One unified OS for the future?

[OlafS3]

Thomas_Richter,

I don't know your background in the hardware industry, but I have several people in the companies I have worked for saying that the engineering divisions are putting their bets on ARM. There are ARM for mobile, ARM for the workstation and ARM for the servers. It isn't limited to mobile or embedded applications, and hasn't been for about 5 years. If engineering divisions of major companies like MS and Dell are saying to place your bets with ARM, then perhaps a major shift is coming in the next few years. With mobile devices being the norm, it may end up spreading back into the workstation and server markets, and the server market is already getting some promising designs. AMD is selling society compatible Opteron-A ARM kits for developers, Qualcomm and Nvidia are ramping up production with high performance ARM chips. Why not get ahead of the curve, and stay on top of the game?

x86 is very costs ineffective because it doesn't scale down well, Intel Atoms consume on average 20-30% more power while offering a diminishing return on power as clock speed scales up. I have a Nocona Xeon workstation at my side that besides being louder and running hotter than modern chips, does roughly as well due to having massive RAM ( My machine has 16GB ) and UW-SCSI, which is still very fast when using 15kRPM disks. The only applications it sucks are are those that are quad+ core aware, it has dual Xeons and for NetBSD usage does very well, but I simply don't use it because it is loud and hot when I have the option of using my TK1 based board from work, which is quiet and has better graphics performance.

"bet on something" is for private people making bets on horse races, on business you "do not bet" but make predictions and try to leave open chances to turn direction if prediction fails. We all know of the bets that were lost, from Commodore starting up to what we are discussing now. So if changing direction it would make more sense to have something portable like Aros so you can support both X86 and ARM and are on the safe side.

And if you talk about companies, there are a lot of companies that set on the wrong horse and do not exist anymore. Not a very wise strategy.

[zylesea]

Show me an ARM that competes well with an i7. AmigaOS is not some tablet OS. If a switch away from where it is now is justified then with a significant increase of computing power. Sure, an Atom is rather crappy, but who speaks about that stuff? i5 or i7 is whats' in remotely normal computers these days. And to that level ARM scales up rather poorely.
Since years ARM is said to soonly enter/roll up the desktop and server market... Reminds me somehow to "two more weeks". x64 will stay usual and up to date for quite a couple of years (I'd say at least 15 - 20). Chances are that ARM will chime in, but it will not abandon x64 quickly (i.e. 15 - 20 years).

[wawrzon]

showme amigalike os thar would take advantageof all the i7 cores.

[guest11527]

Not many software devs are able or willing to create software for hardware that costs several thousand dollars and is pretty outdated.

Pretty much. But if you want to attract developers, you should ideally pick a hardware platform the developer already has (x86) and a license model that attracts developers (open source). Many of the small platforms are successful with this strategy (Arduino comes to my mind). But this route isn't chosen. Instead, the folks still try to port the CBM model (closed source, custom hardware) to the 21st century, and that's not going to work. It's not going to work, regardless of whether the CPU is Arm or PPC. I don't have that at home, and I don't have experience with the hardware.

[guest11527]

I don't know your background in the hardware industry, but I have several people in the companies I have worked for saying that the engineering divisions are putting their bets on ARM.  

"Bet on" isn't quite the right word. "Support ARM", maybe, but for which reason? For what I know, it's more that vendors become more and more afraid of an intel monopoly now that AMD is more and more falling behind, so the industry is checking options for an exit strategy from intel, just in case. My personal best bet is that we'll still have to deal with x86 for quite a while, certainly with other options depending on applications. Actually, most microprocessors are used in embedded applications where you don't see them or notice them, so ARM is certainly not unimportant. What's probably more likely is that computing is moving away from classical desktops and notebooks, and for that reason maybe ARM has some future, but in a different way than you may consider.  

x86 is very costs ineffective because it doesn't scale down well, Intel Atoms consume on average 20-30% more power while offering a diminishing return on power as clock speed scales up.

The intel atom is, in my opinion, indeed not the right choice for "small & embedded" because it carries so much legacy cruft around, and because it isn't as customizable as ARM, but that's not quite the market where AmigaOs (or whatever it might be called) could compete. It's an end-user application and not an embedded application.

[guest11527]

showme amigalike os thar would take advantageof all the i7 cores.

Tell me what "Amiga like" actually is supposed to mean. Because I don't have an immediate answer. Anyhow, an i7 has even a convincing single-thread performance, if this is what you mean.

[Blinx123]

Pretty much. But if you want to attract developers, you should ideally pick a hardware platform the developer already has (x86) and a license model that attracts developers (open source). Many of the successful small platforms are successful with this strategy (Arduino comes to my mind). But this route isn't chosen. Instead, the folks still try to port the CBM model (closed source, custom hardware) to the 21st century, and that's not going to work. It's not going to work, regardless of whether the CPU is Arm or PPC. I don't have that at home, and I don't have experience with the hardware.

Huh? You do realize that Arduino is pretty much a good example of the the kind of platform/business model we (TeamBlackFox and I) are talking about, right?

The beauty of ARM is also compatibility. Whereas an Amiga NG OS on x86 would require porting thousands of device drivers for all sorts of hardware, there aren't anywhere near that much different components in the ARM world.


@zylesea
Can you get an i5/i7 for 50 bucks (board included)?
Unless you can build an OS that is better, more stable and more compatible than anything else out there, people won't even bother to create another partition on their HDD.

The x86 market is simply too crowded. Everyone and his dog is pushing his distro. A hobbyist market simply doesn't stand much of a chance on there. Certainly not as much as on cheap hardware even people in developing countries can afford.

[zylesea]

@zylesea
Can you get an i5/i7 for 50 bucks (board included)?
Unless you can build an OS that is better, more stable and more compatible than anything else out there, people won't even bother to create another partition on their HDD.

The x86 market is simply too crowded. Everyone and his dog is pushing his distro. A hobbyist market simply doesn't stand much of a chance on there. Certainly not as much as on cheap hardware even people in developing countries can afford.

Not 50 bucks, but serious computing power for still not that much money. At least that's what *I* want. My G4 systems are okay, but I would very much welcome another performance step (like from 68k to ppc). From current available ppc to i7 that would be such a leap forward.

And it's not about ruling the world. As it is with MorphOS today this micro ecosystem is doing surprisingly well. I doubt the user number would decrease that much when more powerful hardware would be available. It's not about challenging Windows or OS X. It's not about millions of users, but a few thousand.
And it wouldn#t be just another "pushed distro" as the usually pushed distro is just another Linux which wouldn't be the case for MorphOS x64.

[zylesea]

showme amigalike os thar would take advantageof all the i7 cores.

i can only speak for MorphOS, but one of the rationals for an ISA switch (and breaking compability) would be to introduce SMP.

[Blinx123]

Not 50 bucks, but serious computing power for still not that much money. At least that's what *I* want. My G4 systems are okay, but I would very much welcome another performance step (like from 68k to ppc). From current available ppc to i7 that would be such a leap forward.

And it's not about ruling the world. As it is with MorphOS today this micro ecosystem is doing surprisingly well. I doubt the user number would decrease that much when more powerful hardware would be available. It's not about challenging Windows or OS X. It's not about millions of users, but a few thousand.
And it wouldn#t be just another "pushed distro" as the usually pushed distro is just another Linux which wouldn't be the case for MorphOS x64.

I didn't say anything about ruling the world. But the fact of the matter is: it's easier to get (computer iliterate) people to spend 80-100 bucks on a small machine than it is to convince them to partition or possibly reformat their existing computer HDD.

[amigadave]

Lots of interesting answers and opinions being expressed in this thread, and almost zero trolling or baiting of members who disagree with each other, so thank all of you for that.

As a strong supporter of AmigaOS4.x and a primary supporter of MorphOS3.x in the USA, it almost pains me to write the following.  I think that many users in our community who can look at the "Big Picture" objectively realize that AROS is the only real choice we have for moving forward toward more modern systems without limitations or "work-around" compromises.  If the goal is to have a platform that works like the original Commodore Amiga in many ways, but has already made the break away from several undesirable design decisions contained in the original API that have caused problems, or held back progress, AROS appears to be the clear leader in making good choices for future development.  What AROS lacks is organization and some of the polish of the user interface, that might be present in the other NG Amiga choices.  If AROS had more community support and could gain more programmers working to complete more of the features and functionality of AROS, or if it could gain more programmers creating native AROS software, maybe it would begin to emerge as  the leading choice for NG users?  The split of our community into 4 parts seriously slows down the speed at which software can be created, or the number of available programmers willing to work on just one of the 4 remaining platform choices.

It is still unknown if AROS, or any of it's variants, will succeed in reaching it's goals, but to me is seems to be making better progress the last couple of years.  I have already expressed many times my hope that if/when AmigaOS4.x and MorphOS3.x reach a point in their development where they decide to switch to different architectures, or if/when they lose momentum and start to fail as a organization, that they would dissolve and the programmers would join forces with the AROS developers, so we could have a unified platform again, at least unified for the NG Amiga users wanting something different than 68k Amiga hardware and software (I know that this is unlikely to ever happen, but I can still hope for unification and faster progress through combined efforts).

The keys to survival and possible success in growing the number of users wanting a NG Amiga inspired platform in our community are:

1.  Better tools for ease of software creation.  Software availability can make one platform a clear winner, but only when the difference in the amount and quality of software for that platform is far above the other similar platform choices.  None of our current NG Amiga platform choices have a significant advantage yet.  For example, when the OWB (later renamed Odyssey) web browser had reached a level of functionality and stability that far exceeded any other browser for Amiga & Amiga inspired platforms, it made many users take notice of the one platform it had been developed for, and had them asking for it to be ported to their platform of choice.  It may have even been successful in getting a few users to become MorphOS users, who had not previously considered becoming a MorphOS user.  I know this because I was the person promoting MorphOS at several AmiWest Show over the last 4 to 5 years, and saw the change of opinions and increase in respect those users gained, after seeing how well OWB/Odyssey works, as well as other features and software available for MorphOS3.7.  My point is that software makes a difference, and none of the NG choices has a large enough advantage yet to make it a clear winner over any of the other choices to most users.  Software availability is why all of us also own Windows, Mac, or Linux computers, in addition to what ever Amiga & Amiga Inspired systems we may own.  If Aeros continues to improve so that it can seamlessly run most or all of the Linux software library, without the user being able to tell the difference between the software being a Linux program or an native AROS program, or legacy Amiga program, AND the Aeros user experience can become more like the Amiga it was inspired from, it may gain many new users in the future.

2.  Reasonably priced hardware that is easily available to everyone, but still has sufficient performance to run all kinds of software that a typical computer user would want to run.  It does not matter what architecture is used, so long as the platform has drivers to fully utilize all components of the architecture chosen, and the architecture has a future development path in front of it and large enough market that will keep it available for many years.

3.  A difference at the OS level that makes users and programmers want to use it instead of the already established OSes available.  This difference in user environment and/or structure and how the OS works has to be compelling enough to make it worth the time and considerable effort to create and maintain an OS outside of the mainstream choices.  AmigaOS1.x to 3.x had that difference in the user experience that kept many users and programmers interested to this very day, but it also had design flaws that have not been easy to fix, while keeping the user experience close to the same, so people want to continue using and improving, or creating new software content for any of the NG Amiga inspired OSes.  Without 1 & 2 above, 3 can only hold the interest of a diminishing number of users and programmers and the length of time it can hold the interest of any of us varies, which causes some to leave, and very few to join any of the NG groups from the "outside".

[guest11527]

Huh? You do realize that Arduino is pretty much a good example of the the kind of platform/business model we (TeamBlackFox and I) are talking about, right?

I'm not arguing against the business model at all. Actually, for such a small community, it is probably the only model that might work. I'm arguing against the PPC choice, and I also don't think that ARM is the right choice, even though it is probably at least a *better* choice than PPC.

The beauty of ARM is also compatibility. Whereas an Amiga NG OS on x86 would require porting thousands of device drivers for all sorts of hardware, there aren't anywhere near that much different components in the ARM world.  

But none that could compete to desktop systems - if that is the decided route. As said, I also see a second possible development direction, and this would be the retro market. For that, anything but 68K compatible (for example, by FPGA) wouldn't work. It's a different model, probably something that would be sustainable on a small scale as well.  

Can you get an i5/i7 for 50 bucks (board included)?

No, but if you double that, you probably don't get an i5, but you still get a competative system that can outperform an ARM platform. The "off the shelf" computer systems we ordered here came with monitor, keyboard, mouse, all-inclusive at probably 250 Euro, a pretty good deal, including warranty and service. It's such a common hardware that its easy to keep the price low. These are "boring office PCs" of course, but still ahead of anything Amiga had to offer.  

Unless you can build an OS that is better, more stable and more compatible than anything else out there, people won't even bother to create another partition on their HDD.  

But why does that change if you replace the host processor with ARM? Is a crashing ARM system equally acceptable than a stable x86 system? In the end, I don't believe that the CPU matters at all. What matters is the availability of the hardware, and the community that develops for it. And believe it or not, most users and developers *do* have an x86 hardware somewhere, so that's probably a 0$ if you want to look at the total investment necessary. The system is already there, in almost all cases.  

The x86 market is simply too crowded. Everyone and his dog is pushing his distro. A hobbyist market simply doesn't stand much of a chance on there. Certainly not as much as on cheap hardware even people in developing countries can afford.

Why this is going to help to have a (still?) exotic? niche? hardware platform does not sound very logical to me. It restricts the choice even more, instead of opening it. If the Os is what makes an Amiga an Amiga, then the CPU shouldn't matter, and the easier it is to get hardware, the better.

Anyhow, as said, this is *one* possible direction, namely to go entirely into the software direction. I still see some chance for hardware, a second direction - and that is the retro direction, but that then one has to take the Amiga legacy serious, every piece of it, custom chips, CPU... - and what I currently see from the NGs doesn't. It is not sufficient to have an emulator then. If you define Amiga as the hardware and custom chips, then NG has nothing to do with Amiga. Again, "If". I don't know - make your pick, software or hardware.

So, no matter from which perspective I look at all the NG systems, something is really seriously wrong there. As I said before, I don't get it...

[Blinx123]

@Thomas Richter
My whole arguments rests on two simple facts.

1. Given the choice, the common consumer rather buys another cheap piece of hardware (adding additional value to his household. Like hooking it up to another TV, placing it in the child's room, etc) than screw with an existing computer. This is particularly true for sub-100 USD products

2. x86 as a platform has plenty of user friendly OS' people can rely on. ARM users don't have as much choice, in that regard.

[Rob]

Huh? You do realize that Arduino is pretty much a good example of the the kind of platform/business model we (TeamBlackFox and I) are talking about, right?

The beauty of ARM is also compatibility. Whereas an Amiga NG OS on x86 would require porting thousands of device drivers for all sorts of hardware, there aren't anywhere near that much different components in the ARM world.

x86 can offer long term platform stability by selecting an extended life cycle motherboard.  Jetway are one manufacturer who offer a range of Intel products and a few AMD products.
Their latest I7/I5/I3 boards have planned availability until Q4 2018.

The NAF95-Q87 is an ideal candidate since it has has 3 PCI-e and 4 PCI slots meaning you can plug in cards supported on current PPC hardware and port the already existing AmigaOS or MorphOS drivers to x86.

I don't see any ARM boards with PCI-e or PCI slots so it would seem on ARM you have to write new drivers from scratch and may have trouble getting some of the documentation.
You may also be locking yourself to that hardware to a certain extent since there are a lot of different companies rolling their own ARM SOC's with different devices, leaving you at the mercy of the choices of whoever is making the next weird little ARM system.  e.g. RPi and Beagle have completely different GPU for a start.

So much for compatibility.

@zylesea
Can you get an i5/i7 for 50 bucks (board included)?
Unless you can build an OS that is better, more stable and more compatible than anything else out there, people won't even bother to create another partition on their HDD.

People are currently paying thousands for PPC hardware to run OS4 so I think a lot more would be happier to pay hundreds for a dedicated x86 system.  

The x86 market is simply too crowded. Everyone and his dog is pushing his distro. A hobbyist market simply doesn't stand much of a chance on there. Certainly not as much as on cheap hardware even people in developing countries can afford.

An ARM port of either OS4 or MorphOS would be equally as obscure as an x86 version.

As far as I'm concerned ARM has a long way to go before it can become a convincing alternative to x86 in the event of an architecture switch.

[OlafS3]

@Thomas Richter
My whole arguments rests on two simple facts.

1. Given the choice, the common consumer rather buys another cheap piece of hardware (adding additional value to his household. Like hooking it up to another TV, placing it in the child's room, etc) than screw with an existing computer. This is particularly true for sub-100 USD products

2. x86 as a platform has plenty of user friendly OS' people can rely on. ARM users don't have as much choice, in that regard.

But is that not making a bet again? In the mid 90s PPC was the bet, at that time it seemed a "safe bet". We all know history. Apple did not do the same mistake, they kept doors open, others in our community not, they bet everything on PPC and lost. Now people are again demanding to set everything on the "next safe bet". Why are you so sure that ARM will win? If you loose your bet AmigaOS or MorphOS go from one dead end in the next.

Yes X86 has other OSs but people will compare it anyway. Or you create something like the Raspberry that is unbeatable cheap. Other than that I am of a similar opinion like Thomas. What we need is new software and for that we do not necessarily a completely new platform but hardware with geek factor that is different from competition (like FPGA based hardware would be). Even if we have a 64bit OS with full SMP and MP this would not bring automatically new software because it would still have not the same user base and software as Linux, Mac or Windows. And for new markets like Smartphones or Tablets our desktops are not suited.

So if you are so sure you will certainly bet everything you own on that? Not? That is what most do. They talk as long as they do not risk their own money or do the work.

[TeamBlackFox]

"bet on something" is for private people making bets on horse races, on  business you "do not bet" but make predictions and try to leave open  chances to turn direction if prediction fails. We all know of the bets  that were lost, from Commodore starting up to what we are discussing  now. So if changing direction it would make more sense to have something  portable like Aros so you can support both X86 and ARM and are on the  safe side.

Uhh the entire industry of computing is based on speculation - you can carry out years of market research in advance of a product release, but you seriously can't anticipate the impact of said product, or its reception. In the case of Android, which PRIMARILY runs on ARM devices, with x86 and MIPS making up the minority, it has been well-received. An Android desktop would likely be ARM based, as the hardware is cheap enough that it will still be powerful, but competitive. Intel/AMD x86 at the same price range as ARM either is too power-hungry or too anemic to even boot up. That being said, I'd trust the engineers of MS, Dell and AMD, all of which I have worked with in my past job as a data center tech, over a handful of users and developers in the middle of a forum known for sociopathic trolls, hell I had lunch with a manager for the largest AMD data centre in the DC area simply because he was called out to the MS data centre I worked at and invited me and the rest of the crew to lunch at a sushi bar and discussed what he wanted to see done to improve AMD-based Dell server reliability with us, over sushi and beer at that. He also talked to me about the Opteron-A series, and he said that it will, in his own words "Be the smartest move that HQ has made since launching the Opteron line"

You know as well as I do there are logistical and also other concerns with having to support two different architectures, diametrically opposed at that! Without a ports type system like FreeBSD uses, one or the other will simply have little software. Best to focus on one architecture for logistical reasons.

Show me an ARM that competes well with an i7. AmigaOS is not some tablet  OS. If a switch away from where it is now is justified then with a  significant increase of computing power. Sure, an Atom is rather crappy,  but who speaks about that stuff? i5 or i7 is whats' in remotely normal  computers these days. And to that level ARM scales up rather poorely.

If you're going to make a brash statement, prepare something better than just an opinion: http://www.nvidia.com/object/tegra-k1-processor.html

This, my friend is a SoC which has the power of an Nvidia GPU and a quad-core ARM CPU. I can't find any benchmarks vs an i5 or i7, but most people I know are on the budgetary end of computers, either older gen i-series, older-gen AMDs, or the Pentium and Celeron series of CPUs. Your personal desktop is certainly *NOT* representative of what everyone else has. ARM has scaled up at a logarithmic rate that is even better than x86, I can't really explain it to you other than it simply doesn't waste any space on the die for any legacy-cruft that an x86 CPU does. Your desktop, my workstation and most other x86 devices start up in a 16-bit mode, and have to be initialised from there to protected and then long mode just to even boot a modern, 64-bit OS. ARM? It originally deployed with a 32-bit design and a 26-bit address space, but it can still run a 32-bit binary inside the 26-bit address space. x86 doesn't have this luxury, its address mode is locked to its execution mode.

Furthermore, I will use the same argument that Howard Roark made in Fountainhead, original text below:

"The famous flutings on the famous columns — what   are they there for? To hide the joints in wood — when columns were   made of wood, only these aren't, they're marble. The triglyphs, what   are they? Wood. Wooden beams, the way they had to be laid when people   began to build wooden shacks. Your Greeks took marble and they made   copies of their wooden structures out of it, because others had done   it that way. Then your masters of the Renaissance came along and made   copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Now here we   are, making copies in steel and concrete of copies in plaster of   copies in marble of copies in wood. Why?

Similarly, what is real mode, AKA 16-bit mode, in a modern x86_64 CPU for? To start the BIOS, mostly - the original BIOS comes from the original IBM-PC designs, based on the 8088 and 8086. This was reimplemented by competitors to become PC-compatible. Then the 386 and 486 added a 32-bit protected mode, using an undocumented opcode in the original 8086 design to initialise it. They retained the 16-bit mode to keep DOS running, they simply used extenders like DOS4GW. With the extinction of Windows 9x with the atrocious Windows ME in late 1999, the 16-bit real mode was effectively rendered obsolete. But this was kept and copied into the 64-bit world, where now you had to escalate to long mode from protected mode from real mode. And this is all because the industry decided to use an architecture which is an extension of a 16-bit reimplementation of an 8-bit copy of a 4-bit processor. Why the hell keep all this cruft? DOS won't even run properly on a modern GPT sliced disk, let alone a system with no drivers!

ARM is significantly more towards my ideal of legacy-free than x86, and with the ARM64 releases, they're using a binary translation layer to execute the older 32-bit binaries in microcode on the 64-bit CPUs. In addition, Amiga would do better on a dedicated piece of hardware that is both cheap, and cost-effective, x86 isn't that answer. AmigaOS has a new place in the media-centric world - its low resource usage, efficient memory management and user-centric design would make it a perfect small computer OS, being used in either all-in-one computers or small set-top box computers, and ARM excels in those applications. None of the NG Amigas utilise anywhere near the full potential of workstation hardware, and as I hate to admit it, the days of a large howling workstation are numbered. As we speak I've my Nocona workstation for sale, simply because it is too loud and noisy to keep on, my Challenge S is quiet enough for low-end server applications, the Origin does well for high end, my Octane2 and Beaglebone have been doing very well as my main machines for most applications, and where I need a mobile solution, my trusty Nexus 7 does the job. I simply don't really need x86 except for a few things, which I am considering getting a small low-power computer to do the job of instead.