Ben Hermans still staunchly against x86

[the_leander]

Look, not everyone thinks like you.

Indeed.

You can't tell me I'm wrong

Actually I can, as much as you have a right to your opinion, I have a right to mine. The fact is however, as EDanaII rightly stated, I was criticising AEON/Hyperion, not you.

, and just because you want a cheap and fast machine to run OS4 doesn't make other X1000 fans wrong either.

Must... Not... Bite...

As far as your question for expanding the userbase goes... Dumping AmigaNG and concentrating on the classics - cashing in on the retro crowd and neatly bypassing almost all of the bad blood within the community.

Anyway EDanaII and warpdesign pretty much have it covered as far as anything else goes on this

[runequester]

No, it would rather be: why does the A600 costs the price of a 386, the 386 being the equivalent of the A4000 ?

If amigas had been too cheap, they'd have been too awesome, and the Bruce Willis would have had to step in.


Just saying.

[kolla]

What would you recommend they do to increase the user base?

I would recommend doing what the MorphOS developers did - that is, release OS4 for old powerpc macs.

[Louis Dias]

@ HenryCase

If you want to grow the user-base, then you have to bring the price down to a level a majority of (potential) users are willing to pay. Just because the Sam is the lower end of the price range does not mean it's the price that a majority will pay for. Bring cost of ownership down to about 300$ and I'm in -- but I suspect I'm on the lowest end. This will grow the user-base considerably. A price range of 800$ to 2000$ will not do it.

While the price level of the X1000 might be out of AEon's control, choice of hardware is not. I'm in the x86 camp and computers can be found that would bring the price down below 800$. I've also argued that "if it must be PPC, then xBox, Wii or PS3." The choice of this hardware + OS would also bring the cost down to a more reasonable range and have a better chance of growing the base.

Cold hard fact: the Amiga, despite it's superiority way back when, is a _failed_ computer. Trying to reintroduce such a machine at "caviar" prices when it has "little nutritional value" is just foolish. If you've failed in your career and are restarting it, you don't begin it again by selling yourself at the highest wage possible.

People keep forgetting that this is an enthusiast's market.

I am a Fiero enthusiast.  It is widely considered a failed car yes also did many things that were ahead of it's time in the automobile world.  I continue to update and improve upon it at a premium price.  I also value the car higher than my corvette that is 10+years newer...and enjoy driving it more than my corvette.

This is the Amiga market.  If you want an econo-box/mobile look elsewhere.

[fishy_fiz]

At the end of the day I dont think it matters much. It seem fairly obvious that Hyperion dont want to compete but rather support thier small faction of supporters. It's a shame that theyve essentially given our once beloved Amiga OS a death sentence (as much as some people would like to think otherwise there's no real attraction in something that's essentially industry standard hardware with a comparitively weak cpu with a huge pricetag unless the brand name is important to you for the vast majority of people), but at least there's other choices now as well.

If Hyperion are happy to target the same audience willing to tollerate such decisions then good luck to them (although I am curious just how long the same group of people will keep buying new hardware for OS4(a look at sigs on forum sites show the numbers of OS4.x machines sold is significantly more than the amount of actual users)).

I say this with a slightly heavy heart and as a fan of all the "amiga" options. The sheer volume of threads over the years, and the large amount of responses to these threads shows what a large chunk of the potential market wants, but unlike most businesses they seem content to ignore the majority and continue with a route that appears to have little chance of increasing numbers of users.

[kolla]

People keep forgetting that this is an enthusiast's market.

Too bad for OS4 that there arent enough enthusiasts around then.

[Heiroglyph]

I think the problem is that there is too much choice.

Between 3.x, 4.x, Morphos and Aros, the market and developer base is 1/4 the size that it should be.

The sooner any one of them takes over, the better.

[Hammer]

Interesting, the previous Z11 was a pure CISC chip, this is just mostly CISC.

It can only be a matter of time before it gets merged with POWER though.
.

Your speculation.

No, the Z series is for mainframes only. It's exotic and highly expensive hardware and they make vast sums of money from it.
.

The context was HPC. Like Power, Z also uses large package MCM format.

But you're saying the opposite - everyone has gone RISC internally.
.

Not externally hence my CISC-to-RISC hybrid context.

Anyway, in the embedded market RISC is king and it's much, much bigger than desktop.

Mostly dominated by ARM not PowerPC. Prove PowerPC has superior numbers over X86 in annual unit sales.

Before ARM, the "most popular RISC chips on the (embedded) market" was AMD 29K. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Am29000
The embedded market doesn’t worry about legacy software investments.

[HenryCase]

@ HenryCase
If you want to grow the user-base, then you have to bring the price down to a level a majority of (potential) users are willing to pay. Just because the Sam is the lower end of the price range does not mean it's the price that a majority will pay for. Bring cost of ownership down to about 300$ and I'm in -- but I suspect I'm on the lowest end. This will grow the user-base considerably. A price range of 800$ to 2000$ will not do it.

How do you propose they bring down the price down to $300 for a new machine? This isn't a console market where the hardware can be sold at a loss, and mass market hardware is cheap because it's produced in bulk. I'm sure you know this already, which is why I'm surprised that the 'make it cheaper' is constantly brought up as a solution, it's obvious why the price is high.

If you have a solution, then I'm sure they'll be all ears. x86 isn't an option because OS4 hasn't been ported to x86 (and if they do make an x86 port, expect them to pass on the cost to the Amiga user, who won't be able to afford it and then it's goodnight Vienna), and old Mac hardware will only get you so far (haven't seen a massive increase in the MorphOS user base yet).

Must... Not... Bite...

So you have got some self control. Keep it up.

[Karlos]

As an aside, hands up everybody here that would actually buy an x86 version of AmigaOS considering AROS is already on x86 and is completely free?

[the_leander]

So you have got some self control. Keep it up.

Unnecessary.

[the_leander]

As an aside, hands up everybody here that would actually buy an x86 version of AmigaOS considering AROS is already on x86 and is completely free?

10 years ago maybe. Today, with or without AROS... No, not if it were produced by Hyperion.

[bloodline]

As an aside, hands up everybody here that would actually buy an x86 version of AmigaOS considering AROS is already on x86 and is completely free?

You can lose "an x86 version of", and still ask :-/

[Karlos]

You can lose "an x86 version of", and still ask :-/

I dunno, does AROS PPC run legacy 68K (and some legacy PPC) executables?

[SamuraiCrow]

I dunno, does AROS PPC run legacy 68K (and some legacy PPC) executables?

Not without EUAE.  In fact they are trying to fix a serious bug that prevents Sam440 series computers from running Efika software and the other way around as well.  You can run EUAE on either of them but it won't run any faster than the OS 4 or MorphOS versions of EUAE.

At least EUAE and JUAE support x86 JIT though.

[zylesea]

How do you propose they bring down the price down to $300 for a new machine? This isn't a console market where the hardware can be sold at a loss, and mass market hardware is cheap because it's produced in bulk. I'm sure you know this already, which is why I'm surprised that the 'make it cheaper' is constantly brought up as a solution, it's obvious why the price is high.

Make a smart design. Step #1 is chose cpu and features with care. There's plenty ppc to chose from. Freescale has some interesting offers. They will not compete with x86 or ARM at every performance level, but there are chips with reasonable price/performance ratio for small computers that would get used as a general computing device.
Some QorIQs, 86xx, some 85xx. Plus, I highly doubt that an Applied Micro 460 based design needs to be that expensive as Acubes design actually is. The chip itself at least doesn't cost several 100 $$$...