So where did the PPC amiga thing come from?

[runequester]

Im guessing he's referring to the PPC stuff thats already out there.
My wife's laptop runs a G4 and still works perfectly fine for the stuff she uses it for.

[Piru]

1995 is when AROS was started so there was already a start for x86 Amiga-like OS

In 1995 AROS wasn't even close that could be called an Operating System. Back then AROS was a hack running on top of X.

Claiming that it would have been potential OS for some kind of x86 Amiga is worst kind of historical revisionism. AROS was years away even from AmigaOS 1.x kind of functionality. IIRC it took something like 4-5 years for AROS to actually boot on a x86 system natively.

[Hammer]

That's not really relevant, those are for running typically DOS apps on the amiga without going through emulation, and has nothing to do with being "real roots" of Amiga at all. Same type of cards also existed for Macs and Atari, for example.

IIRC, Commodore engineers were looking at going PA-RISC after m68k, PowerPC at the time did not exist yet.

PowerPC was introduced sometime in 1992.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC
"In 1991, the PowerPC was just one facet of a larger alliance among these three companies".

[Hammer]

That's not really relevant, those are for running typically DOS apps on the amiga without going through emulation, and has nothing to do with being "real roots" of Amiga at all. Same type of cards also existed for Macs and Atari, for example.

IIRC, Commodore engineers were looking at going PA-RISC after m68k, PowerPC at the time did not exist yet.

1992 = PowerPC

[bloodline]

In 1995 AROS wasn't even close that could be called an Operating System. Back then AROS was a hack running on top of X.

Claiming that it would have been potential OS for some kind of x86 Amiga is worst kind of historical revisionism. AROS was years away even from AmigaOS 1.x kind of functionality. IIRC it took something like 4-5 years for AROS to actually boot on a x86 system natively.

IIRC, AROS something of a joke until Aaron Digula set out the initial goals after publishing his RFC in '97... Then Michal Shultz got x86 native booting sometime in '99, not long after I joined the project, but even then intuition didn't work properly and it was some months (in early 2000) before AROS would boot to intuition, with a nice mouse pointer (serial mice only at that time) and a window to play with...

[Hammer]

Allow me to elaborate.

Back in the day, we were all hailing the 68060 as the holy grail, but let's not forget that it actually arrived late and with lower performance compared to the Pentium (particularly in floating point terms). It was clear to everybody back then that the 68K was falling behind. When apple introduced the first PowerMacs, people started talking about the possibility of making the same jump (the PA RISC idea pretty much died with Commodore). Amongst those people were Phase5.

All?

Due to cheap hardware cost, I switch to Intel Pentium Classic 150Mhz after my Amiga 3000/030 @25Mhz.

The PowerPC was seen as an obvious choice back then as RISC was still seen as the future (which indeed it was, but just not in the way it was envisaged), it shared the same native endian representation as 68K, supported the same basic datatypes (except for long double).

During that time, there are RISC processors i.e. from ACE camp it's MIPS or DEC Alpha.

From Amiga mags, Newtek(?) was promoting DEC Alpha(?) based Raptor workstations.

[Hammer]

I certainly do. By the time that a move to PPC was considered the 68K was a dead issue. X86 was still pretty primitive and thank god the didn't go to PA RISC.

Even now, PPC is capable of producing competitive, competent performance.

C= Amiga PA-RISC might lead to C= Amiga Intel Itanium.

Intel Itanium was designed to replace Intel's own X86 CPUs, but AMD64 (X86-64) hammered Intel Itanium in X86 software protection and sales volume. Also, AMD64 hammered any shift towards non-X86 64bit ISA e.g. PowerPC 970.

The battle is between two large OEM/ODM clone armies of X86 vs ARM. Other CPU ISAs will be caught in the crossfire.

[Cool_amigaN]

I certainly do. By the time that a move to PPC was considered the 68K was a dead issue. X86 was still pretty primitive and thank god the didn't go to PA RISC.

Even now, PPC is capable of producing competitive, competent performance.

This is such a LOL statement in so many ways!

[kolla]

PowerPC still has a market in network equipment, routers and switches by Cisco and Juniper, for example.

[psxphill]

PowerPC still has a market in network equipment, routers and switches by Cisco and Juniper, for example.

It's used in all three of the current generation of games consoles as well.
Although the ps3/360 cpu is a step back, like the pentium 4 it's designed for high clock speed at all costs.

[itix]

Not interested in yet another thread of "PPC is dead" gibbering. We've all been there enough times.

What I am wondering about is.. what is the absolute earliest talk and from who, about amiga going powerPC ?

In other words.. where did it start?

It was a decision made by Amiga.

Amiga goes Power PC (TM)

During his key note address held in Los Angeles at the Video Toaster Expo, Petro Tyschtschenko, CEO and President of Amiga Technologies officially announced the Power PC to be the processor used in the future generation of Amiga computers.

The first POWER AMIGA will be available 1st quarter 1997 and will feature the Power PC 604 RISC CPU. Further models will be available later in the entry-level, as well as in the mid-range.
(...)
The development of the native RISC AmigaOS will be made internally at Amiga Technologies.
(...)
More good news for all Amiga users: The Power PC technology will not only be available for new Power Amigas. Thanks to a close co-operation between Amiga Technologies and Phase V, a German turbo board manufacturer, a full range of Power PC boards will also be available for the A1200, A3000 and A4000 series.
(...)
First Power PC boards for current Amigas will be available before end of 1996.
(...)

That was it.

[cha05e90]

PowerPC still has a market in network equipment, routers and switches by Cisco and Juniper, for example.

And they are still very useful components in automotive enviroments (Renesas, Freescale, ...). Our company sells thousands of PowerPC derived systems to our customers. They usually drive around with our products. :-)

[cha05e90]

It was a decision made by Amiga.

Thanks, I wasn't able to find this link - but I knew I read this somewhere...

[Zac67]

@itix
Excellent find! While reading this I think I can even remember parts from it.

[actung_bab]

It's kind of strange when Commodore was making x86 boards for Amiga's before PPC ever came along.   Amiga's real roots are more x86 than PPC.

Thats a spin you put on it amiga as in jay miner never went x 86
The commodore Brand may be loved by people but there biz plan sucked
mac also went to clones nearly killed them same with Commdore pcs i seen one
in shop looked yuk and sold poorly no one saw the point of it was just like ever other
Pc of the time hmmmmm reminds me of today

[actung_bab]

Overly simplified: It started with the guys that later brought us the Pegasos and MorphOS...

they might been paid to work on software but was phase 5 that did funded the event
also warp up programs as well they where more system freindly but did love quake ppc that was power up