New Hyperion Entertainment Website http://a-eon.com/ - The Mystery Continues

[nyteschayde]

Fallout 1/2 had way more class than F3.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3PXiV95kwA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWaTB1LkQhA&feature=related

People who say that just are angry because the format changed. Fallout 3 was a master piece. I love that game. The SDK for it is also good and there is such a huge modding community for it that I can't quit playing it. I think Fallout 3 has made a bigger impression on me than most of the games I've played in the last few years.

[JimS]

Stuff that's going into space needs to be radiation hardened. Our atmosphere shields us from a lot of the radiation that comes our way. Apparently this is a lot easier to do with older slower designs.

I suspect that the smaller 'feature size' of newer chips is a factor... making them more susceptible to disruption by radiation.

[Rodomoc]

been a while since i have posted so let me re-introduce myself. i'm basically an old 8bit burnout from user/programming/custom interfacing standpoint having cut my teeth on pet machines then doing the c64. exciting times back then. my amiga experience was with a stock 500 machine in the mid 90's. was user of this machine, never programmed it. went on computing hiatus and returned to commodore as hobbyist several years ago. still have same c64 i used in early 80's and it still works along with a majority of floppies and even cassettes. have a 128 that i am about to utilize for greenhouse environmental control purposes. have modernized 3000 seeing most use. so this is me. i follow amiga happenings a lot. bad as it sounds, my best amiga user experience is currently uae (sorry but for what i do on amiga this is easier than maintaining my 3000 machine and also portable on my laptop too.) run the 3000 because i wanted to modernize an original machine. will never do this again due to cost vs returns. play with the other post amiga systems (never os4) but settling on none. so guess i still have my head in the 68k sand. tried many linuxes and unixes but never like them as 'home' computers. simply do not have the time to become expert at too many things. i guess i am commodore loyal from pre-amiga days. i like amiga because of good usable applications simply not available in any goodness on other platforms (scala). am starting to use for creating interactive infant/early childhood learning programs. not my working profession, have a youngster that i am trying to teach at home. also like amiga because of the long term loyalty of hardware/software developers and many users. a long introduction...sorry.

new x1000 board better than others before it and also obviously behind x86 stuff. spent some time reading xmos papers today. neat little devices for hacking and interfacing. this is a good thing in my opinion. problem is mainboard due to be very expensive to get this hacking/interfacing ability. specifics unclear but seems to link up through pci-ex 8lane. wouldn't mind having one of these chips for some alternative energy projects i am working on. i see os4 people having a slightly better time of it in the next year. user base real small but increasing a little here and there. x1000 probably a high end developers machine or well to do hobbyist machine. still, i'm glad for community that there is something new. it looks like hyperion is going for it in a sense and i wish them well. looks like a lot will be happening on os side of things this year as well. so maybe board not for everyone, but at least it is something to continue with. if anything os should improve. maybe one day porting to smaller/cheaper devices would be viable. until then i say carry on. there are lots of camps to choose from. many people in more than one, as I am. although i can say that i will be retiring from one of them. i can't say if i will jump into os4 yet. being a user, it depends on software availability. os4 getting there so maybe?

cheers.

[Karlos]

People who say that just are angry because the format changed. Fallout 3 was a master piece. I love that game. The SDK for it is also good and there is such a huge modding community for it that I can't quit playing it. I think Fallout 3 has made a bigger impression on me than most of the games I've played in the last few years.

He's right, you know. It didn't become Game Of The Year for nothing. I'm still playing it :roflmao:

[hazydave]

I would argue that, technically, x86 is dead.  It exists in RISC emulation layers and x64 is steadily erasing its footprint.

Both of those ARE the x86. Only Microsoft says "x64"... the official name from AMD is x86-64... Intel calls it something else. Regardless, it's all x86. Sure, it's improved... that's been happening, here and there, since 1981. They've got gotten better at it over the last decade... and, well, Intel wasn't always in control.

Now, of course, anyone who's got a religious rather than technical objection against something called "x86"... if they can find they don't hate it when they call it "x64", I say go for it. And while you're at it, stop being insane. The instruction set hasn't mattered since whenever it was in the 1990s that compilers just got better than people (if you want to say 99.9999% of the programmers out there, I'll concede there may be some joker in a cave somewhere who can code better than the compiler... not more accurately, not faster, but better. At least until I change from one x86 chip to another).

And as much as people hate Microsoft, it has done something right with Windows 7: in order to obtain WHQL status for a device, a manufacturer must provide 64-bit as well as 32-bit drivers.

Yes, that was a smart move.. also smart when they required it for Vista, but at least people seem to actually be using Windows 7, not reformatting XP over top.

[hazydave]

Its pretty obvious that x86 is ruling the desktop, and it seems ARM has embedded devices as their big thing. Why did the next gen consoles use powerPC processors?

The main reason is that they wanted IBM as a foundry. Particularly the Cell... there just weren't many chip fabs that could make that when the PS3 came out. The PowerPC, driven for years by Cisco and, a bit, by Apple's desktop use, was (and still is) one of the faster embedded processors. No game machine can really put a desktop-class processor in -- the costs (CPU, heat management, power supply) are way too high.

Also, IBM apparently had the design methodologies in place to redesign the PowerPC at lower costs. And they were taking things down in power, which is always simpler... it would have been much more expensive to add performance, SMP and multithreading to ARM in those days.

Some of it was their design goals, too. Microsoft wanted "anything but x86", since apparently, they were tired of how easily the XBox-1 (which was essentially just a super low-end PC) was hacked. They also wanted multiple threads and cores, based on estimate of how video games were being built at the time. Most embedded processors are single-core only.

Of course, Nintendo had done this, years ago, for the GameCube. The Wii uses PowerPC simply because the GameCube did, and the Wii is only a small upgrade of the GameCube architecture.

There's also this: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2009/01/new-book-from-ibmers-sony-suckered-into-funding-xbox-chip.ars. Some IBMers are claiming that Microsoft chose the PowerPC because Sony had already paid a huge pile of money developing a version of the PowerPC optimized for video games.

[SamuraiCrow]

Now, of course, anyone who's got a religious rather than technical objection against something called "x86"... if they can find they don't hate it when they call it "x64", I say go for it. And while you're at it, stop being insane. The instruction set hasn't mattered since whenever it was in the 1990s that compilers just got better than people (if you want to say 99.9999% of the programmers out there, I'll concede there may be some joker in a cave somewhere who can code better than the compiler... not more accurately, not faster, but better. At least until I change from one x86 chip to another).

I think the choice of the XCore chip using the LLVM (Low-Level Virtual Machine) toolchain was a good transitional state.  Soon it may be possible to go cross-platform in the way that Java would have done early on if it hadn't sucked so bad at first.  And best of all, LLVM is funded by Apple, Google, and Adobe.

The one problem is that the supervisor-level stuff on a Kernal needs to be done in assembly rather than C.  Perhaps porting LLVM to AROS would be a better idea in the long run.

[runequester]

Thanks for the explanation guys. That makes a lot of sense.

[kolla]

You can emulate the Amiga chipset running UAE on the host machine... what's the minimum speed CPU that does a passable Amiga emulation. I guess you could splt up the emulation between threads... maybe. But you'd have to watch that whole multi-threading thing.

Once upon a time, when compiling UAE for Linux, there was something along "--enable-penguins", which IIRC, enabled UAE to emulate 68k on one CPU and chipset emulation on the next. But I might remember wrong,  and UAE has certainly evolved since then, the option is no longer there.

Just run UAE.

That's what I'm doing Most of the time. Even though I do have hardware to run latest MorphOS, for example. UAE is just too flexible to ignored, I can use the same virtual amiga on my laptop, desktop, under Linux, Windows, OSX or whatever. The only thing I miss is a way to have amigaos windows interleaved with host OS, or have host OS being able to address and render inside an amiga window on UAE.

My biggest gripe these days is the legal state of OS3.x, with copyrights east and west, all the fuzz around unofficial BB3 for example, developers having signed NDAs and given away copyrights of their own software to "dead" companies like Haage&Partner and Amiga Inc., so they cannot even continue to work on software they originally wrote themselves. I would not be surprised if MorphOS and OS4.x will share this destiny eventually.

[Nlandas]

Yeah, maybe you're right... though I think that's after some process tweaking.

I thought it was cool that they thought they could get it to 2Ghz at 90nm though. Still love to see it on a mainstream desktop processor as you point out but the OS isn't there yet. 8^)

Of course it is... that's "code" for "PowerPC" these days. At least some years back, Cisco was putting PowerPC in most every router and switch they made. Thus, PowerPCs grew all sorts of router and switch friendly hardware, like modern memory buses and RapidIO links.

Absolutely, Like back in the day when printers were using a lot of 68K series processors.

Of course, every CPU that's not an "applications processor" (eg, desktop PC, PDA/phone, etc) is an embedded CPU... they're used in a box or board, hidden away somewhere. For example, I built an R/C controller system. which had two 32-bit ARM CPUs on the main controller, one 16-bit RI MSP430 CPU on the remote, even a tiny Zilog Z8 on an optional tachometer sensor. That's "embedded".

Zilog, Sweet - I haven't seen that name since college. I think the heath kits we had used a Zilog at their core. I had a machine code manual for one of that generation somewhere around here. I remember designing a primitive A/D on the kit but my sample rate was too slow to really capture the waveform.

I don't believe anyone building embedded telecommunications gear would bother with something like this.

Yeah, I figured it was a totally stab in the dark. Hopefully, someone comes up with some unique use for it and sells a several thousand extra computers because of it.

That's the question. I'm not sure just what you'd do with that XMOS chip on its own. It's interesting, but I reject their example of MP3 player... that's well served by $3.00 DSPs these days, probably with a bunch of on-chip peripherals specifically designed for making............

Maybe there is some benefit to be had for an FPGA connected to the Xorro slot being able to gain access to the XMOS chip and the I/O logic there. Would that possibly offload some of the work the FPGA would have to do to interface with all I/O systems and let the XMOS take care of it? I better stop now, I'm just hoping there is something neat that comes of it.

The fact I didn't really "get" the XMOS chip... ok, I wasn't motivated by "this is work", but you know, I do this for a living. I shouldn't have to guess :-)

LOL!!! Too true. Maybe they'll have some seed ideas closer to release time. I bet they'd let you in on the project. Have any fun ideas that you've been keeping to yourself? Love to see some of them. 8^)

None of those guys are working on this, far as I know. And it's a very different world. When we were doing this, personal computing was still very, very young. Right now, not so much.. it has matured. And yeah, it's a little sad, because who gets excited about a new computer release? Ok, maybe a few silly Macheads, but really, the PC you see this year is just a little better than last year. There are occasionally new CPU microarchitectures, but most of the time, it's just small improvements. Same with GPUs.

The reason isn't that no one's trying.. but rather, that many tried, and most ultimately failed. Those who are left are spending billions to incremental improvements, funded by the billions of chips they sell. Mature market.

Doesn't mean there can't be fun, or cool new things. I've been far more interested in the cool computing devices I can put in my pocket, or even my livingroom, than on my desktop. There's just more action in those places.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that any of the innovative old guard were on this project. Being there in the early days while each of you broke new ground in the brave new world of personal computers spoiled me. I sometimes feel like they deliberately hold back the full ramifications of new technological developments in order to incrementally improve things. That way they can sell more product as the new slightly better model comes out.  I know that it's not true but someday I just hope there is a unique team of hardware and software developers that get together to release something truly groundbreaking again.

I too have found most of my enjoyment in the smaller portable device market - MP3, Smart phone, GPS, digital cameras and other gadgets. Now that those markets are maturing everything is converging into a single device. That's interesting to watch - someday to have one device that's just as good as a separate video/digital camera, GPS, MP3, video player, phone, etc. Still keeps my interest peaked.

On the desktop side, I have to admit that PeeCees have become little more than a communications tool for me. I do a little video editing for my wife's school musicals and concerts as well as family outings but nothing like the enjoyment I got back in the day. I must be getting old - You guys sure did make it interesting though. It was a fun ride. Thanks.

Ok, I'm hooked in via satellite modem... it's a little faster than dial-up. And many, many times more expensive. But all those dishes on the roof is great for my tech-cred :-)

LOL!!!! Did you really need help in the tech-cred department. *Chuckle* Somehow I don't think so. We are lucky to have broadband and DSL available here. I hear that while it's expensive FIOS is really, really fast and the HD quality on it is good. Maybe someday that'll be here as well. Good talking with you Dave.

So long and thanks for all the Fred Fish...

-Nyle

[amiga92570]

hmmm... Interesting document. Definitely hardware. But, if it ain't x86, then it'd better be xbox or ps3, 'cause, i doubt they're gonna sell too many of them otherwise.

But we will wait, and we will see...

i find it kind of amusing that that this document lists trevor, anthony and ben's birthdays... Is this normal for belgian law? Or is it a european thing?

Hmmm... Ex box... Or am i thinking blasphemy here?

who cares. Cheap supportable hardware or bust!

Probably bust...

pa6t

[leszeka33]

They'd like to claim the high end. That doesn't mean they actually there, any more than any other of the zillions of Amiga-industry promises made since ESCOM closed the Amiga Technologies doors.



i7 CPU, 6-12GB DRAM, certainly at two full PCIe x 16 slots (well, at least they tried on that... they have two full lenght PCIe slots, but they degrade to x8 if you use them both... so there's really only one x16 slot).



Well, they're letting you fill in that assumption, rather than just outright saying it. It would be really nice if Amiga wanna-be computer companies stopped doing this.. what's the point of raising Amigaoid hopes once again, just to smash them. I would like this to not be another one of those, but really... not much to expect here. PowerPC CPUs have a hard time beating Intel Atoms on performance these days (and the ARM may be a valid competitor, soon). I can't imagine how this is going to be anything but overpriced and underwhelming.

And I'd love to be proved wrong.

Nbench on my G4 1.25 GHz

BITFIELD : 1.8098e+08 : 31.04 : 6.48
FP EMULATION : 136.04 : 65.28 : 15.06
FOURIER : 6710.1 : 7.63 : 4.29
ASSIGNMENT : 14.934 : 56.83 : 14.74
IDEA : 2398.1 : 36.68 : 10.89
HUFFMAN : 1230.6 : 34.13 : 10.90
NEURAL NET : 11.981 : 19.25 : 8.10
LU DECOMPOSITION : 415.28 : 21.51 : 15.53
==========================ORIGINAL BYTEMARK RESULTS==========================
INTEGER INDEX : 35.571
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 14.674
Baseline (MSDOS*) : Pentium* 90, 256 KB L2-cache, Watcom* compiler 10.0
==============================LINUX DATA BELOW===============================
CPU :
L2 Cache :
OS : Linux 2.6.27-1.ydl61.4
C compiler : gcc version 4.1.2 20071124 (Red Hat 4.1.2-42)
libc :
MEMORY INDEX : 7.227
INTEGER INDEX : 10.355
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 8.139
Baseline (LINUX) : AMD K6/233*, 512 KB L2-cache, gcc 2.7.2.3, libc-5.4.38
* Trademarks are property of their respective holder.

My Dual Intel Core(TM)2 CPU 6600 @ 2.40GHz  

MEMORY INDEX        : 17.249
INTEGER INDEX       : 14.827
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 26.020

Nbench on Dual GenuineIntel Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N270 @1.60GHz 1600MHz

MEMORY INDEX : 7.239
INTEGER INDEX : 7.268
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 7.359

http://www.jacobheider.com/hardware/nbench.php

Nbench on 4 CPU Intel Core i7 940 @2.93GHz 1600MHz oc 3608MHz

MEMORY INDEX : 7.239
INTEGER INDEX : 7.268
FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 7.359

http://www.tux.org/~mayer/linux/results2.html

My G4 is 1.42 times faster than the Intel Atom.
My G4 is only 3 times slower than fastest overclocked i7.
My G4 is only 1.43 times slower my 6600 .

x86 can be faster than the PowerPC, if
1.Problem can be carried out over multiple cores
2.Software developer knows how to write software for multiple cores.
3.Software developer has time to make the software on multiple cores.

Most of the software on my pc use only one core,  
and works just a bit faster than my G4.

Next time check, before you write.

[MskoDestny]

My G4 is 1.42 times faster than the Intel Atom.
My G4 is only 3 times slower than fastest overclocked i7.
My G4 is only 1.43 times slower my 6600 .

Comparing only the performance of a synthetic integer benchmark is rather misleading especially since the benchmark you used provided floating point and memory performance numbers. Your G4 is 1.42 times faster than an Atom at doing integer operations, but has no advantage at memory intensive tasks and only a small advantage at floating point. Your Core 2 Duo may only be 1.43 times faster at integer operations but it's 2.39 times as fast at memory intensive tasks and 3.2 times as fast at floating point. That overclocked Core i7 may only be 3 times faster at integer ops than your G4, but it's 4.64 times faster for memory intensive operations and 6.61 times faster at floating point. If you don't think that a 3x to 6+x speedup is not significant then I don't know what to say.

And all that is just for a single core. nbench is not a multi-threaded benchmark program.

x86 can be faster than the PowerPC, if
1.Problem can be carried out over multiple cores
2.Software developer knows how to write software for multiple cores.
3.Software developer has time to make the software on multiple cores.

Uh, no. It's faster even on single threaded code. IBM's POWER6 might be faster than an i7, but there aren't any PowerPC CPUs for the desktop market that are competitive with even midrange x86 CPUs like the Core2 and Phenom II. I imagine the chips for the embedded market (one of which is likely what's going to be in the X1000) fare even worse.

Further, things that really need a lot of CPU power have been moving to multithreaded code. The latest game engines and video encoders can use multiple cores.

[leszeka33]

Uh, no. It's faster even on single threaded code.  

So You think that the software done on one core, will work by itself without a rewrite of several core faster.
You're not very smart.

[kolla]

You're not very smart.

He's not funny either. You, on the other hand, you are very funny. :roflmao:

[yssing]

but there aren't any PowerPC CPUs for the desktop market that are competitive with even midrange x86 CPUs like the Core2 and Phenom II

The Cell in the PS3 has 8 cores clocked at 3,2 GHz, granted only 6 of those area available to the developer. Linux performes very well on the PS3. Its very cheap and I know people who use is as their desktop computer.

Also, you really need to look at performace vs powerconsumption. Which Intel x86 based CPU only uses less than the 440? and still gives the same performance.

I dont know eveyrthing there is to know about CPUs far from it, but my guess is that the CELL is more than powerfull enough and that the PPC does have a future.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(microprocessor)