Amiga OS4 on PS3?? Not as cheap as some thought.

Take a look at this article

http://amigans.net/modules/news/article.php?storyid=118

"European launch at a price of ?425 (599 euros) per console."


Wonder what the price point of the Sam440EP will be or indeed, the Amy, will be.

@Mikey_C

Yikes! And I thought my A1 was an expensive toy.

You'd want to get a lot of usable hardware for that price. In other words, all of the hardware in the machine had better be supported by your "alternate OS".

@tonyw

I don't think anyone should buy the PS3 ONLY for OS4. If you don't plan to use the game console or Blu-ray capability a SAM motherboard would be a better choice.

Smaller, more expandable and using only a fraction of the electricity

It's just that since Sony will sell millions of PS3's regardless of the price it will make sense to port OS4 for it. BTW here in Denmark it is 760 EUR if you pre-order now.

@Mikey_C

It's also not as expensive as some have thought, some thought the device would be around 1000 Euro at least, considering the cost of components and the cost of dedicated Blu-Ray players which offer less functionality.

We can assume prices will go down eventually, due to cost reductions (slmline version) and mass productions. Personally I would even buy a device with similar specification if it only ran AmigaOS4 for 1000 Euro and if it had a crappy gaphics chip (the Cell is where lots of the PS3's graphics potential comes from). The PS3 is the cheapest Cell development platform and Blu-Ray player available, it's not the cheapest games console, for this the PS2 may look more attractive.

Building a Samantha into a full platform may well cost more than a PS3.

@Mikey_C
...
Wonder what the price point of the Sam440EP will be or indeed, the Amy, will be. ?

Same as the A1. The 'scales of production' by unit quantity is a big factor. It easier and
cheaper to make 10,000 PS3s than 1000 Sams.

I wouldn't be interested in either one!

@thread

Both AmigaInc. and Hyperion talked about PS3. The Cell is something new, something that wasn't here before, something that might be considered as the "legal heir to the throne" of the original amiga, hardware wise, by people remembering the Amiga as a machine that could do things no other was able to do and as the prime games machine of its time. Hyperion is a games company how much is an SDK for the PS3? This is the best and biggest opportunity they will ever get. What else are they waiting for? Poor embedded speced ppc boards? There will be at most a few thousand ones, nothing were real money is made of, ask BBRV or Eyetech, they know.

Imagine the publicity they could get if they manage to have their OS on that machine within the european launch date and even with full access to the hardware. This is what they need. And then compare against the alternatives that anounce and anounce and talk and talk.

Think big.

ciao

@Mikey_C

Shocking isnt it.. considering the A1200 went up to ?425 at one point and the A500 debuted at ?599.99....

@Mikey_C

Quote:

I agree that 600 Eur is a lot of money, but you also have to consider what you get for it. Especially when you compare CPU speed and other possibilities of the PS3 with Amy or Sam. The technology of the PS3 is much more advanced and to be honest the Amy looks outdated in comparison. If I can ever get OS4 running on PS3, my friends will be very impressed, I am sure! And you can also use it for PS3 games or watch high-res movies. It's not only the computer that you get. More like a multi-purpose device. And as Mike has said, prices might drop in the future.

@mausle

I agree 100%!

@mausle

I seriously doubt Hyperion will get full access to the PS3 hardware. Perhaps Sony will change their stance on the limitation at some point or we might see a hack, but probably not for the foreseeable future.

Still with the power that lays in the CELL I'm sure Hyperion could do something interesting with it. Atm. I think it's all about Amiga and Hyperion getting their dispute settled, preferably out of court. After that we might see some progress.

Hi Mikey_C,


Well, let's look at numbers.....

PS3, what, I don't have the numbers but was it 1 Tera flop or something? A Sam, 1% of that, hmmmm, a little less, I think.

3.2 GHz vs. 550 MHz? (That's ~6x.)

DDR3 ram!!!!!

AND it's 64 bit!!!!!


Also, ALL will have the same graphics subsystem, heck ALL the subsystems will be identical. That's VERY powerful. Only ONE driver set is necessary.

Then, sure there's a FPGA in the Sam, but aren't the SPEs like having SEVEN FPGAs at the same time?!?!!

Also, NO NEED for DVD or BluRay codecs, it's an innate ability of the mechanism.

Then there's the added bonus of playing all the big PS3 titles. Oh and the big PS2 titiles, and while I'm at it, the PS1 big HIT titles too, why not?

Then, there's MAME, .... and emulators that should be able to duplicate ALMOST ANY console before the Wii and xbuxz 36zer0.


Name one, other than those 2, that the PS3 won't be able to emulate????


So, how much would you pay for THAT???!?

BUT WAIT, there's more....



AOS4.0, UAE (1.0 to 3.9) and Aminet!!!!!!!


Amiga! AOS4.x! "Victory is mine!" -- guess the orator

@Atheist

There is a serious problem with the PS3.
It does not allow direct access to graphics and
some other components.

So you get no hardware acceleration for the gfx,
not for 3D, not for 2D.

I really would like to see how it performs regardless
of this serious limitation.

Disabling HW support in Amithlon makes a huge difference.

@Shadowolf

Quote:

No acceleration of 3D, are you sure? That sounds like a big drawback, because you couldn't use Warp3D or other acceleration that talks to the graphics card. All would need to be made in software like on old 1MB ISA graphics cards! I think old games and 3D stuffs will run ok because the CELL is fast, but is this really what we want?
I have read that someone managed to run Quake3 on the PS3 with Linux with a lot of hassle, very complicated to install. Is it possible to run this without hardware acceleration? Is it fast enough? It would be sad if we can't have fast 3D games on the PS3 when talking to the hardware through the layer. Even more peoples would only play games without OS4 then and buy games from big companies.
I have to find the link again describing this.

@Shadowolf

I have only seen Yellowdog Linux in action on the PS3 and using some common apps like browser, gimp etc it runs just fine.

I haven't seen any 3D stuff running but shouldn't the PS3 have enough CPU power to run whatever we have available now, even without hardware acceleration?

@Troels

Quote:

I have searched for the article that describes Quake3 on PS3 and finally found it. Quake 3 on PS3 Feodora

The peoples in the comments describe it as very slow, some is even joking if it is running at 5fps. The video has been removed, maybe because it showed PS3 in a negative light. I don't know why.

I have also looked for information about the layer, it's called Hypervisor. Here you can see a picture how it works.

The access to the graphics card and acceleration is completely restricted by this, all you have is a simple framebuffer like 20 years ago!

The Hypervisor is something like a virtualization package. Running Linux or AmigaOS on PS3 can be compared to running Linux with Vista using VMWare.

I have used VMWare to run Linux on Vista. It is very nice to have and convenient, but you cannot compare it to running Linux directly without virtualization. All 3D games run unplayably slow and you cannot have all the great XGL effects which make the desktop pretty.

Maybe there is a CELL-mainboard that we can use instead of the PS3, so without all the restrictions? Does IBM plan to make a desktop board with CELL?

@Helge

That doesn't sound to encouraging, so basically it will only be usefull for lighter 2D applications unless a you get access directly to the hardware or a hack magically arrives at some point.

I think Terrasoft have some CELL hardware but my thought with the PS3 was that it was reasonably priced and available everywhere with fixed hardware that was easy to support. Guess there is no CELL/PPC hardware that will really fulfill that now.

@Troels

There are even more trouble with PS3 and foreign OSes. Check this out:

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks ... /pa-linuxps3-1/index.html

According to this aricle if you don't have HDCP-capable display then the maximum screen resolution would be 576x384. Checking the prices of the HDCP-capable devices, I won't get one any time soon.

@rachy

No that?s not where nice

@MikeB

Quote:

But they are already doing mass-production, so I don't think this is a very good argument.

According to the spokesman of Sony Computer Entertainment America Kimberly Otzman, the PS3 prices will not drop for at least another two years!

Hi Helge,


They'll HAVE to drop their prices, due to the 36zero lowering theirs, and also, the Bluray manufacturing cost should come down too. Just like DVD-RWs used to cost $1200, now they're $90 for a top of the line unit.


HD-DVD players will TROUNCE them, if they don't lower prices.

@Helge

Quote:
Not according to Mikael Haglund at the last AmiGBG, at least. This may of course have changed since then.

I attended a talk today at the Copenhagen Linux-Forum, where a professor from the Copenhagen University specialising in supercomputing told about how they (the supercomputing "nerds") had convinced IBM that the CELL was useful not only for games consoles, but at least as much in the supercomputing field. They had taken delivery of some of the first blade servers with CELLs and had done a number of experiments and benchmarks etc. with them.

The two main points I walked away with were:

a) Yes, the CELL can (CAN) deliver pretty good improvements in performance (also for a lower cost/wattage/cooling) over a similarly clocked Intel thingy (don't remember the model they compared with).

b) This requires utilising the chip to its full. And that's not something any programmer will be able to do. There is no helpful features such as prefetching, branch prediction etc. as has been the norm on previous generations of modern CPUs. Everything has to be done by the programmer. A good utilisation of the chip's power involves dividing tasks into many independent threads (he gave an example with 18, I think, just for a simple task, and that was without having something else to take over when waiting for resources outside the processor, e.g. main memory, disk).
He estimated that only about 10% of current programmers would be able to pull this off in a reasonable way.

And we were not (as I thought at first) talking machine code here; their experiments had all been done in C, as that was the only language available to them so far. They were expecting to get Fortran at their disposal (apparently the supercomputing people's language of choice ) soonish.

If this is a realistic picture, I can understand why we haven't heard more from Hyperion about porting OS4 to the CELL; personally, I wouldn't want to touch such a project with a bargepole :-/

Of course, you could always port it to "just" the PPE (I think that's what the PPC compatible part of the CELL is called), but that would be a real waste, wouldn't it? Sort of like driving your 4.2 litre SUV half a kilometer down the road to the baker's and back Sunday afternoon? (Oh wait, people actually do that nowadays ...)

Best regards,

Niels