ARM for the future?

[commodorejohn]

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.

So, uh, what Amiga operating system do you prefer? Amix? Minimalist demoscene bootloaders?

[Iggy]

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

I can get behind that. I have no legacy hardware and use MorphOS exclusively, but I still consider myself an amigan.

[TheBilgeRat]

The phenomenon is purely market economics in action. No great corporate conspiracies are involved here.

None other than the normal type of corporate behavior that involves destroying the competition by any means necessary and delivering the least amount of innovation at the maximum price point that the market will bear.

[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.

[nicholas]

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

So who are you then?

[Iggy]

None other than the normal type of corporate behavior that involves destroying the competition by any means necessary and delivering the least amount of innovation at the maximum price point that the market will bear.

Now that's not an unfair statement. Intel and Microsoft have both played at that game. The SEC has investigated plenty of that behavior.

[runequester]

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

As of January of this year, a total of 15 billion ARM processors have shipped. I think they are doing pretty well.
 
For the majority of people, life is about embedded devices, not clunky PC's.
 
Whether microsoft can actually adapt to that will be interesting.

[Iggy]

On Microsoft, has this occurred to anyone?
If Microsoft supports ARM with Windows 8 and Amiga NG OS' are ported to ARM, it may be possible using virtualization software to run Windows and an Amigiod OS simultaneously on the same computer.

[fishy_fiz]

I ported both dosbox and bochs to aros, so have used windows on an amigoid system more than a few times already     Sure it's not virtualised, but still more than usable. Without doing any specific benchmarks Id hazzard a guess at bochs being somewhere between a high end 486 and low end p1, and dosbox being somewhere between a high end p1 and low end p2 on my aros box. Dosbox has a jit style emulation for x86 targets, so is quite nippy.

Backtracking a few posts though,...... x86 being at the highest price point the market will bare ? Huh? x86 is by an absolute mile the best bang per buck cpu on the market.

[the_leander]

x86 is fine for performance, and it's true that it's come a long way since the 8086, it's still ugly as hell under the hood - the "four sort-of-but-not-really general-purpose registers" approach was obnoxious back in the day, and it's downright inexcusable now, with not only modern architectures but even the original 68000 providing a full complement of interchangeable registers. And it hasn't improved, either - they've just kept expanding the register width. Granted, a compiler can work out a good approach for shuffling values into and out of the registers, but for those of us who like assembler, it's pure aggravation.

1994 was just calling, they want their technical info back.

From wikipedia:

With the advent of the 32-bit 80386 processor, the 16-bit general-purpose registers, base registers, index registers, instruction pointer, and FLAGS register, but not the segment registers, were expanded to 32 bits. This is represented by prefixing an "E" (for Extended) to the register names in x86 assembly language. Thus, the AX register corresponds to the lowest 16 bits of the new 32-bit EAX register, SI corresponds to the lowest 16 bits of ESI, and so on. The general-purpose registers, base registers, and index registers can all be used as the base in addressing modes, and all of those registers except for the stack pointer can be used as the index in addressing modes.

Two new segment registers (FS and GS) were added. With a greater number of registers, instructions and operands, the machine code format was expanded. To provide backward compatibility, segments with executable code can be marked as containing either 16-bit or 32-bit instructions. Special prefixes allow inclusion of 32-bit instructions in a 16-bit segment or vice versa.

With the 80486 a floating-point processing unit (FPU) was added, with eight 80-bit wide registers.[17]

With the Pentium II, eight 64-bit MMX integer registers were added (MMX0..MMX7, which share lower bits with the 80-bit-wide FPU stack (st(0)..st(7))).[17] With the Pentium III, a 32-bit Streaming SIMD Extension (SSE) control/status register (MXCSR) and eight 128-bit SSE floating point registers (XMM0..XMM7) were added.

And that again increased with the advent of X64 (AMD Athlon64 onwards).

[commodorejohn]

Okay, my mistake. Are they really general-purpose, though? Looks from that excerpt like it's more just the gradual integration of specialized coprocessor hardware into the CPU than actual additional registers.

I'll still take either the 68k or ARM for assembler programming, in any case.

[the_leander]

Now that's funny!
RISC was supposed to be big.

In a sense they became what everyone suspected they would since at the heart of any modern X86/x86-64 processor is a risc core hooked up to some logic that provides compatibility with the x86 instruction set.

[the_leander]

Okay, my mistake. Are they really general-purpose, though? Looks from that excerpt like it's more just the gradual integration of specialized coprocessor hardware into the CPU than actual additional registers.

Well the excerpt is from here although I imagine there are much more technical resources out there or linked to within the article that would be better suited to answering your questions.

I'll still take either the 68k or ARM for assembler programming, in any case.

What about MIPS?

[commodorejohn]

Haven't tried it...

[vidarh]

1994 was just calling, they want their technical info back.

From wikipedia:

Most of that is still mostly consistent with what you were replying to: A small number of "almost but not quite" general purpose registers for integer ops and logic.

And that again increased with the advent of X64 (AMD Athlon64 onwards).

... but only for 64 bit code. And you still carry along the whole messy old legacy. x86_64 is *much* better, it's almost tolerable. But it's still far uglier than m68k from an assembly programming point of view. Not that that matters for most people these days, though, since there aren't many of us left that actually write any reasonable amount of asm (I mainly do for my compiler backends).

[nicholas]

Most of that is still mostly consistent with what you were replying to: A small number of "almost but not quite" general purpose registers for integer ops and logic.



... but only for 64 bit code. And you still carry along the whole messy old legacy. x86_64 is *much* better, it's almost tolerable. But it's still far uglier than m68k from an assembly programming point of view. Not that that matters for most people these days, though, since there aren't many of us left that actually write any reasonable amount of asm (I mainly do for my compiler backends).

Everything is ugly compared to 68k assembly.