@Jack

I have a Dlink KVM, and the keyboard button it works on, scroll lock I think, is the OS4 Help key. Every time I swiched the KVM, a multiview window came up on my AmigaOne. There's something you can set in uboot prefs to avoid that, but I forget what it was. (And will need to find it again when I get my computer room set up again)

Eh, I fell for the old bring back an ancient and already answered question trick too.

@Helgis

I have a program for my PC that does this.

http://www.chiefarchitect.com/

Basically what you need is a library of items, colors and patterns available to use in real life. (real-life paint colors and real-life patterns such as hardwood, carpeting, wallpapers, etc.) And it would be convenient to be able to easily resize items, such as have a cabinet object which can be resized to various standard or even custom widths.

I'm not really sure what unique properties of X1000 would make any difference to CAD or house design. I don't expect Xcore would be useful for CAD software, we do not have any GPGPU support for maths acceleration, other OSes do graphics compositing, there's not really anything that would make a CAD program (house or other kind) any different than any other computer, it's just a port to PPC and OS4.

@Helgis

If I can afford anything, I'll either buy an X1000 or I won't buy any Amiga board. I'm interested in certain things that are on or I believe are on the X1000, that are not in the Sam boards. Not as much the Xcore, and I wait until we know what the CPU is to get excited about that, but there's other characteristics that interest me very much if I'm right about them. If I can't afford X1000, I'll be happy with my AmigaOne XE until it dies.

I didn't say anything about 4GB DDR2 slots. There are four slots, each is a DDR2 slot. We know nothing about how much RAM will fit in any one slot or what if any limit on the total RAM amount.

@Helgis

Is there any support for a Bluray drive?

We don't even know how much memory the 4 DDR2 RAM slots can hold and work with, do we? Or if that can be configured or if they will tell us how much of each thing it will have?

I hope I can afford to buy an A1000 someday too. Not sure when or if I will be able to, I'll have a baby soon and may not be able to buy much of anything not baby things for a while.

@Hondo

Quote:

Here's the link he must be referring to at osnews from October 2009:
http://www.osnews.com/story/22391/The_Future_of_AmigaOS4_a_Roadmap

which points back to
http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/v ... t=0&viewmode=flat&order=0

There's a couple things about 4.2 mentioned, but they have disclaimers as well. What Helgis says of 4.5 and 5 I don't even see there at all. Not sure where he got that, unless it's still the ancient roadmap that talked about porting AmigaDE onto 4.5 and merging them in 5, Hyperion would do PPC and Amithlon would be x86 path, which has nothing to do with reality in this universe for a very very very long time.

@freddix

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HDD to memory loading, I'm not sure Xena has useful access to either of those things to be superior at that tast compared to a CPU or to SATA chip with DMA. Perhaps if you use it as an HDD controller chip and have it use DMA feature, but I think that is already present elsewhere.

Considering what the Xcore chip can connect to on the motherboard other than the Xorro slot, I think you'd lose performance by making it responsible for certain things like this.

Audio might be reasonable, make it be an audio chip with DMA... But there's probably already an audio chip in there, I think it's been said to be HD audio even.

@Geoshaper

Go read up on xmos's web site and some forums at
http://www.xmoslinkers.org/projlist/
and
http://www.xcore.com/forum/

Some discussions about this from a while ago at AW.net with some answers for you

http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/v ... _id=30943&forum=33#544974

http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/v ... _id=30893&forum=33#542053

http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/v ... c_id=30398&forum=2#539872

@Helgis

The CFE thing again hints at the impossible. Grrr. So I will assume that either the CFE list is not updated or they ported it to something else themselves.

I hard somewhere, maybe in TV program or something, that if you eliminate all the realistic possibilities, then whatever remains, however unlikely, must be true. Well, it's still too unlikely for me to believe right now, no matter how awesome it would be if it's true. (It would even save me a whole chip in my own design idea if true as well as be higher performance)

@Helgis

I don't hate the X1000. I hope you haven't thought that. I am very happy with some things we've seen and some things I myself strongly suspect but do not know for certain. I do get frusterated that I continue to not be able to have a laptop, and thus it's far less convenient for me to use an Amiga. I use my PC laptop all the time, so does my wife. Currently no desktop style computers are even hooked up, and I cannot use my XE for anything. I'm working on uboot for XE, and working on some drivers, all in a virtual Linux machine in my PC laptop, until I have something I ready to test and need the XE plugged in.

@Helgis

I don't think anyone has ever thought you to be pessimistic. My observation of other peoples' observations is that you are very very far the opposite.

@Helgis

I don't have any questions for them... Do you not answer the questions I have tried asking you?

@Helgis

Quote:

ARM dominates in a different place than X86 dominates. They both do, in their respective areas. X86 dominates in desktop/laptop computers. ARM dominates everywhere else.

Quote:

Consider this, compare the number of new ARM laptops you can buy today to the number of new PPC laptops you can buy today. Think about that...

If they made a PPC board without modern things like PCI-Express, USB2, SATA, I'd consider it a laughable joke. They HAVE to do that, or it's pointless IMNSHO. I'd prefer to see USB3 now, hopefully we'll see some plugin-cards supported for that.

How has PPC changed to benefit desktop in the last 5 years? The big 3 game consoles use it? They are not desktops, and cannot be well used for that purpose. Xbox360 has a relatively high rate of failure. PS3 was horribly slow to catch on. Sure, they are gradually integrating peripherals into SOC chips that we want in a motherboard, but where are all the desktop motherboards for us? Only a couple. Very very few, far between, and still no freakin Amiga laptop after all these years, not even when old PPC laptops do exist. The market for desktop PPC boards simply is not anything to consider in existence, and thus only very special designers put them out for us nanoscopic Amiga community to use.

If it was me, I'd stop making motherboards directly including any CPU especially for Amiga market. And I'd not want to call my own an AmigaOne-Anything if I don' t absolutely have to in order to get some OS licensing for some reason. I'd make one thing that can be a laptop or can be an ATX or can be a Flex-ATX or can be a mini-ITX or... and let the users decide what shape to make it, as in this teeny teeny tiny market it really does not make sense to have such a number of different motherboard designs or different performance levels. If I ever do succeed in my design idea, it'll be the highest performance I can get, with the most modern features I can get, so it's as useful to as many Amiga fans as possible. I do want an X1000. I don't know if I can afford one, as I'll have a baby about the time X1000 is said to ship, but no matter what CPU is on it, it's still not what I want, because I'm really tired of having all of my Amiga stuff chained to a desk and I can't use it anywhere else than at that desk in that room of this house. Give us a laptop, and I'll find a way to pay for it. Give us a desktop casing of any size/shape, and I'm at the mercy of my wife, I'm much less motivated to really make sure I get one that way.

Quote:

So much attention from who, other than us Amiga fans? Just watch when it's announced to Slashdot, what the reaction is. (Here's a hint of what that will be, they'll be in crazy wonder why we weirdos want a new board for such an ancient and dead platform, and really be puzzled why we don' tchange to X86 and have all that cheap and plentiful variety instead of one or two bigbox boards total to choose from. I'll bet you US$100 on that. Other than Amiga web sites, that will be the response.) It'll be a fantastic board for us, but honestly, who else will care? How well did Eyetech do outside of the Amiga community, they wanted to sell it as a low-power consumption server. Why did Genesi turn away from PowerPC in favor of ARM? (Until giving poltiical support to someone's new bounty 8610 idea?)

Quote:

How do we have PA Semi and their extremely powerful PPC chips? I really don't understand why you continue with them. They haven't existed for two years... I liked those chips. If I could, that's what I'd have in my Amiga laptop. I had an NDA with them for such a goal, but they were taken away from us and shoved into a garbage disposal in Apple's basement. If A-Eon have managed to go supernatural and bring the thing back to non-military life, I will be truely amazed, and perhaps I'll consider Ben a CPU God. Until there's a proven miracle and we begin to celebrate PA6Teaster every year with the PA6Teaster Jackalope hiding buckets of fudge Boing balls, I do not believe the chip exists anymore. Unless you're a defense contractor making zillion dollar fighter planes and are super-rich enough to bully Apple around and have them give in. Even if the PA6T is somehow back from the dead, at best it's now 2 years old tech.

IBM have dropped future Cell development.
http://www.n4g.com/tech/News-431744.aspx

Fixstars does not list their PowerStation tower anymore?

Linux distributions are dropping PowerPC. Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, and Fedora are either gone already or going soon.
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubun ... 2007-February/000098.html
http://www.osnews.com/story/23071/GNU ... ros_Silently_Drop_PowerPC

Sony is killing OS support on PS3. My Slim never had OS support to start with, but older PS3s will lose that capability soon, and thus reduce "desktop" usage of PowerPC things.
http://blog.us.playstation.com/2010/0 ... s3-firmware-v3-21-update/

I know who Ben is, I've talked to him about a number of things. I don't know anything about X1000 that you all here don't though. He's a cool guy, but not a CPU god. Amarjit Gill might be (thought nothing to do with A-Eon), here's hoping... I don't recognize the other names on the A-Eon list.

I'm curious as to what the Xcore will lead to. Maybe a couple simple IO boards. I myself would prefer an FPGA like a biggish Spartan6. I have a lot of ideas, FPGAs can do more of them than I think XCores can, but I have a big Spartan3 on a PCI card to play with before saving up for a Spartan6 board.

@Helgis

Quote:

I think that saying PPC is the dominant embedded CPU isn't correct anymore. ARM is. I think has been for a while. PPC is still there, but losing ground to ARM. Consider that nearly every cell phone has an ARM in it. Tivo. GPS units. etc... PowerPC is still in routers and car engines and some other things, but it;s falling behind in raw numbers.

PPC has progressed extremely amazing in the last few years? I'd say, for desktop users, that's not true at all. Desktop features are being removed. The highest-performance chips we had have been dropped. Sure, Titan is coming, but we don't know much about it. I'll assume it does not have Altivec, as I cannot find anything saying it does. Same for IBM 470, which may be what Titan is anyway. (Wikipedia used to say Altivec for 470 but not anymore)

Quote:

I don't think anyone, from a buyer point of view, has ever considered Amiga as an embedded system. I think Hyperion would be smart to find embedded uses for their product and have it go there as well as desktop OS for us, but I'm not sure we have a reason to think there's already an embedded system aspect to come back from. Most people view Amiga/AmigaOS as an antique, dead, game machine. Look at the reaction to ANY Amiga post on slashdot...

@Helgis

Quote:

I don't quite "blame" Hyperion for anything, without them Amiga would have died ages ago. A-Eon, they haven't had a chance to do anything good or bad yet.


Quote:

You don't need a PPC in particular for doing those things.

Elsewhere you talk about PowerPC trying to make a desktop comeback. The PowerPC chip companies are not. Hyperion/Aeon may be, but they are trying to use an architecture those chip designers are targetting away from desktop uses for desktop uses.

Perhaps it sounds lik eI "blame" them for that. Perhaps I do to an extent. Apple left PowerPC out of frustration that they could not get the performance they wanted in the power consumption that they wanted. They now use X86 for performance, and they use ARM for low-power consumption in portable stuff like iPods and iPads. They directly killed the best "desktop" PowerPC chip out there.

Who else but us WANTS desktop PowerPC anymore? Considering that, why would the chip guys put effort into continued desktop PowerPC chip creation? It's EXPENSIVE to do that, and why do that with no expected returns? (A couple thousand potential Amiga fans is the same as zero in this comparison, we're completely negligible to them)

Now, does someone want to do such a thing regardless of what some of us consider to be poor chip business decision today? I guess it's possible. Likely? I don't think so. Of course Hyperion/Aeon know something we do not, whatever CPU they use we don't know what it is exactly. They most likely have something new. Doesn't mean the chip designer intends it to be a desktop chip, but for our purposes it may be the new closest choice for what we want a CPU chip to do.

@Helgis

Quote:

We'll see about low prices when we know what it will cost. Right now there is no way to compare prices with comparable or faster x86 computers.

Same for low heat. We have no idea what CPU it will have. The IBM PPC970 was very hot. So was it's companion northbridge chip. The power consumption there was why there was never a G5 iBook or Powerbook.

Your wording was correct, if PowerPC becomes viable desktop chip again (not just for us Amigans), it will be surprising.


Now, I'd like to say again that I don't intend to preach x86 religion. it's a chip, and businessmen should choose the most profitable business way, not the most religious way of us fanatics. PPC is a good design, but opportunity there seems to be going away, and getting the computers we want is only getting more difficult.

I think Hyperion would be smart to consider port to ARM. ARM is now what PPC once could have become, but never did become.

@Helgis

Sorry, I hit submit instead of quote before and got distracted with work.

If you're right that PPC turns into the now or future #1 alternative to x86, I'll appologize in publicIy truely don't believe that will happen.

The PA6T, IMHO, was the best PPC we'll ever see, in terms of a desktop platform like Amiga for performance and features. And we'll never even see that, I believe.

Freescale doesn't put Altivec in their QorIQ chips. There's no market for Altivec worth their trouble to include it.

Freescale seems to be shifting their attention away from PPC and toward ARM.

IBM dropped further development of Cell.

Hard to imagine that PPC is making a huge comeback or that the maybe couple thousand of us Amiga fans that will really want to buy an X1000 will be leading such a comeback.

We all know you are a diehard believer of Amiga. Many of us that you think are here just to argue against you are not. I want an Amiga laptop, have for many years, and have gradually been working to see how possible it is for me to do. I've chosen an existing laptop to start from. I've bought PCB design software. I've got NDAs with chip vendors, including ATI/AMD, Freescale, PA SEmi in their day, PLX Technologies, etc. I have a design concept I'm very happy with. I have a degree in Computer Engineering (half computer science, half electrical engineering) because I wanted to design Amiga computers. I'm getting involved with Uboot to try and help improve things for Eyetech AmigaOne owners, and for my own development needs. I've spent a LOT of money on development and evaluation tools, I have 4 PCI-Express slots in my AmigaOne XE (cost about $2000), I have a JTAG debugger kit for the 74xx/75xx series cost about $2400, a pile of Radeon cards from when I was involved with the driver way back when, a pile of PCI-Express cards, and am trying to find time to write some various drivers for them. I've made a basic design spec for a wireless networking framework to go on to of Roadshow as you can see at AmigaBounties. Not a detailed spec or API to begin coding, but listing features and capabilities I think are important. It's hard for me to find time or money to do much, this kind of thing is full-time work for companies, let alone little old me by myself, but I'm going along at some glacially slow pace regardless.

I've never stopped hoping and wishing either. I wouldn't be doing any research or spending any money toward any Amiga goals if I didn't, let alone the couple tens of $$ that I have so far, and that's barely beginning if I ever succeed. But I do try to observe reality and live within it as well. I had wished to use the PA6T if I can do a laptop, but it went away and I had to choose another chip even though I didn't want to change.

Other than wish and talk, what have you actually DONE toward making Amiga better again?

Since 2003, a lot of things have changed. Intel came out with Atom. Multicores are popular. PPC development has slowed from what it once was. The math is very different today than what it was back in your article's days. I work on ARM chips for a living these days, studied microprocessor design, etc. I have some understanding of pipelines and why a longer one affects performance and power consumption compared to shorter ones. My employer once made PowerPC chips, I don't believe they still do, we do make a lot of ARM stuff though.

While you're in love with PPC today, consider why did Apple switch away from it? They could not get G5 chips that would work in a laptop. IBM's were far far far too power hungry, hot, and would not work on battery for more than a few minutes. PA Semi supposedly came to existence to provide a power-friendly G5, but were too late. That's the rumor I heard about them anyway. And now they're gone. X86 laptops work well and can last on battery for quite some time with decent performance today. Compare that to my G4 iBook. My iBook is slow and needs recharged more often than my Core-2 duo laptop.

Why be so blind to choose X86? You've liked the idea at various times in the past yourself. But consider, I want a laptop. Hyperion won't support iBooks or PowerBooks, I tried that angle with Hyperion and was turned away. I've spent 6 years imagining my own laptop design and not yet having time or money to invent my own to successful completion. PowerPC is not allowing me to have what I want. X86 laptops are all over the place.

Is X86 superior technlogically? Today's x86 compared to today's most advanced PowerPC, I think yes. It's also cheaper and far far far more widely available. It's extremely more convenient. If x86 is so inferior, why do you say that PowerPC is adopting much of same technology as today's X86?

The genuine truth is fixed, not manipulatable. Believe can be manipulated, but that doesn't change what is actually happening. You can rewrite history books and future students can learn and believe what they now say to be "truth" but that doesn't change what actually happened back then.

I'm frustrated with being restriced to PowerPC, because the chip makers are moving away from desktop performance and features. Altivec is important to me for my Amiga, or whatever equivalent of it. I'm not a preacher for X86 religion, but it is being developed in the direction we desktop usage Amiga fans want to go. I'm not talking abotu instruction set or CISC or pipeline length, I'm talking about 16lane PCI-Express slots, available laptops, and surely more performance than a 970 or PA6T that can run on a battery for a useful few hours.

Tell me, how is PowerPC giving me what I want, an Amiga laptop? And why are the Amiga powers that be doing things to prevent me from having a laptop?

@Helgis

Quote:

It's called being realistic. Try it sometime.

Quote:

If they didn't know what CPU they put on their own motherboard, I doubt it'd work very well.

Curious, why the sudden interest in PPC being the holy grail of CPU's? You had started a number of threads on AW.net about changing Amiga to x86 is the solution to everything...

@Helgis

Quote:

PA Semi hasn't existed for a year or two now. Since PA Semi company's assimilation into the Apple collective, those engineers made the A4 chip in the Apple iPad recently announced. The best we can hope for is that the Agnilux people may license the PA6T from Apple and revive it, but that's very wild speculation and wishful thinking for now.

http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/v ... p?topic_id=31070&forum=33

Quote:

Not likely to become the greatest or most attractive alternative to x86. I believe that description quite strongly belongs to ARM right now and for a long time to come.

@tonyw

If someone with a working flash chip and had a programming kit, he could copy the chip to a file, send the file, and this guy could program that with his programming kit. I once copied my XE chip this way to fix a motherboard that had a bad flash chip, to make a new blank chip boot the thing. (That was an XE so I can't help here, and that was years ago and I've since lost the file and don't know where my kit is just now)

Would a bounty for the filesystem be to update the OS4 CD filesystem for this, or to make a companion or replacement filesystem?

For the commercial OS4 filesystem, I think they should update it as part of an OS4 update. Either a free point update or as a paid for OS4.2 thing. I've alrady paid for 4.0 and 4.1, and would also be paying for 4.2, so I would not pay into a bounty for something I also need to buy.

If a companion filesystem to take up the newer UDF version, or for a complete replacement for the OS4 commercial filesystem then I think a bounty could make sense.