MHz. That is what the Natami team is expecting and that is what similar complexity and sized processors are running in fpga. That should compare nicely to a single core PPC at more than 2x the clock speed and possibly approaching 3x the clock speed.

Assuming they can actually get it to 150MHz, I expect it'll have trouble matching a PPC at the same clock speed never mind exceeding it.

[minator]

Since you made a claim on PPC vs X86 I'm restarting PowerPC vs X86.

You're comparing 2003 machines to 2006 machine and are what - surprised?

There are plenty of benchmarks on this, but x86 are stronger in some areas (branchy integer stuff) while PPCs are better in different areas FP and especially Altivec.

Apple were very clever with the timing of their switch because it meant they went from lat year's PPCs to next years x86s and of course the x86s were faster.

Actually according to the benchmarks published at the time there wasn't that much of a difference between them, in fact the G4s could rip music faster than the first mac x86s.

It was only after the Core2Duos appeared that a clear gap emerged, but by then development of desktop PPCs had already stalled.

[minator]

On the question of is PPC viable for the future, well I'm sure they'll do for now but after MOS supports the G5s and the X1000 eventually ships, where next?

PPCs are still moving forwards but their market is exclusively embedded these days.
If you want to stay on PPC you have to accept that you are going to pay a lot of money for machines that will be beat by x86 and also by even cheaper ARM machines.

The fastest Amiga this year is likely to be the Sam460 which with OS, memory etc will cost in the region of £800 or more*.  Today I can get a Toshiba AC-100 10Z smartbook with a dual core 1GHz Cortex-A9 for £250**.


*based on an estimate from Amigans.net

**in stock at Amazon.co.uk