

A new Amiga with customizable coprocessor - ams6110
http://www.osnews.com/story/22693/New_Amiga_Sports_Programmable_Co-Processor_Dualcore_PPC

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jacquesm
The persistence of the Amiga people is definitely something to learn from.

If anybody ever wants to put an end to it they'd better bring some garlic,
wooden stakes and silver bullets.

~~~
mynameishere
The Amiga is similar to the Mac to the extent that the users loved it. Unlike
the Mac however, the parent company detested and destroyed the Amiga.

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jacquesm
I remember when they first came out and literally standing glued to the floor,
multiple active windows, it was the first time I ever saw that.

The only other machines at the time capable of doing that were priced way out
of ordinary mortals budget.

There as the Acorn 'unicorn', probably the cheapest and then right away big $
stuff like the Apollos.

There was no way I could afford a machine like that (nor the Amiga, for that
matter, at least not at that time) so I stuck to my trusty 8 bitter for a bit
longer and built the Elektuur 'GDP', a hardware assist for vector graphics.

But it never looked as good as the Amiga OS.

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Luc
> [...] I stuck to my trusty 8 bitter for a bit longer and built the Elektuur
> 'GDP', a hardware assist for vector graphics.

Interesting... This one?
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Electron#Slogger.2FElektu...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Electron#Slogger.2FElektuur_Turbo_Board)

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jacquesm
Close :) BBC model B.

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topbanana
10/10 for persistence. I'm sure it'll run BeOS too before long ;)

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ashleytowers
Whilst this is interesting technology wise and may open impressive
possibilities... so what? Without a solid install base why would I spend my
time writing impressive software that is tied to this machine? Profit? No
install base = no customers. Hubris? No install base = no one to impress.

I'm fully aware this is a chicken and egg situation...

(I say all of the above as a total Amiga fanboy from back in the day!)

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Retric
I think it's designed for the number crunchers out there. A GPU can crush a
CPU for some applications but there is a huge middle ground between a GPU and
a CPU.

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vidarh
Why do you think it's designed for the number crunchers? I want one (I'm an
ex-Amiga user, and still miss it...), but I certainly don't think a dual core
PowerPC + a 400 MIPS co-processor is going to be cost/performance competitive
with a suitable x86-64 based server at this stage. In fact, I'd be surprised
if it was much faster than my current $600 laptop.

The XCORE ("Xena") co-processor they've added is exciting, but because of the
hard-realtime capabilities / low latency and IO lines, not for raw
performance.

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Retric
I was thinking of the people that crunch numbers not the programs. I don't
think it's designed for a production environment; rather it's a dev box that
lets you explore programmable processors. I think they avoided making an x86
with coprocessor because they want to own the dev environment for such things,
but the innovation is all about that coprocessor.

PS: 1x Xorro slot with a card that's 102400 MIPS is fast. An example of number
crunching would be real time encoding of super? HD (4x 1080p). Or a custom
high bandwidth router etc.

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vidarh
I don't consider it a dev box as much as a box intended to satisfy Amiga
hobbyists, some of which may use it for development, but a lot of which just
want a non-x86 box running AmigaOS at decent speeds... Keep in mind that the
people behind this are long time Amiga supporters - they're not in this for
the sake of the XCore.

For the people who _are_ interested in the XCore, it's cheap to buy USB
attached dev-board, so this only really matters if you want to play with a
system that _may_ have significantly tighter integration (we don't really know
yet how tight).

For the Amiga community, an x86 box would've been a non-starter. The people in
the most likely buying segment for this box are people that have stuck to
ancient "classic" Amigas, or at best upgraded to sub 1GHz single-core PowerPC
boards running newer versions of AmigaOS, that they've paid more for than what
you'd pay for a quad core 2GHz+ x86 box. Most of them would've been happy with
"just" another PowerPC machine, but the XCore adds some extra excitement and
may entice a few ex-Amigans like me to have a go for the fun too.

> PS: 1x Xorro slot with a card that's 102400 MIPS is fast. An example of
> number crunching would be real time encoding of super? HD (4x 1080p). Or a
> custom high bandwidth router etc.

The 102400 MIPS is an example based on a hypothetical card that doesn't exist,
though.

For comparison, XMOS themselves sells a roughly 25000 MIPS experimental board
for $1500, so while you can make it fast, it'd also be fairly expensive and it
does require a new product.

I _am_ excited about having the XCORE chip there, and I may buy an X1000 (who
am I kidding, I will buy one unless the price is absolutely outrageous), but I
_am_ an ex-Amiga guy and would buy it in part because I still really love the
whole Amiga experience, without any illusion that I couldn't do most of the
same things on a PC much cheaper in most instances.

When it comes to the XCORE what excites me about it, rather than performance,
is that it will be standard. In other words, (the few) people who write Amiga
software can soon reasonably rely on having it available in the computers of
most users of their software. People are already thinking up all kinds of
bizarre uses for it.

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Retric
Thanks for the background. When I read:

"We believe that with this easy gateway to the world of 'Software Defined
Silicon' and a path to massive parallelism, the X1000 will once more make the
AmigaOS platform the best choice for truly creative and unique applications.
For custom hardware control from robotics to theatrical lighting, for
_hobbyist creativity, for hardware hacking_ and for a multitude of
applications we haven't even imagined yet, the X1000 is a dream platform - and
therein lies another meaning of 'X', the unknown. _It is you, not us, who will
define the future._ "

I thought it was a great way to attract hobbyist developers. A quad core 2+
GHz x86 chip can do an insane amount of computation quickly and cheaply and
even a mid range GPU takes that to a whole other level. I don't know how many
flops you can get per MIPS on XCore, but if you are handcrafting at that level
you can do things for less power than a CPU while having more flexibility than
a GPU.

It never really occurred to me that people where still using the Amiga OS.
From that standpoint it's much more evolutionary than revolutionary, but still
cool.

PS: In my mind computer hobbyists and developer often mean just about the same
thing. But, I realize developer makes people think of Software Developer not a
HW dev.

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jorsh
Oh cool. A dead platform jumps onto another dead platform. The concept of a
modern Amiga has gotten beyond ridiculous at this point.

