SAM 460 poor performance, high price

[Iggy]

How about a nice deal on a G3 AmigaOne SE in a Commodore Gaming midtower case, red?

How nice?
PM me.

[AmigaNG]

They were? Didnt Alan Redhouse say they were making loss with their AmigaOne? Even when sold at some $1000 price. I have never seen proof Eyetech was doing ok.

"2) How many AmigaOne boards have been sold so far and what is your  opinion on the demand for the current boards and upcoming Micro1A  boards?
Alan: From the publicly available figures it seems  that we have delivered more AmigaOne boards than any other 'open' (ie  not IBM or Apple) PPC-based standard PC form factor board supplier. And  in terms of real sales for real money (which in my view is the ultimate  measure of success anyone can give boards away) we really seem to have no significant competition to date"

FROM= http://amigaworld.net/modules/features/index.php?op=r&cat_id=3&rev_id=41&sort_by

[Piru]

"2) How many AmigaOne boards have been sold so far and what is your  opinion on the demand for the current boards and upcoming Micro1A  boards?

Alan: From the publicly available figures it seems  that we have delivered more AmigaOne boards than any other 'open' (ie  not IBM or Apple) PPC-based standard PC form factor board supplier. And  in terms of real sales for real money (which in my view is the ultimate  measure of success"

http://amigaworld.net/modules/features/index.php?op=r&cat_id=3&rev_id=41&sort_by

Let me pick some highlights from that:

• publicly available figures
• seems

If it was such a great success why didn't Eyetech handle warranties (which were supposedly covered by the profit margin, and was given as reason for the high price!) and why did Eyetech fail? Trying to blame it on MAI doesn't explain it. They were told numerous times that the MAI chipsets were defect.

[qwerty40001]

So indeed it makes sense for OS4 users to pay a lot more for inferior, much slower hardware. Congratulations!

MorphOS is a nice operating system, but is Amiga Os 4.x is made from original sources of Amiga Os 3.1.

You MOSTeam were not honored,   to join your source code with the holy sources of Amiga OS 3.1.

I'm sorry, but when I was young, I used the Amiga OS, not MorphOS.

You have done a good job, but it is not what it should be.

[AmigaNG]

If it was such a great success why didn't Eyetech handle warranties (which were supposedly covered by the profit margin, and was given as reason for the high price!) and why did Eyetech fail? Trying to blame it on MAI doesn't explain it. They were told numerous times that the MAI chipsets were defect.

If it was such a fail, why did they continue to develop a new model, like I said it was mostly likely the level of claims on hardware problems/issue that got made they most likly thought to just pull the plug before they loss all their profits, sad but most likely true.

[Iggy]

Let me pick some highlights from that:

• publicly available figures
• seems

If it was such a great success why didn't Eyetech handle warranties (which were supposedly covered by the profit margin, and was given as reason for the high price!) and why did Eyetech fail? Trying to blame it on MAI doesn't explain it. They were told numerous times that the MAI chipsets were defect.

What does any of this have to do with the SAM460EX? And while the SAM460EX is overpriced, in what fashion is it slow? I would be willing to bet its memory bandwidth is significantly higher than a Pegasos or a Powermac.

At 1.15 Ghz, this is the fastest board Acube has produced.

[Hans_]

Sam460EX is a way to give new HW (instead of clunky old one) to the AmigaOS, Altivec isn't used in Amiga software at the moment (with the sole exeption of mplayer) so it's basically irrelevant.

Actually, Altivec isn't irrelevant. It is used (albeit not as extensively as I'd like) in MiniGL, the avcodec library, and IIRC, some other parts of the OS too. Even if it weren't used at present, it's important enough that Freescale have finally decided to add it to their QorIQ range of processors. About time! It would be nice if Applied Micro could follow suit; their new dual-core PowerPC processor would be a lot more interesting if it included altivec.

The Sam 460ex is meant to be a low-end machine. It may not have altivec, but it's still a nice machine. It's a good step up from the Sam 440 series, and I prefer it over my A1-XE G4. Why? Mainly because of the PCI-Express bus and faster RAM.

Having said that, I'm still getting an A1-X1000.

Hans

[yakumo9275]

What does any of this have to do with the SAM460EX? And while the SAM460EX is overpriced, in what fashion is it slow? I would be willing to bet its memory bandwidth is significantly higher than a Pegasos or a Powermac.

At 1.15 Ghz, this is the fastest board Acube has produced.

it does; Andreas benchmarked it; other than video bus, mac min beat it out.
here

Andreas_Wolf wrote:

Comparison Sam460ex at 1.167 GHz (OS4) vs. Mac mini G4 at 1.5 GHz (MorphOS):

Sam460ex results:

---> VIDEO BUS <---
READ: 72 MB/Sec
WRITE: 261 MB/Sec

Mac mini G4 results (my machine):

---> VIDEO BUS <---
READ: 32 MB/Sec
WRITE: 180 MB/Sec

[zylesea]

MorphOS is a nice operating system, but is Amiga Os 4.x is made from original sources of Amiga Os 3.1.

What are teh old sources worth when the resulting OS performs less and doesn't offer as many features and has a worse backward compability?

I'm sorry, but when I was young, I used the Amiga OS, not MorphOS.

The older I become the more experience I collect and gain more ability to critically review long gone things...
Fond feelings are nice but I reality is something different. And to tell you what:*if you critically view your fond feelings (well, don't mix fond feelings with experience and hsitory), you can very much enjoy the present as it is. At leat *I* do.

[zylesea]

"2) How many AmigaOne boards have been sold so far and what is your  opinion on the demand for the current boards and upcoming Micro1A  boards?
Alan: From the publicly available figures it seems  that we have delivered more AmigaOne boards than any other 'open' (ie  not IBM or Apple) PPC-based standard PC form factor board supplier. And  in terms of real sales for real money (which in my view is the ultimate  measure of success anyone can give boards away) we really seem to have no significant competition to date"

FROM= http://amigaworld.net/modules/features/index.php?op=r&cat_id=3&rev_id=41&sort_by

Alan Redhouse: "on schedule and rocking"
Any more words needed regarding his business credibility?

[Piru]

What does any of this have to do with the SAM460EX?

It's a response to a sub-thread in this topic, mainly regarding generic profitability of custom PowerPC HW. It's not unusual to get borderline OT on a.org

And while the SAM460EX is overpriced, in what fashion is it slow?

It is slow for the price. It is roughly performing like a pegasos II G4 in CPU intensive tasks, assuming you ignore altivec.

I would be willing to bet its memory bandwidth is significantly higher than a Pegasos or a Powermac.

The memory performance is better, yes.

At 1.15 Ghz, this is the fastest board Acube has produced.

No question about that. It's just that faster powerpc HW was produced 7 years ago. You can get faster systems for fraction (literally!) of the price.

[cha05e90]

Nice one. Already 9 pages of the usual bash-fest. As I suppose the thread was started exactly for this purpose, I would say it succeeded.  :-(

[Iggy]

Well at $1025 US dollars with AOS4 bit w/o shipping it is a bit rich for my tastes. The on board video is nice for basic tasks that don't require 3D.

My next purchases are still going to be a Powerbook and a G5 Powermac.

I can probably outfit both of those for the price of the SAM469EX board.
Still, I object to the SAM460EX as being called slow, its just way overpriced.

[itix]

"2) How many AmigaOne boards have been sold so far and what is your  opinion on the demand for the current boards and upcoming Micro1A  boards?
Alan: From the publicly available figures it seems  that we have delivered more AmigaOne boards than any other 'open' (ie  not IBM or Apple) PPC-based standard PC form factor board supplier. And  in terms of real sales for real money (which in my view is the ultimate  measure of success anyone can give boards away) we really seem to have no significant competition to date"

FROM= http://amigaworld.net/modules/features/index.php?op=r&cat_id=3&rev_id=41&sort_by

http://www.amigaworld.net/modules/news/article.php?storyid=2339

"In fact as it stands today it would have been far cheaper for us to have given all current board owners $500 each not to buy a board and walked away from the whole Amiga scene in early 2001."

"Secondly the 'Amiga Enthusiast' market does not generate sufficient profit for us to be able to indulge ourselves (in reality myself - all our former 'Amiga' staff and most of me are off doing proper revenue-earning things unconnected with the Amiga Enthusiast market) in non-essential time consuming activities. Even these 20 answers are being typed on my laptop on holiday!"

If it was such a fail, why did they continue to develop a new model, like I said it was mostly likely the level of claims on hardware problems/issue that got made they most likly thought to just pull the plug before they loss all their profits, sad but most likely true.

They didnt. Eyetech went out of the business when they could not fund development of new board on their own. Eyetech only succeeded by selling rebranded Teron boards to Amiga market. Boards which failed miserably on so called "Linux market".

[jorkany]

If it was such a fail, why did they continue to develop a new model

If you're talking about Eyetech, all they were doing was taking whatever model of Teron MAI happened to ship over and labeling it an "AmigaOne". Who knows why MAI went through so many versions of their evaluation boards - if they hadn't gone out of business you could ask them.

Why did you even bring up Eyetech in this thread anyway?

[Argo]

In number crunching SAM 460 is barely as fast as the Pegasos2 G4@1GHz if you don't account for the altivec. If altivec is taken into account then G4@1GHz runs circles around the system. Granted, Sam460 has a faster memory interface, but the number crunching figures are quite disappointing.

Not doubting you, but do you care to toss out some numbers on this? I'd just like to know what size gap we're talking about here in performance.