You do have an entire processor core in the A1X1K doing nothing clipping along at 2GHz.
Which still makes it a massive pain to keep latency down to the level the XMOS can without hand-writing asm with no OS support, and locking yourself into a situation where your code won't work whenever someone cooks up another use for that core.
Trying to do multi-threaded IO on a PPC core with the kind of latency the XMOS can achieve, for example, would be a rather impressive demonstration, if it's possible at all. They're not designed for that at all.
Throughput is another matter - there it'd totally thrash the XMOS chips.
It is absolutely telling. It tells us that people aren't actually interested in this enough to start hacking.
All it tells us is that people aren't interested in hacking Amiga-specific projects with the standalone units. I'm in that category. I want to play with it more, but what interests me is exploring what I can do with the integration, not really the standalone units.
You're right that you don't need XC, but you're wasting your time and making trouble for your self for no good reason by ignoring it. You'd also be shutting yourself off from using a large base of library code the Xcore community has developed and put out for others to use. The ASM documentation sucks, you'll find yourself on the forums begging XMos engineers for help.
The asm documentation coupled with assembler output from the XC compiler is more than sufficient. The channel extensions are simply and straightforward, and I had no problems finding out how to do it in asm. Have you actually looked at it? I have. It's a tiny amount of work.
As for "shutting yourself off", if that's so critical I doubt you'll find many people here who don't *have* other hardware if they absolutely need it, but even if not, converting XC source is not generally a lot of work - the syntax extensions are tiny.
And the "good reason" is to avoid a proprietary compiler and tools that aren't available everywhere you might want to use them.
Good for you, and you'll not have access to the simulator and code profiling tools.
The simulator can be run from the command line. No need to run Eclipse. Profiling can be done with the GNU toolchain, no need to run Eclipse (and/or you can do it with instruction traces from the simulator).
Have you even bothered looking at the command line tools available?
Though some of the tools including the simulator is still closed source so there you would be stuck with running them on a Windows/Mac/Linux box unless they're getting it ported.
But who are we kidding here, you've never used this stuff and you'll never do any of the things you mentioned in the previous paragraph. Haven't we had this conversation before on that other site... like a year ago?
I've used it. But I'm one of those that don't have all that much interest in the standalone units, at least not enough to compete with the far too many other projects I have ongoing.
And yes, we've had this conversation before, and we still don't have the X1000 and so like many others I still don't have a platform that'll make it interesting for me to invest time in it.
When I have one, I'll play with it. Whether or not anything "useful" will come of it, we'll have to wait and see, but I'm not buying an X1000 for productivity, but for fun - otherwise there'd be no way I'd be willing to spend that much money on it.
