Ideas: The new Amiga. Yes, it's inevitable!

[Atheist]

DavidF215 wrote:

@CodeSmith

Regarding NatAmi, I would think for it to have any commercial significance it needs to be licensed; otherwise, what happens when the number of legal copies of AmigaOS 3.x are gone. A license with Amiga, Inc would enable production of additional AmigaOS licenses.

Hi DavidF215,

I believe there are an infinite amount of AOS3.9's available. Doesn't every copy of Amiga Forever come with a full, byte for byte copy of AOS3.9? What you run it on is your business.

Anyway, there are over 5 million AOS roms out there, as long as you own one, you are entitled to some version of AOS, that gives NatAmi60 at least 2 years of production. :-D

[bloodline]

A6000 wrote:
The great thing about the amigas custom chipset was/is that it gave each model a long life, 24 years and counting,

It was users too tight to upgrade that gave the Amiga it's long life... THe Custom chipset gave it a 4 year headstart over the rest of the industry, then the industry cought up... and the Amiga died.

whilst PCs are obsolete in 4years or less.

So that stock A1200 you bought in 1992 was still able to keep up with a PC in 1996?

If a future amiga used off the shelf parts, it would need to be regularly upgraded too, GPU's have a life span of just 2 years or so,

Nvidia have been working to a 6 month product lifecycle for a long time... I think the rate has slowed now... though I could be wrong.

and newer software would not run fast enough on a 4 year old amiga that used off the shelf parts.

How would it be any different with a custom design?

Fast processors and gigabytes of ram encourages lazy programming.

No it doesn't, it allows developers more freedom. The software I run on my MacBook Pro today would be unthinkable on a top of the line desktop machine 8 years ago!

[TheMagicM]

All this talk of new hardware will never get anyone anywhere.
We have OS4.x and MOS 2.0 but no 3rd party software (thats any good or NEW) to support it.  You can have all the x86, quadruple core PPC, dual video card system, 100GB RAM (whatever you'all are dreaming about) but no software to run on it other than the OS.

Best thing is to pick up a programming book and start writing something.

This post brought to you by the letters ** and the word "*****".

EDITED by TheMagicM :-)

[A6000]

I think it is wrong for a moderator to use this forum to conduct a personal vendetta.

[mdwh2]

(Reposting from the other thread, in case you missed it...)

Beast96GT wrote:
The Amiga graphics chips could optimize for Quaternions which are much better than matrices (especially for rotations).  

In what sense "optimised", that isn't already done on modern hardware? Presumably if there was some obvious way to speed things up here, NVIDIA etc would already be doing it.

Quaternions are only a representation of 3x3 matrices for rotations, they still need to be converted to 4x4 matrices to represent general transformations anyway.

Zekaric wrote:
Quaternions is just another tool in the box, it won't replace euclidean transformations; so they aren't exactly necessary IMO.

Well, if they're needed, they're written in software anyway, so they shouldn't have anything to do with hardware choices. Quaternions are better than Euler rotations as they avoid "grimbal lock", but use less variables than a 3x3 matrix (4 verus 9). It's also easier to do some algorithms using quaternions rather than rotation matrices (e.g., spherical linear interpolation).

[DavidF215]

A6000 wrote:

No, they won't, Amiga Inc will not under any circumstances, grant any Amiga licenses. They are determined to kill the Amiga, why?, I don't know, maybe some other company is paying them to do it, I cannot see how they would benefit otherwise.

Sure about this?

A6000 wrote:
When Natami runs out of OS 3.9, they could either sell it without an OS, since we all have several already, or bundle AROS68k with it.

I guess AROS would work.

Atheist wrote:
I believe there are an infinite amount of AOS3.9's available. Doesn't every copy of Amiga Forever come with a full, byte for byte copy of AOS3.9? What you run it on is your business.

Yeah, I forgot about Amiga Forever having the OS. It would be a native OS to the hardware.

[Beast96GT]

..double post..

[Beast96GT]

 

mdwh2 wrote:
(Reposting from the other thread, in case you missed it...)

Beast96GT wrote:
The Amiga graphics chips could optimize for Quaternions which are much better than matrices (especially for rotations).  

In what sense "optimised", that isn't already done on modern hardware? Presumably if there was some obvious way to speed things up here, NVIDIA etc would already be doing it.

Quaternions are only a representation of 3x3 matrices for rotations, they still need to be converted to 4x4 matrices to represent general transformations anyway.

Zekaric wrote:
Quaternions is just another tool in the box, it won't replace euclidean transformations; so they aren't exactly necessary IMO.

Well, if they're needed, they're written in software anyway, so they shouldn't have anything to do with hardware choices. Quaternions are better than Euler rotations as they avoid "grimbal lock", but use less variables than a 3x3 matrix (4 verus 9). It's also easier to do some algorithms using quaternions rather than rotation matrices (e.g., spherical linear interpolation).

To avoid gimbal lock and get smoother rotations, most game engines convert a rotation matrix to a quaternion, rotate it, then convert it back to a matrix.  You can't tell me this process can't be optimized, especially on the GPU.  

Chris

[mdwh2]

Beast96GT wrote:
To avoid gimbal lock and get smoother rotations, most game engines convert a rotation matrix to a quaternion, rotate it, then convert it back to a matrix.  You can't tell me this process can't be optimized, especially on the GPU.  

Yes, this is spherical linear interpolation, and yes, I suspect that between the billions spent by the likes of Intel and NVIDIA, and the large numbers of people working in 3D graphics, people have already optimised it as much as is worth doing.

The first rule of performance is that it's only worth improving the bottlenecks. Whilst SLERP may at first look long winded, it's nothing for modern CPUs, and typically only has to be done once per animated object per frame - I imagine drawing thousands of polygons with complex pixel shaders is far more likely to eat up the time.

Engines don't necessarily need to convert both ways - e.g., they can store rotations as quaternions, so you can do SLERP straight off, and then convert that, along with the position, to a 4x4 transformation matrix to apply. Converting a quaternion to a matrix is a quick process, just involving a few multiplications.

Moreover, this sort of thing already can be optimised. CPUs have all these extra instructions (e.g., SSE) for multplying arrays of numbers together which can be used here. Similarly on the GPU. Saying they could optimise this process is like saying they could optimise the dot product or cross product or matrix multiplication - such things already are optimised.

Also I don't see how this is related to any new Amiga hardware idea? You're not going to convince NVIDIA etc to implement some new idea, and if you're suggesting that a company develops their own "Amiga" custom chipset just to implement this one idea, it would likely as a whole fall way behind other chipsets due to a lack of investment and experience.

[persia]

Exactly, you have Nvidia and ATI, each with thousands of employees focused on video development and you think that a little company is going to design something better?  The world is a different place than when CBM went bankrupt, trying to manufacture your own graphics cards (or worse yet putting them on the motherboard) is foolish, better to go with industry standard components and build your OS around those.

This is why it is hard to get back into the OS market.  How do you distinguish a new Amiga from a Linux/BSD/Windows box?  If you build it why not just run MSWindows or Linux on it?  You really have to write the applications for the OS as well as the OS.  Everybody does video now, and you have rich and complex products that run circles around video toaster.  Why would I (your average Joe Video) want to use an Amiga?

You need a new OS and a new set of killer apps, a tough combination for sure.  And if you do come up with a killer app you have to resist the millions of sales you could potentially get from porting it to Microsoft. It takes a visionary who doesn't care about money, a rare breed to be sure.

[Steril707]

I see a couple of different things here:

1: One of the above posters is right, the PS3 is somehow like a modern Amiga, it would just need its own OS. Lots of custom stuff in there, and using the CELL chip instead of a generic x86 or windows approach, and it’s a powerhouse leading in front of the other consoles (just my opinion )
Imagine Commodore would be still around and not acting as retarded as in the late eighties/early nineties,  this could be how a modern Amiga would look like.

2: The OS way: If no dedicated hardware is around, I would go the x86 route. Like the rest of the possibilities, it doesn’t hold much future, because except of a few nostalgic geezers like us, nobody will give up their Windows/Linux/MacOs operating systems for Amiga Os in any form. There is simply not enough power behind the Amiga anymore.

3: Natami. If this is real, and I am not yet convinced that this will ever see the light of the day in any form (I believe they got their “Super Aga” running, but getting a 68040 running on the same FPGA with even higher speeds than the originals sounds a little bit farfetched to me). Well if this is real indeed, I see many chances. You have the fraction of oldschoolers, who want to play their old games and use their old software, but you can also get the people along, who want to use their Amiga for more modern uses,  browsing the web in a convenient way for instance. Plus a couple of nerds (like me) would maybe be interested to develop something new for this.

Natami and AROS together sound like a dream come true to me, and the best thing with this is, you have people from the community working on the future of the Amiga.

[B00tDisk]

This:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813159002

running AROS.

Amiga OS, graphical powerhouse*, and hey, it's all on one board, just like an Amiga!


*=compared to what the Amiga has, or will have at any point in the future.

[DavidF215]

persia:
>Exactly, you have Nvidia and ATI, each with thousands of employees focused on video development and you think that a little company is going to design something better?

My thoughts, too. Start with developing drivers for a selected line of integrated Intel Graphics processors then expand to Nvidia.

>This is why it is hard to get back into the OS market. How do you distinguish a new Amiga from a Linux/BSD/Windows box? If you build it why not just run MSWindows or Linux on it? You really have to write the applications for the OS as well as the OS. Everybody does video now, and you have rich and complex products that run circles around video toaster. Why would I (your average Joe Video) want to use an Amiga?

For some reason the old Journey song, "Only Solutions," from Tron popped into my head.

@B00tDisk
Nice Mobo. It should run KX Light with Amiga Forever, and noone would know the difference.  Just need to be able to run OS4 on it then, or if Amiga Inc would allow Hyperion to develop OS4.2 for one of the ACube PPC motherboards then that would be fine, too.

[Hammer]

Modern graphics cards are designed to be optimal for typical 32-bit floating point (matrices and such) math.

ATI Radeon HD 38x0/48x0 and NV GeForce GT2x0 can do 64bit floating point math.

The Amiga graphics chips (preferably on a card) could optimize for real-time ray-tracing. It's not a fantasy by any means; it's already being done on the PC, but it's limited and requires massive hardware.

There's no need for "massive hardware" i.e. $199USD Radeon HD 4870 would do the trick. Soon to be released Radeon HD 48x0(RV770 LE) estimated to be ~$150 USD.

Refer to http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/38145/135/
"Watch out, Larrabee: Radeon 4800 supports a 100% ray-traced pipeline".

Cheaper Radeon HD 46x0 has ~320 stream processors i.e. similar Radeon HD 38x0(RV670).

Realtime raytracing for Transformers movie trailers was done on Radeon HD 2900XT(R600).

[Hammer]

1: One of the above posters is right, the PS3 is somehow like a modern Amiga, it would just need its own OS. Lots of custom stuff in there, and using the CELL chip instead of a generic x86 or windows approach, and it’s a powerhouse leading in front of the other consoles (just my opinion )

That CELL chip fixes issues with RSX GPU (NV G7x) i.e. lack of Early-Z test, limited vertex shader resource, lack of concurrent operations pixel shader and textures. These are issues for the G7x GPUs.

NV G7x's issues was fixed in NV G8x GPU i.e. includes Early-Z, concurrent operations for shaders and textures,
maximise shader resource (unified shaders).

Like NV G8x GPUs, issues from G7x is not applicable for Xbox360’s GPU(Xenos).

[B00tDisk]

There's something that people talking about OS4 on the PS3 are overlooking - and that is that Sony has completely locked you out of the hypervisor unless you give them a lot of money.  Case in point, there was a rolling homebrew demo showing off some blitter operations, well, guess what?  The hole that the coders used to do it was closed up by Sony in the following system update.  

Ain't gonna be Amiga OS on the Playstation (unless you're running UAE through Linux).