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AmigaOne X5000 – first impression

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Re: AmigaOne X5000 – first impression

#51

Post by pmoriarty »

pavlov wrote: post #48
Tloewald wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a maxed out Amiga 500 (with sidecar expansion) back in the day and it was awesome (for games and 2D graphics) in 1988, amazing in 1990, and then Commodore ate it owing to monumental incompetence. Even at the height of its technical superiority, it was crippled for serious work. Its pixels weren't square in any graphics mode, and in the highest resolution mode you needed to endure flicker unless you had a specia…

I don't know why you were downvoted because you're describing a major problem the Amiga had in the creative industries of the '80s and '90s. Back then almost everyone was still designing for print, and the Amiga just wasn't cut out for that. It was a multimedia machine before there was any way to distribute multimedia to anyone else than other Amiga users. Video production was a niche that was compatible with the Ami…

Designers were a tiny minority of computer users back in the heyday of Amigas, and they're still a tiny minority of computer users now. Designing for print on computers back then was as much a nice activity as using computers for video post production. So if the Amiga sucked at printing, that was not what held it back from succeeding, as desktop publishing was just in its cradle back then. In fact, as an avid Amiga user back in the day, I never ever heard anyone complaining about the Amiga's printing chops.

These are the kinds of arguments against the Amiga that I actually heard: "Who would ever need 4096 colors?" "I don't need to use all those sounds" (coming from IBM PC owners whose computers could only display 16 colors and only produce bleeps and blops for sound).

The Amiga's real forte was games, pure and simple. It was a monster of a gaming rig, for the day, and a ton of gaming innovation happened on the platform. Gaming was a pretty mainstream activity for computer users even then, and Commodore completely flopped by not marketing the Amiga as primarily a gaming machine.

Re: AmigaOne X5000 – first impression

#52

Post by gsnedders »

gsnedders wrote: post #47
hsivonen wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At what point will all big-endian usage be just developers testing big-endian with no users to use the results, and at what point shall we stop even testing? (Yesterday, I finally got around to making encoding_rs work on 64-bit big-endian systems by testing PPC64 in qemu. Then I timed out trying to get a 32-bit big-endian system with recent enough glibc to run Rust up and running in qemu, so I still haven't tested th…

With IBM's huge investment in better support for little-endian PPC (in hardware, in software development toolchains, and in software itself) it seems likely that many PPC users are going to slowly move away from little-endian. I can imagine some embedded uses, e.g. in network hardware, may well stick with big-endian because it fundamentally makes sense there, but I imagine it's going to become increasingly obscure.

My above comment is of course wrong, they're going to move away from big-endian to little-endian. Pretty sure I changed what I was saying half-way through. :)

Re: AmigaOne X5000 – first impression

#53

Post by TD-Linux »

hsivonen wrote: post #42
TD-Linux wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, my first thought was "this board looks great for testing big-endian". Would be nice to see comparisons to e.g. the G5.

At what point will all big-endian usage be just developers testing big-endian with no users to use the results, and at what point shall we stop even testing? (Yesterday, I finally got around to making encoding_rs work on 64-bit big-endian systems by testing PPC64 in qemu. Then I timed out trying to get a 32-bit big-endian system with recent enough glibc to run Rust up and running in qemu, so I still haven't tested th…

MIPS is the other large big-endian case that's still in wide use (especially in home routers), however the machines are even more painfully slow to test on.

Re: AmigaOne X5000 – first impression

#54

Post by faragon »

TD-Linux wrote: post #53
hsivonen wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At what point will all big-endian usage be just developers testing big-endian with no users to use the results, and at what point shall we stop even testing? (Yesterday, I finally got around to making encoding_rs work on 64-bit big-endian systems by testing PPC64 in qemu. Then I timed out trying to get a 32-bit big-endian system with recent enough glibc to run Rust up and running in qemu, so I still haven't tested th…

MIPS is the other large big-endian case that's still in wide use (especially in home routers), however the machines are even more painfully slow to test on.

Most MIPS CPUs can run both BE and LE (MIPS-LE), although is usually tied to the kind of applications (e.g. most MIPS routers run in big endian mode)

Re: AmigaOne X5000 – first impression

#55

Post by rbanffy »

dleslie wrote: post #22
rbanffy wrote: post #12

I was going to be short. Still, even if large, I won't price this above two cents. I am saddened to say, but everything that made the Amiga great when it was launched seems meh by today's standards. Amigas had preemptive multitasking before any other home computer. Today it's the norm. Amigas could switch video modes every scanline. Today, even the concept of a scanline takes a while to explain to someone born in the…

Where's a VC when you need one?! Someone get this plan in motion.

I don't think there is a single VC able to invest enough to see this idea trough. The CPU alone is something Intel attempted and couldn't make perform well as a GPU. The Xeon Phi is (like the SPARC Niagara was before it) very interesting (and I'd love to see a similar part meant for desktops) and a model of what I think future CPUs will be.

Re: AmigaOne X5000 – first impression

#56

Post by rbanffy »

rjsw wrote: post #45
rbanffy wrote: post #12

I was going to be short. Still, even if large, I won't price this above two cents. I am saddened to say, but everything that made the Amiga great when it was launched seems meh by today's standards. Amigas had preemptive multitasking before any other home computer. Today it's the norm. Amigas could switch video modes every scanline. Today, even the concept of a scanline takes a while to explain to someone born in the…

> Hardware accelerated graphics (their blitter was cool) is also the norm (and many orders of magnitude faster now). Not really. Current GPUs don't have 2D hardware, everything is just done in "software". > I'd imagine, for starters, a uniform CPU/GPU architecture. Lots of cores accessing a single memory pool (let them have some scratch memory for themselves to save bandwidth) running the same software doing the job…

For the blitter, this re-imagining is doing everything in software anyway. We can add a couple instructions for that.

I was thinking about Xeon Phi (which is the child of Larrabee), but with cores able to perform better than x86's as GPU cores. There seems to be a great deal of ground between CPUs and GPUs and a lot of spots one can be to function reasonably as both.

Re: AmigaOne X5000 – first impression

#57

Post by Tloewald »

pmoriarty wrote: post #51
pavlov wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why you were downvoted because you're describing a major problem the Amiga had in the creative industries of the '80s and '90s. Back then almost everyone was still designing for print, and the Amiga just wasn't cut out for that. It was a multimedia machine before there was any way to distribute multimedia to anyone else than other Amiga users. Video production was a niche that was compatible with the Ami…

Designers were a tiny minority of computer users back in the heyday of Amigas, and they're still a tiny minority of computer users now. Designing for print on computers back then was as much a nice activity as using computers for video post production. So if the Amiga sucked at printing, that was not what held it back from succeeding, as desktop publishing was just in its cradle back then. In fact, as an avid Amiga u…

Word processing was a huge market even if design was not.

Re: AmigaOne X5000 – first impression

#58

Post by dajt »

Udik wrote: post #39
rbanffy wrote: post #12

I was going to be short. Still, even if large, I won't price this above two cents. I am saddened to say, but everything that made the Amiga great when it was launched seems meh by today's standards. Amigas had preemptive multitasking before any other home computer. Today it's the norm. Amigas could switch video modes every scanline. Today, even the concept of a scanline takes a while to explain to someone born in the…

That's more or less what I wanted to say (as a former Amiga owner and enthusiast, back in the '90s). These nostalgic operations that keep popping up every few months or years are basically denying the spirit of the original Amiga, which was that of a machine ahead of its time. A completely new machine instead, entirely different and totally incompatible with the old Amiga, based on some radically different architectu…

I thought Be would be the spiritual successor to the Amiga and attractive to the original Amiga user base. Having said that I didn't buy one because I didn't want to spend time and money on a platform that was obviously not going anywhere. Even a Mac would be a reasonable place for an ex-Amiganaut to end up. I didn't go there either because while I thought the original OS-X was a great idea I think it got more fragmented and further from the lauded Apple design brilliance with every release. Plus Apple stuff is stupid expensive for what you get.

Re: AmigaOne X5000 – first impression

#59

Post by faragon »

Sanddancer wrote: post #28
faragon wrote: post #10

I don't know about the Amiga stuff, but as PowerPC board for running Linux looks great: "The e5500 is a superscalar, dual-issue core with out-of-order execution and in-order completion. It maintains the seven-stage, four-issue pipeline that is a trademark of the e500 family, but is able to provide additional performance, by scaling up to 2.5 GHz." [1] [1] http://www.nxp.com/assets/documents/data/en/white-papers/64B..…

It's a pretty old chip, and there's a newer generation of Freescale stuff -- the e6500 -- with more cores, smt, pcie 3, etc. Plus, it's kinda expensive compared to other PPC boards. Even the Qoriq reference board is cheaper [1], and reference boards tend to be rather high priced themselves. If you're gonna run Linux, your best bet is elsewhere. [1] http://www.nxp.com/products/microcontrollers-and-processors/...

Wow, thank you very much! :-)
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