Intel sux HARD!
Everyone with a brain knows
G4 powerpc's architecture is miles ahead of intel.
they dont have the clock speeds
but they dont need it.
POWERPC kicks intels ass
Architecture independence kicks everyone's ass, because you can use any CPU you want, now and later.
Note how many platforms Microsoft supported before they made their big break "giving away" their OS to IBM. MS-DOS was not their first product. Take a look at what they are doing now with XNA. Anyone who is going full-force towards either x86 or PowerPC is insane.
The only people still writing highly native code are GPU programmers, because GPU instruction sets are still dead simple, and nobody really knows the "right" way of doing it, yet. CPU technology has matured over a half-century. The things people are saying today about x86 vs PowerPC, are similar to what people said about C compilers decades ago, and what they said about APIs before 3D accelerators arrived. People don't learn.
In a 64-bit length of code, some of it is the instruction, and the rest is the data to be processed by that instruction. In some applications, having a long data stream is useful, like say database processing, but for many other applications, small instructions regarding small amounts of data is the norm
I guess that depends on the CPU. Don't 32bit integers work much faster than short ints on modern CPUs, even though they contain less information, because they are more "native" to the CPU's operation?
I think the decision to make new amiga hardware based around the PowerPC processor was the right one.
No way. I've been wanting a CPU independent programming language ever since I saw how fast AMOS was compared to pure assembly (also, the fact that it was about a hundred times faster than any other BASIC I've ever used). I think Java bytecode has more or less given CPU independence a bad name due to its low speed and memory consumption. I'd really like to know more about the overall performance of Tao's VP. Not much has been going around about it, lately.
I has OSX panther running on a Powerbook G3 Pismo and it just flew
The OS or the applications? Almost anything works better than Windows on x86, and Linux on x86 is pretty damn fast for its purposes.
The current generation of AmigaOne is NOT aimed at the public, it is aimed at the existing user base.
Unfortunatly, this proves its fate. Any "new" Amiga that comes out in the future would offer little to no support for the AmigaOne. It's a hobby machine. Little more.
And you can bet your bottom dollar Eyetech wont suddenly change processor after Hyperion and everyone going to all that hard work into getting AmigaOS onto PPC!
Well, you have to admit that if you're not going x86, PowerPC is the only reasonable choice. MIPS and SH4 don't even come close in performance as they are designed for different markets.
Still, a GOOD OS doesn't have a particular CPU in mind. Most of the work to making AmigaOS native to PowerPC isn't for the PowerPC specifically, it's to get away from native 68K. After all that work, it probably wouldn't be that hard to make it x86 native. They just don't want to. ;-)
If you don't think software developers are an issue, compare how long it takes to get things done on your 3.2 GHz monster and an A500. Is it really 400 times faster, as the clock speed suggests?
That's the same argument that have driven Java. People predicted a decade ago that Java was insane and would die quickly, if it wasn't already kaput. Today, it's about the only thing that embedded developers use, and is THE language of the web, no matter how hard Microsoft tries to push .NET. Performance isn't everything.
I base my conclusion that PowerPC is a bad idea not because it's technically inferior and x86 is just better, it's because x86 is a more stable market. Windows machines can't defect to PowerPC overnight, so you have to think about what 95% of the industry is going to do when x86 goes belly-up. Shouting about technical supiriority has hardly made companies successful if they are impractical.
Where does this article say that? In fact, there was little collaboration on the part of both companies. Intel may have used AMD's documentation to develop the EM64T for compatibility reasons but that doesn't mean they "adopted" anything.
I heard about that, too. There's a lot of give and take between those two companies, and they have agreements not to sue each other over stuff like this. It's nothing new. It makes you wonder if x86 will ever undergo the same treatment as Sparc.
Hardware just moves on too fast. Forget it.
Some people will just never learn that the age of proprietary hardware is over.
If you drop legacy you might as well just use Windows or Linux, they have more software anyway and let you take full advantage of the expensive hardware you just bought before next week's hardware comes out.
Yup. A new desktop that works like Amiga using a modified Linux core would interest me the most. It's not worth making a unique, new OS when there are no hardware vendors stumbling over themselves to write drivers for you. I really like Linux at the low-level. It's XWindows, Gnome/KDE, and the dependence on the CLI that drives me nuts. A unified CLI/GUI framework for Linux (which removes the need for coding argument parsing yourself) would rock. It's like what HTML and XML did for the web (but more carefully thought-out, I hope!)
Current AmigaOne hardware is better suited for embedded applications, but even those kinds of hardware, like PDAs, are becoming increasingly open, like the PC.
