Boing Pi?

Hey all,

Not being at all knowledgeable on all things PowerPC outside of the Amiga side of things, and considering the huge sucess of the Raspberry Pi and the achievement the foundation have managed already with much more to come, I am left with some thoughts and queries.

Considering the design of the Raspberry Pi, is it concievable that such a board could be produced with an equivalent PowerPC processor. The problem is from looking at AppliedMicro and Freescale, unless I am going blind, there appears to be no "true" SoCs from either company using PPC - only ARM based product. (By "true" SoC I mean something that would be suitable for home computing like the Broadcom processor on the Pi with a GPU core and sound capabilities).

Obviously this is due to ARM becomming rather dominant in mobile tech.

So to be more succinct, would a PowerPC based variation on the Raspberry Pi concept be possible, at a cost not too far away from that of the Pi, and would it be possible to build a plug-into-the-tv wedgie AIO Amiga running OS4 perhaps with two SD card ports to allow use as two floppy drives would have on our A500s, and have the cost at around £100...?

Well £100 for the hardware at least as I guess AmigaOS 4.2 would be £s more.

I am also trying to think back - Hyperion 100% ruled out AmigaOS on x86/x64, and even with AmigaOS 4.x pushing forwards to 64-bit, I personally feel that a supported port to low cost 32-bit ARM achitecture would be massively beneficial (ie the ability to purchase AmigaOS 4.2 for Raspberry Pi would allow the production of licensed Raspberry Pi boards as low coast entry level home computers in very much the traditional sense... just have to add a geek port ;))

Question is would Hyperion even remotely be interested in such a move, being as PowerPC seems to becomming less and less end-user targetted with the technology seemingly exiting from the console market, and having little penetration into any end user product?

Rasberry Pi HW is far too slow for AOS4 and has too little RAM + poor mass storage.

"That is, graphics capabilities are roughly equivalent to Xbox 1 level of performance. Overall real world performance is something like a 300MHz Pentium 2, only with much, much swankier graphics."

I have a SAM440ep 667Mhz and IMHO, any slower would be almost totally unusable as desktop.


There are at least two PPC chips from freescale that have GPU on the same chip.

MPC5121e ( most likely the Amiga Netbook is based on this, http://www.limefree.org/limebook.asp I saw it somewhere sold below 300EUR)
It's not far performance wise from the rasberry Pi, even though it's old chip. LimePC X1 is based on the same chip, but it does not come with display or keyboard, it has been sold at 99eur, IIRC. http://www.limefree.org/
Another is MPC6810D (IIRC), but it only has 2D onboard.

Some time ago Verisilicon demonstrated that it is able to put PPC460+GPU on the same die. But that product is not available to buy. Also there has been rumors about CC2200 chip that would be a 800Mhz PPC with 3D GPU.
So... PPC+GPU is possible, but for decent speed you need to pay someone (like Verisilicon) to do a custom chip run.

I would be more personally interested in an updated sam460ex style design with either more memory or an updated processor keeping the GPU entirely seperate from the CPU unless the GPU comes with other IO functions for being part of a chipset implementation.

other than that would there really be any point considering "desktop" equipment has to be of considerable usability vs just being an older mobile device

Where the Pi has cheap hardware it also comes at the cost of lower specifications.

The price is the entire point in this case for me. An entry level Amiga that plugs into a TV at around £100-£150 with the OS - a modern A500/A1200 that's the same kinda low cost compared with PCs as the A500 and A1200 were back in the day. That's what the name Amiga means to me - an accessible home computer that kids can learn computing/programming etc with as well as play games. A true successor to the A500 and A1200, which, due to price points, none of the AmigaOS 4.x hardware are (though to be fair, the price points of the AmigaOnes, and Sams are as low as you can expect thus a different approach may be needed, and even the touted netbook sounds expensive for what it is, especially in the current environment.)

@KimmoK

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I disagree. It is currently usable running Linux, which is slower than AOS4. Also, AFAIK the Raspberry Pi is more powerful than classic PowerPC Amigas. If AOS4 were ported to it, it would probably run nicely.

Having said that, I don't see the Raspberry Pi as a desktop. It's a nice (cheap) toy for tinkering, and for teaching children about computers. However, it's too limited to compete with a modern desktop. Having 256 MiB shared RAM/VRAM is quite limiting, even though it's perfect for what they're trying to achieve.

My A1-X1000 is noticeably faster than my Sam460ex. This is evident even with simple tasks such as a text search through a PDF. Personally, I'm not interested in any AmigaOS 4 device that's much slower than a Sam460ex, unless it's a mobile device.


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From memory, those on-board 2D graphics modules are little more than display controllers, i.e., there is no GPU for hardware acceleration. The MPC5121e's PowerVR is usable, but it's good enough for OpenGL-ES 1 only (no shaders). By contrast, the Raspberry Pi's GPU is good enough for OpenGL-ES 2.0, which means that it has shaders. It even has a 1080p AVC decoder. The current integrated GPU in PowerPC chips are embarrassing in comparison. Of course, ARM manufacturers can justify the cost of developing these CPU+GPU combos, because of the volume of mobile devices that need them.

While discussing the Raspberry Pi is interesting, for AmigaOS 4.x I think that it would be better to keep the limited talent and resources focused on improving the OS and the support for existing hardware. If Hyperion did continually chase the latest and greatest hardware, then nothing would ever be properly supported.

In particular, a port to an ARM device like the Raspberry Pi would take longer than to another PowerPC CPU, and then you'd have to write yet another set of drivers for totally new devices. Device drivers take a lot of work to develop (which makes them expensive), so the best plan for any new hardware would be to look for SOCs (and peripheral chips) that contain mostly devices that are already supported. The fewer completely new peripherals, the better.

Hans

Ok - looking at it from another perspective. The A500 especially was a paradigm shift from the computers general available for home use when it was released. To repeat that paradigm shift - is x86 really the only way? Clearly at a "home computer" price point it is impossible to compete with a £2000 PC in a toe to toe fight in the same way that the A500 at £399.99 obliterated a £2000 PC in 1989. However is there another development thread, or is it simply just a case that the games consoles now completely own that space with people having to own a games console and a cheap PC to do what the traditional home computers did?

I kinda feel sorry for my kids not having the opportunity to have something like my A500 or A1200, and alongside the PS3 (the 360 barely ever gets switched on), the Raspberry Pi might fill in some of the gap, hence my train of thought.

May i suggest that we reserve judgement on the Pi performance until it is out. It always surprises me the comments of to slow. We will see later in year how well my project works out and then this question will be answered.

Anyone with half a brain would quickly see that getting OS4 onto the RaspberryPi would be a stroke of genius... it's built for OS's like AmigaOS and what better way to allow AmigaOS to spread than to have it available on hardware that costs £35!

Was AmigaOS not already ported to ARM ages ago too?

As for the Pi not being designed to be a platform for a mainstream OS; that's perfect, we don't have a mainstream OS in our hands, we have a niche OS, and this is a niche platform. They go hand in hand and this could seriously raise AmigaOS's profile.

Am I missing something here, or what...

@slash

No you are not missing anything, it is clear to me that Amiga needs to be on Raspberry Pi.

What people are missing when they say lets build a PPC version, is that Raspberry Pi is hot in the world media and will stay there for a while. Anything else is just to be left out in the cold.

AmigaOS isn't on ARM - which frankly is something that would open up a whole world of possibilities. PowerPC is losing an awful lot of funding as time goes on from what I can see.

In the meantime getting AROS onto the Pi is a fantastic project - but forgive my wish, ClusterUK,that Amiga OS4.2 was coming to it.

I think it's not time for a architecture switch for AOS4.
ARM is not yet as powerfull as PPC.
x86 does not yet fit in tyny devices as well as PPC.

The imagineable $$$$$$ spent on ARM porting should rather be used to try to get similar but more powerfull PPC product for AOS4 low end.

about performance:
Rasberry Pi developers say it has the performance of P2@300Mhz.
Imagine that + the expansion limitations...
The HW sounds identical to xbox1 downclocked to 300Mhz..

Thing is there doesn't appear to be a PPC equivalent processor :(

@svenof9

There is no PPC chip with equally powerfull 3D.
But with 2D, the P1022 would be pretty ok. And when it's dualcore 1Ghz unit, it would be able to do some 3D by the CPU. And it can handle GPU connected via PCIe x4.

(P1022 should be able to deliver around 5000MIPS, on a picoITX design it might appeal to some opensorceHandheld and netbook builders, for laptop you would need to ad a mobile GPU)

btw: CommodorePi

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The display controller in the P1022 is just that, a display controller. As such, it has NO 2D acceleration either, so it wouldn't be okay. It's definitely not comparable to the GPU in the Raspberry Pi. In fact, that LCD controller is as good as useless for our purposes. Getting the CPU to do all of the graphics is too slow, and at total odds with the original Amiga's design, which used dedicated processors for each task.

I wish that there were a decent PowerPC + GPU combo (by which I mean, has shaders, so the MPC5121e is out), but we don't. This means added cost, as the GPU has to be provided separately. I'm not complaining though, because the PCIe graphics cards that we have access to are far more powerful than the one built into the Raspberry Pi (and have dedicated VRAM).

Hans

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IIRC, the AmigaOS promotion website that Hyperion had years ago said something about being able to port the OS to other CPU architectures such as ARM if you really wanted it (and were willing to pay for it). However, I don't remember seeing anything to indicate that it had ever been done.

Hans

Will be better that Amiga OS 4.x runs on PPC Macs, at least this hardware is very good and for the same price although the second hand.