Mainstream HW vs. Custom Niche HW

[Iggy]

I've seen benchmark of the Cortex A15 @ 1.7GHz that give it parity with the G4 (not the G5), so I'm not sure about the benchmarks you're quoting.

But don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of the ARM ISA.
And once it moves to 64 bits things are really going to take off.

BTW - I haven't killed anybody lately (that I'll admit to). :lol:

[som99]

I've seen benchmark of the Cortex A15 @ 1.7GHz that give it parity with the G4 (not the G5), so I'm not sure about the benchmarks you're quoting.

But don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of the ARM ISA.
And once it moves to 64 bits things are really going to take off.

BTW - I haven't killed anybody lately (that I'll admit to). :lol:

I do not know how liable and conclusive the benchmark I found was but reading what is tested it seems fair enough for a rough est.
Tho im happy to get pointed in the right direction

The program I looked at was Geekbench 2 and the tests used is the following:

Code: [Select]

Integer Performace
Integer benchmarks measure integer performance by performing a variety of processor-intensive tasks that make heavy use of integer operations. None of the integer benchmarks perform any file I/O in order to isolate the work done to just the processor and the memory subsystem.

Blowfish encrypts and decrypts memory using the Blowfish algorithm.
bzip2 Compress and bzip2 Decompress compress and decompress a text file in memory using libbzip2.
Image Compress and Image Decompress compress and decompress an image in memory using libjpeg.
Lua executes a script written in the Lua Programming Language. The Lua script is a prime number sieve that finds all prime numbers below 200,000.
Floating Point Performance
Floating point benchmarks measure floating point performance by performing a variety of processor-intensive tasks that make heavy use of floating-point operations. None of the floating point benchmarks perform any file I/O in order to isolate the work done to just the processor and the memory subsystem.

Mandelbrot renders the Mandelbrot set.
Dot Product computes the dot product of two vectors.
LU Decomposition computes the LU decomposition of a 128x128 matrix.
Primality Test performs the first few iterations of the Lucas-Lehmer test on a particular Mersenne number to determine whether or not it is prime.
Sharpen Image and Blur Image apply a convolution filter to an image in memory. These filters are similar to the filters found in graphics editors like Adobe Photoshop.
Memory Performance
Memory benchmarks measure not only the performance of the underlying memory hardware, but also the performance of the functions provided by the operating system used to manipulate memory.

Read Sequential loads values from memory into registers.
Write Sequential stores values from registers into memory.
Stdlib Allocate allocates and deallocates blocks of memory of varying sizes using functions from the C Standard Library.
Stdlib Write writes a constant value to a block of memory using functions from the C Standard Library.
Stdlib Copy copies values from one block of memory to another using functions from the C Standard Library.
Stream Performance
Stream benchmarks measure both floating point performance and sustained memory bandwidth. Geekbench 2 uses benchmarks based on the STREAM benchmarks developed John D. McCalpin. None of the stream benchmarks perform any file I/O in order to isolate the work done to just the processor and the memory subsystem.

Stream Copy computes a(i) = b(i), where a and a b are arrays.
Stream Scale computes a(i) = q * b(i), where a and b are arrays, and q is a constant.
Stream Add computes a(i) = b(i) + c(i), where a, b, and c are arrays.
Stream Triad computes a(i) = b(i) + q * c(i), where a, b, and c are arrays, and q is a constant.
 But ill take your word for it and agree until I find better benchmarks

The move to 64 bit ARM is not to far away now, im happily waiting for a SoC to play with in the future

Also im glad I did not get killed today (as far as I know im not on anyones list yet)

[Iggy]

@som99

Yeah, the jump in performance over the A9 (much greater then I expected) has me pretty jazzed.
I've been considering buying a Chromebook, but only if I can get it to run a Linux distro like Ubuntu.

ChromeOS' requirement of always having an internet connection bugs me. There's always going to be somewhere where that won't work.

A15 quad cores should be real killers.
Glad to see something better then the Krait introduced.

I just wish the development boards didn't cost twice what a quad core A9 board cost.

And, btw, not only wasn't I on anybody's list to be killed today, but it looks like Mother Nature has decided to spare me too (should I tempt fate by posting that this early?)

[TheBilgeRat]

:confused:

I wasn't talking about numbers of users, neither people's choice of forums, or the difference in activity on various web forums spread out in the community. Amiga.org and AmigaWorld.net has more activity than MorphZone.org, much thanks to more registered users and more "IRC-style" posting.

Edit:
To answer your question: I suppose we are on *all* those forums (and many others as well, there are many local forums in the world as well, and there is no law saying you are required to do a lot of postings online just because you run a certain OS)! Who cares?

careful, t - you'll attract the rabid dogs!

[Iggy]

woof!

[takemehomegrandma]

few others who failed to deny some pretty accurate guesses by Andreas Wolf

Got a link?

[MadLensman]

Chromebook with Ubuntu.....
 
Had a novel one in a couple weeks ago at the shop, the OS on the CB wasn't playing, neither was any of the hardware other than the screen booting and displaying a horrific mish-mash of corrupted GPU output. The reason:
 
Me: "Did this happen after a particular change in the system?"
 
Customer: "Yes, but nothing I'd done, nothing major, I just tried to install the latest Ubuntu...."
 
And that m'lud is when I hit him..... :insane:

[haywirepc]

Can someone explain WHY they have not supported G5 yet? I have never understood how morphos works on g3 and g4 but not g5. G5 would allow a huge increase in cpu speeds and performance. Maybe its just because I never programmed for power pc... But I don't get why this has been a big issue... Or why there has been reluctance on the part of the morphos developers to do. Dosn't seem logical to me to ignore the fastest cpu your os was designed for...?

Steven

[bloodline]

Can someone explain WHY they have not supported G5 yet? I have never understood how morphos works on g3 and g4 but not g5. G5 would allow a huge increase in cpu speeds and performance. Maybe its just because I never programmed for power pc... But I don't get why this has been a big issue... Or why there has been reluctance on the part of the morphos developers to do. Dosn't seem logical to me to ignore the fastest cpu your os was designed for...?

Steven

Isn't the G5 little endian only? That would be a show stopper for MOS and AOS4... AROS would be fine though

[alexh]

Isn't the G5 little endian only?

Nope, it's Big Endian only. Where other PPC's are pseudo Bi-Endian.

[runequester]

I guess the question about G5's is... it'll give some more machines to use but what can you actually do on "amiga" that requires that level of hardware?

[Crumb]

I guess the question about G5's is... it'll give some more machines to use but what can you actually do on "amiga" that requires that level of hardware?

Encode audio/video, render graphics, play games, run emulators, compile big projects...

I would prefer that MorphOS was firstly ported to G5, multicore & 64bits support could be added later and in the switch to 64bits work could start in compiling everything for boring little-endian architectures. MorphOS uses IPTR pointers like AROS in its sourcecode and drivers apart it shouldn't take 5 years to port it to another architecture if you lose Trance, it could start its life internally in x86-64 hosted on another OS just like AROS did to avoid spending too much time on drivers for hardware that won't be available in the final release, and when it's more or less stable then focus on drivers.

As Iggy has pointed out the main problem would be lack of software, a ppc emulation box containing a full PPC-MorphOS could be used for that, there are several opensource ppc emulators like qemu, sheepshaver or pearpc.

[haywirepc]

Still a great question and still not answered. Big endian. Small endian. Why not g5? Why not multicore support? And the bigger question to ALL amiga NG os devlelopers is this: Why not SMP? The goal of os 3.x api long now has been duplicated. How to write extenstions to that api to allow multi-core.

They all sleep on this very important question. Its SAD.

Yes hard to implement in current api. Someone must say that now so many machines have 4, 8, or even 16 cores. And all amiga os systems ignore this. Someone needs to write a new api.

[OlafS3]

Do not give up hope and wait and see :-)

[Crumb]

Still a great question and still not answered. Big endian. Small endian. Why not g5? Why not multicore support? And the bigger question to ALL amiga NG os devlelopers is this: Why not SMP? The goal of os 3.x api long now has been duplicated. How to write extenstions to that api to allow multi-core.

G5 is not ruled out but there are more important things that need all their attention. On MorphOS hardware is both available & cheap and reasonably powerful, all Amiga systems right now lack new apps, that's the main concern, not hardware support.

I would love a G5 version but my G4 Mac Mini runs very smoothly and so does my powerbook. If you haven't tried MorphOS yet you can do it right now if you want, you don't have to wait for any G5 version, it's very fast right now even on old G4s. If you find a G4 with nVidia graphic card you can reflash a Radeon more or less easily, there are tons of tutorials out there.

The problem for all AmigaOSes right now is lack of new powerful apps, not hardware support.

They all sleep on this very important question. Its SAD.

They are working on other important features like wireless support, R300 support, iBook support, improving the bundled apps, killing bugs... agreed that development goes slowly but I don't think there are many developers capable of doing that kind of job.

Yes hard to implement in current api. Someone must say that now so many machines have 4, 8, or even 16 cores. And all amiga os systems ignore this. Someone needs to write a new api.

Krashan explained that it wouldn't be difficult to add support for a new type of tasks focused on number crunching/memory access that could run on the other cores without causing any loss of compatibility, it would be some kind of AMP.

[itix]

Can someone explain WHY they have not supported G5 yet? I have never understood how morphos works on g3 and g4 but not g5. G5 would allow a huge increase in cpu speeds and performance. Maybe its just because I never programmed for power pc... But I don't get why this has been a big issue... Or why there has been reluctance on the part of the morphos developers to do. Dosn't seem logical to me to ignore the fastest cpu your os was designed for...?

Laptops. MorphOS already supports 6 different desktops from 400 MHz Efika to 1.8 GHz PowerMacs but only one laptop.