Hello everybody :) I came over a very interesting article from 2003, but it's pretty much relevant for today...
Think about it. It started many years ago as a huge CPU-debate: The x86 vs PPC, and we might know the most...
We will not focus on the past where PPC many years ago was popular for the desktop market, but what will be happening now in present time, in 2010 and beyond...
But before that we will look deep into the reason why x86 has dominated the desktop market as the CPU of choice the last 15 years. I think the answers will interest you all..
The main reason is Microsoft's huge market influence they have through their monopholy, which has made it almost impossible for competitors to provide better, cheaper and smarter solutions..
Through their partnership with Intel and AMD, they have pushed x86 CPUs to what we know of them today. Extremely fast, powerful and ridicilous cheap and pretty easily available everywhere. Apple fell into their own trap and escaped with a cowardly choice: Ditching the extremely efficient PPC in favour of x86. Companies like SI and some Linux distributors as Fedora have also fallen into the trap and ditched PPC for x86...
Many might think: "But x86 is the best choice. It's the cheapest, most available speediest CPU to get. Everybody supports it, and Windows can only run on x86..."
That's exactly that. Microsoft's dominance prevented other and better solutions to make an important impact, but this is likely to change now. Microsoft seems to be loosing ground and influence as they get report of more trouble with the x86 technology than good news actually. The problem with x86 has always been heat when trying to become more powerful and faster..
PPC in the other hand has always generated low heat and long been based on RISC-architecture. Many of us have seen how effective it was under AmigaOS4 and several Linux-systems. Very flexible and very attractive..
But until now, PPC used to be very expensive and became harder to get because of Microsoft increased dominance on the desktop market with Windows and x86 CPUs. The great news are that IBM is still developing newer PPC chips based on newer POWER architecture, not wanting to give up, and other CPU companies have now jumped in to join IBM in the development of a futuristic, cost-effective, multi-flexible PPC solution that will finally be competitive with x86!
We now also have Freescale, AMCC and P.A Semi. CELL too seems very interesting, but it's not the ideal choice for the moment...
I think that A-EON and Hyperion Entertainment knew more than they were letting on, when carefully deciding the CPU for AmigaOne X1000. If we look closer to the spesifications of X1000 in general, we will realize that it uses exactly much the same technology of today's x86-systems, so the only difference is now the main CPU.
This is very interesting, and so i believe that X1000 will show the world why PPC again can become the greatest, most attractive CPU alternative, also to the desktop market, as the embedded market.
The link here will give you a better understanding of what i have tried to say here:
Helgis wrote: We now also have Freescale, AMCC and P.A Semi. CELL too seems very interesting, but it's not the ideal choice for the moment...
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.
This is very interesting, and so i believe that X1000 will show the world why PPC again can become the greatest, most attractive CPU alternative, also to the desktop market, as the embedded market.
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.
With due respect. No matter how right you might be, many of you lack a positive and optimistic perspective on things..
It's called being realistic. Try it sometime.
Quote:
I'm confident that A-EON and Hyperion Entertainment know the real answer and might provide a surprising answer to our questions...
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...
Oh i am pretty much sure they knew exactly what CPU to have on the motherboard. You are really underestimating these people...
Don't forget that the Amiga is to celebrate its' 25th anniversary in summer. This mean that something big and very important has to happen in the Amiga scene...
The answer is AmigaOne X1000....
If i happen to have right, which is very likely, would several of you appologize in private to me? It seems that so many of you think that i am just a stupid dreamer who is stuck in the past. That is not the case...
I know exactly what i am speaking of, and when it comes to the Amiga, i know what i am talking about. I never lie or joke about the Amiga. I am pretty damn serious...
I am realistic. I have been that the whole time, but i never gave up the belief of the Amiga. I never stopped hoping that the Amiga will do it again...
I strongly believe we are into a great change this year. Microsoft is no longer having the same impact and influence on people as they used to. Several people are now realising that they simply can be free and make their own choice...
Why be so blind to choose a fugitive, easy solution the x86 and Windows is? Why not simply think deeper into technology and ask yourself what would simply be the best? Everybody knows that PPC is a better solution than x86, and i am not talking about how much Ghz and how cheap it is. I am talking about the overall performance and how little heat a CPU is to give at the same time. The PPC provides that kind of efficiency...
Neither you and i are the right person to judge such technology. There are key persons behind these types of development who will be the judge of that, and don't think that the developers of the new Amiga hardware don't know what they are doing, because they do, and they surely know a lot more than we all do on this site!
Soon to own a powerful AmigaOne X1000 with latest AmigaOS 4.1 incarnation ;) Dual Core PPC!
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?
The answer is that i was blind like so many of you. I too thought that the x86 was the best and the only choice, until i came over that article. Yes, some might laugh and think: "It's from 2003, so what!", but it's relevant for what is happening now in 2010...
I am now realising how smart, effective and powerful the new PPC chips are getting today, and they have adopted much the same technology of today's x86s..
And i am trying to understand the way A-EON and Hyperion Entertainment are thinking...
Why being blind sheeps following the leader of the cliff, when we can be the smart sheep choosing our own destiny, walking our own path?
Soon to own a powerful AmigaOne X1000 with latest AmigaOS 4.1 incarnation ;) Dual Core PPC!
To me it (just) seems that new embedded PPC SoC chips start to be powerfull enough to perform pretty well on dekstop. (for almost any desktop use/need)
But I'm 99% sure that PPC will not be back on desktop mainstream.
It might have some bigger chance on notebooks and other more mobile devices, if it manages to compete with ARM. This year is crusial, IMHO. If all next gen PPC SoC chips from all major PPC companies are in broduction at the end of this year, I'm sure a lot of companies will check them out carefully.
If everything goes well, PPC will be very good for Amiga niche, otherwise it seems that it is just "ok".
PS. I hope four core Titan core chips are available next year for A1X2000 ... ;-P
And i assume you are the Amiga God that has ALL the right answers, is that so? Would you have a private speak with A-EON and Hyperion Entertainment, claiming that they are wrong and you are right? That you know the truth and they don't? That you are realistic, and they and everybody else following them are not?
That's a bold claim...
Soon to own a powerful AmigaOne X1000 with latest AmigaOS 4.1 incarnation ;) Dual Core PPC!
It's a pretty good argument, no doubt of that, but again think of it...
If you look close at the AmigaOne X1000, knowing for sure that it is a desktop computer, the PPC can surprisingly become a great alternative CPU platform for the desktop market again. 2 points for PPC will be important there. Low-heat efficiency and low prices...
When the last one is becoming a fact for PPC, then there is no reason why PPC shouldn't be an important alternative CPU for the desktop market also..
Soon to own a powerful AmigaOne X1000 with latest AmigaOS 4.1 incarnation ;) Dual Core PPC!
I'm just claiming that you are wrong, not Hyperion or A-EON (honestly I don't know what they think...). POWER market is embedded and industry, is that hard to understand ?
X86 are where different from 64bit Intel chips used to day, heavy cut back on 486, 386 instructions making CPU?s even more risk based then they used to be in the past, the huge production volume of the Intel and AMD processors compared to PowerPC.
Right now PowerPC is locked in to the Server market and high end embedded devices like quality routers, half way competing whit ARM on middle end devices, ARM and Texas Instruments competing on the low end devices.
Most of the embedded devices runs Linux and there is does not require any special CPU type, so at the end of the day it?s about price, performance and requirements, not about what type of CPU you have.
One might say that AmigaOS is in a where unsecure environment at the movement, where the CPU development does not necessarily go in the direction we like, things were different when we were not alone needing a PowerPC, it?s really a shame Apple changed their minds about PowerPC, and moved to Intel chips, AmigaOS4.1 is hardly any excuse for IBM to produce desktop chips again, but AmigaOS might become a good excuse in the future if it does support multiprocessing and provides a level of user friendly software, one can only hope that IBM sees some value in AmigaOS, and are willing to help out, just think if only 0.1% present of IBM resources where put in to making AmigaOS a complete package, Fast CPU, OS and software, putting AmigaOS where MacOS was in the past.
I?m afraid that IBM as out sold them self whit Open Source Linux Community, maybe they should have moved the OS/2 development to PowerPC back in the days.
Edited by LiveForIt on 2010/4/1 2:28:44
(NutsAboutAmiga)
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Helgis wrote: If you look close at the AmigaOne X1000, knowing for sure that it is a desktop computer, the PPC can surprisingly become a great alternative CPU platform for the desktop market again. 2 points for PPC will be important there. Low-heat efficiency and low prices...
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.
It's merely still uncertain what direction CPU development will take, and how this will affect the Amiga. As i have been told myself, debating x86 vs PPC for Amiga is irrelevant as things seem to be now...
But there seem to be a hint of PPC trying now to make a return to the desktop computing as an important alternative better CPU...
There might be an important strategy for A-EON and Hyperion Entertainment for the reason to use PPC in AmigaOne X1000. I see 2 strategies here..
1. A-EON/Hyperion Entertainment realise they have to let AmigaOne X1000 use modern PowerPC CPU that supports the industry-standard components the X1000 motherboard will use, and so have to let the latest AmigaOS 4.1, that also is PowerPC-based, support the technology that the X1000 provides and complete the AmigaOS with the missing parts: Multi-processing SMP-support, full 64-bit based AmigaOS, Java, security, Xena-support, new graphic subsystem, perhaps even new audio subsystem, full HD-support through HDMI and better 3D-technology..
It might seems a lot of work to do, but would be necessary if that is the longterm strategy, to let PPC be the future CPU for Amiga and bringing that to new heighs...
2. Same as 1, but in addition when fully completing AmigaOS4 with all these features, perhaps then finally decide if the Amiga should change CPU direction to x86 and simply bring this modern AmigaOS to x86...
But in overall, i don't think we should "bury" PPC yet. It might just seems now that it's returning back from the shadows to again become an important, alternative CPU-platform of choice...
Soon to own a powerful AmigaOne X1000 with latest AmigaOS 4.1 incarnation ;) Dual Core PPC!
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