uCLinux has strength over Amiga OS in that it is open source and hence customizable, mostly posix compliant and with subsets of the well known interfaces found on "full" Linux, including modern IP stack. Amiga OS falls short very quickly.
Customizable becomes important at the low level of embedded systems. POSIX compliance is less important but makes porting code easier. A modern IP stack is a benefit of being a relevant OS which the held prisoner AmigaOS is not anymore. The AmigaOS was probably in the top 5 of personal computer OSs at one time and now it wouldn't break the top 20. Tech savvy kids today have probably never even heard of it
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Who cares about CPU performance ? The GPU is the thing that's important today. Any CPU is fast enough for gaming today and that's what is important.
Have you seen how weak the CPU found in PS4/XboxOne is ? And it's fast enough to emulate correctly a 3-core Xenon from the Xbox 360...
GPU performance is likely more important than CPU performance for games but CPU performance still matters. Most ARM processors would create a bottleneck for better games today. Exceptions may be ARMv8 (AArch64) but it is a completely different ISA than Thumb 2 which more closely resembles PPC (and will probably be the end of PPC as another high end RISC architecture is attempted). The PS4 and Xbox 360 CPUs are not weak just not clocked very high (1.6GHz and 1.75GHz respectively) as consoles have to find a compromise between performance, power consumption, cooling in a small case and cost. They opted for GPU performance and CPU efficiency with parallelism. Each core is actually pretty strong being CISC which is why emulating a much higher clocked PPC is no problem
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"Has the potential" ? Via reimplementation on a FPGA ? Seriously ?
The 68k is dead. You seem to be driven by your nostalgy of the eighties. Gamers want games... they don't care about the CPU/GPU you may be using.
The 68k would eventually need to become an ASIC to surpass higher clocked Thumb 2 and ColdFire processors in performance. Processors are developed in FPGA and the Apollo core has shown very good performance considering (outperforming several hard processors in performance/MHz). FPGA CPU performance requires high parallelism and a significant amount of pipelining which is needed by higher clocked hard CPUs also. Several people involved with the Apollo project have worked for IBM in Germany so they have some CPU development experience. I modified a code analyzer for the Apollo project and looked at a lot of code. The 68k has several advantages over the x86 and the bottlenecks can mostly be worked around.
The 68k and Amiga are dead but so what? The Ouya raised $8.5 million with kickstarter which would be more than enough to make an Amiga SoC ASIC. The Amiga would not become instantly relevant again but maybe tens of thousands of new Amiga motherboards sold for <$200 U.S. would breath some life into the dead Amiga. Otherwise the Amiga disappears as an old has been and no one remembers the significant technology and contributions.
Some may be interested in Amiga games, but it's far from the majority, and UAE is more than enough for these people.
UAE may be helping to keep the Amiga memory from fading but it is not a sustainable path or viable development target.
Sony chose MIPS because it had a meaning, changed to Power with the PS3, and made another change to x86 with the PS4. And people are still buying Sony consoles.
Sony has made a lot of mistakes and has a huge debt as a result.
If CBM was alive, they likely would have switched architectures too, and hopefully would have rewrote the OS to be ready for such changes.. Which hasn't been done yet on the Amiga.
C= may not have had a choice on whether to switch architectures. Changing architectures is a lot of software work and creates incompatibilities. It may be possible for a larger company but it could spell the end for smaller companies like A-EON/Hyperion. Developing a 68k Amiga SoC would be going back to the Amiga user base (and roots) gaining users instead of away from it where it would lose more of its already small user base. Being vertically integrated owning the hardware intellectual property allows to control your own destiny (no more forced ISA changes). It would be a good idea to partner with a knowledgeable ASIC producing company and try to produce products which could also be sold into the embedded market. I was talking to some people before Gunnar (Apollo core designer) decided to be all high and mighty about his project. One company was thinking about how they could use a high performance 68k in their embedded products instead of ARM. The Amiga seems to be about protecting intellectual property instead of developing, marketing and selling products though.
