Opinion: PPC, 68080 and other

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by NorthWay

There is still Mill who are betting their boat against the commonly accepted truth of that. I'm a bit worried about the silence from that direction, because I like a _lot_ of their ideas. (If I was to do a 64bit Amiga-like (SAS)OS I'd hope they would deliver so it could be my target.)

Yes I followed that project and watched most of the scholar videos, they released. (witch are really interesting, independent of the project itself)

I really hoped they could manage to produce something ... but sadly there is nothing. AFAIK not even the FPGA implementation is open to the public and there is no usable simulator ...

"It's dead, Jim"

[LazarX]

Originally Posted by pix

Pimiga is a great combo of emulator and hardware and on a Pi400 it almost captures the feel of having an Amiga very well, so I'm happy with that end of things.

If I was going to opt to use an OS on off the shelf hardware, while I liked the look of MorphOS and tried it on an iBook the idea of owning Apple hardware to run Amiga makes me feel a bit.... dirty.

Why should it? Apple made some very nice hardware during it's 68k and PPC period. The original cheese grater G5s were a joy to tinker with and were the most accessible machines ever made. It's later OS is a direct descedant of UNIX itself. There are a lot of legitimate reasons to dump on Apple. But they truly put out a UNIX you can give to Grandma. AndI still have fond memories of our Mac IIci.

Would really hope the Amiga will one day get standardized on OS 4 with either Moto or PPC redesigns at higher power and its own chipsets to really offer Amiga developers a way to flex the differences of an Amiga against anything else.

In a world where we have to choose between boring ol x86 and an endless stream of ARM, we need that!

At this point, 3.2 and MorphOS are the only items that look like they have active development.

[pix]

Originally Posted by LazarX

Why should it? Apple made some very nice hardware during it's 68k and PPC period. The original cheese grater G5s were a joy to tinker with and were the most accessible machines ever made. It's later OS is a direct descedant of UNIX itself. There are a lot of legitimate reasons to dump on Apple. But they truly put out a UNIX you can give to Grandma. AndI still have fond memories of our Mac IIci.

I'm sorry, I understand you have fond memories of your experience with Apple computers, but I don't share them and I am rabidly anti-Apple, so I mean no offense when I vent. They have made "some" interesting looking hardware over the years I suppose? See their OS releases as rather pointless though if I'm being honest.

If it makes a difference, I think I more or less feel the same way about running an Amiga on Apple badged hardware, as I would on Google badged, or Microsoft badged hardware. At least with a PC I can make it look however I want it to look and install whatever I want to install.

I'm afraid to that Apple and that logo to me = hype an conceit. The company should have died out in the 90's and been left dead and buried, but the cabal had to bail out their silicon valley buds and continue to gift us with those few people in marketing, graphic design, or execs who would find any excuse to spend triple the amount required on a computer that has only one mouse button, simply because they were apparently so enthralled by the idea of that minimalist schtick.

MacOS may have hid its BSD underbelly well, but I'm not sure why Granny needs to use that? And I am not at all thankful for the iPhone and iPad - which are still lapped up model after turd model by Apple grazers who, as a group, have literally destroyed device diversity, competition and realistic pricing in the way Apple does best. Now people pay $1500+ for a new phone release and they are "oh so grateful" to be locked into 3 year cell contracts and force me to support that turd of a mobile OS simply because the Youtube adverts showed them a new shiny. I can't believe we lost Windows Mobile or even Windows Phone, Blackberry and Nokia Symbian plus countless other far more interesting OS and devices to that stain called an iPhone - and replaced them with an endless stream of clones which look identical apart from where a notch appears, or how bulky the camera lenses are. Yeah - I am not the least bit thankful to Apple computers, phones or users personally

Yes, I really do hate Apple as a company and my experience with its userbase has not been a good one

You might just find me agreeing on the G4/G5 desktops however - they were really nice pieces of equipment and some of the Mac Pro all-in-one's are also very nice and I do own one of those that I repaired and keep around for display.

At this point, 3.2 and MorphOS are the only items that look like they have active development.

I think you are right - however, without new PPC equipment MorphOS is running out of road. Of the Mac hardware it supports, some of it is quite terrible. And yes, to reiterate - it makes me feel a bit grubby having my Boing ball hosted inside a machine with an Apple badge. I hope you can understand

Its a pity that AROS can't get as far as MorphOS has. Looks like it is going to be Amiga OS3.2 after all?

[hammer]

Originally Posted by Gorf

But the slots where not equal:
2 for integer operations and two for floating point.
And only one integer-slot is connected to the barrel-shifter, so only that slot can do multiplications and shifts, while only the other integer-slot can do branching.

So if you need a lot of integer multiplications in a row (like early 3D shooters) you are essentially down to a single issue CPU again.

Alpha 21264 (1998) could to out-of-order execution, but this is still very limited compared to todays CPUs. Well but so could Pentium Pro since 1995.

In terms of OOO there is no distinct RISC advantage - all architectures need to throw a lot of silicone on to it, to make it happen.

To avoid this Intel had the glorious idea to let the compiler do the re-ordering and give the CPU a very long instruction word instead: EPIC
And everyone thought: "This is the way!"
Well ... not so much.
Turns out there is not that much parallelism in the instruction flow of a single thread in real world applications.

Modern CPUs may not equal pipelines.

[klx300r]

Originally Posted by LazarX

..,At this point, 3.2 and MorphOS are the only items that look like they have active development.

the Cloanto/Hyperion lawsuit has definitely slowed down OS4 development but there's quit alot still going on with OS4 over at amigans.net and A-Eon/Amigakit are still producing new OS4 hardware with the X5000 and recently released A1220 and also ACube with their Sam460 line,

[Minuous]

Originally Posted by pix

I'm afraid to that Apple and that logo to me = hype an conceit. The company should have died out in the 90's

Or better yet, the '70s :-D