Yes, regular computing would be emails, word processing, listening to music, watching videos, light photo editing etc. 3D rendering and engineering software are exactly the type of niche software that benefits from an FPU.
Yeah - bummer!
Back in the days when I started to tinker with computers there was no internet and most off-the-shelf computers came with just monochrome video (Hercules) and regarding audio, all they could do was "beep".
So they were not really well suited for listening to music, watching videos, light photo editing etc. - and overpriced.
As I was studying mech. engineering back then my focus obviously was on CAE, CAD, CNC, CAM and 3D-rendering/animating (e.g. for 'collision investigations' - virtually assembling and animating the 3d-parts to see if they collide with other parts when in motion).
But that's not "regular computing". Maybe it is for you, but not for most computer users and certainly not for the target market of the A1222.
From an designing engineers perspective it actually IS "regular computing", as we're usually working at least 8 hours per day with such software. Other computer work (like e.g. e-mailing or word processing) is easily regarded as annoying, as it takes our minds off 'the really important things'.
And yes, I somewhat forgot that this thread is about the A1222, as I was thinking of software that benefits from FPUs.
Surely you realize that?
Now that you mention it...
Today I'm walking straight up to my retirement and I somehow get the feeling that I'm no longer part of the target audience of the computer industry. Today, the majority of computer users obviously uses their computers "just" for gaming, listening to music, watching videos, e-mailing or word processing or even worse: for the so-called 'social networking'.
I'm one of the dinosaurs who sees all this as a massive waste of time and mainly regards the use of productivity software as 'serious computing'.
I used to play rarely, and if so, I played something like FA-18 Interceptor, Falcon, F1GP or a good Flipper simulation - once or twice per year. But the last time I did so is long ago- at least 5 years...
Although if there's enough demand for it, I guess the software could be re-compiled for the A1222 FPU...It does have one.
I don't think so.
ISD Marketing, Ditek International and CRP Koruk were DynaCadd owners and none of them is active in the Amiga market anymore, if they still exist at all.
The same situation for Cinema 4d - Maxon left the Amiga market ages ago and stopped support for it. My heart starts bleeding in the face of the possibilities the current version of Cinema 4D offers: Just look at the cutaway drawing of a wheel at
https://www.maxon.net/en-gb/products/cinema-4d/features/modeling/polygon-modeling/ - that's what I'd like to be able to do on an modern Amiga!
Too sad Maxon left the Amiga market!
The X5000 would also be a poor choice for 3D rendering etc., especially under AmigaOS as it doesn't support SMT.
Did you mean SMT or SMP? As "multithreading" seems to be part of SMP...
If I understand correctly what Thomas Frieden states in the
Hyperion Entertainment Blog - Development News,
hardware (CPU) needs to have several cores and software (OS) has to support SMP:
Original by Thomas Frieden:
...
When looking at SMP support, we need to take actual processor technology into account.
...
Later on, chip manufacturers added additional so called “cores” to one physical processor.
A very recent development is the ability of such individual “cores” to execute more than one instruction stream in parallel. We call those instruction streams threads.
The development of SMP support has been separated into several distinctive steps. The first step was to rewrite the scheduler in C for easier accessibility.
...
The second, more fundamental step was to decouple the scheduler from its current data structures.
...
This has now been achieved. The current development build uses a scheduler that no longer uses the original AmigaOS data structures, but a structure that is replicated for each core.
The next step is to have each core in the development system (currently, the X1000) to run the scheduler. Test code will then start tasks on the different cores and see how they behave. We have already experimented with this and the results look promising. The tests basically showed that the lockout mechanism for Forbid works as planned.
As a final step, the balancing will be introduced, which then finalizes the first implementation of SMP support in AmigaOS.
You'd get maybe 20-30x the performance from a $400 8-core x86 CPU running Linux or Windows. Even more if the tasks could be accelerated by a GPU.
Is it asked too much to be able to have this on NG Amiga systems?
The X5000 actually HAS more than one core - and Hyperion is working on SMP for AOS.
If you're a professional, you know time is money. More projects completed in a shorter time means you earn more...
Yeah, but being close to retirement I also know that money isn't all that matters in a human life.
There are also things like love, fun and the like...
