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That "high-end" computer is less powerful than a Xbox 360 which has a 3,2GHz Tripple-Core PowerPC G5 CPU.

Nope, Xenon and G5 are very different. The G5 is an out-of-order quite wide superscalar processor with a deep pipeline and no hyperthreading.

The XBOX 360 Xenon is an in-order not so wide superscalar processor with a shorter pipeline and hyperthreading.

Instead, the Xenon is rather similar to the Cell PowerPC core.

Edited 2010-01-05 18:32 UTC

Then it's strictly not a G5 CPU. Whatever. Still more powerful than the Amiga one...

Sure it has just already minimal Linux to run developing tools, benchmark and computing stress tests.

See for example this teasing image of X1000 running Processor stress tests brought to public by A-EON firm:

http://a-eon.com/gfx/hidden.png

In this age, when you bought large number of processors in quantities, manufacturers will give you the software developing tools bundled with it and usually these tools are already written in Linux environment (even if minimal kernel distro).

Any Portings could be done in not so much time...

Edited 2010-01-05 14:45 UTC

If Intel's Larabee and AMD's Fusion projects are any indication, then its heading in that direction. First step will be to get the CPU and GPU on the same die, then the next inevitable step will be to make the GPU more general purpose (GPGPU). Or more likely, we'll have both steps happening simultaneously.

Intel's goal with Larabee (which is more ambitious - effectively merging the CPU & GPU concepts) may be a tad early (thus why its debut as a consumer product has been delayed), but with those projects, and the momentum/desire behind CUDA and OpenCL, the writing is now on the wall: soon enough, GPUs won't be just for graphics anymore.

For a number of years now graphics cards have been used by advanced music production software as a means of rendering real time audio.

I forget the technical name for the technique, but essentially even older graphics cards were good for *some* music filters (due to the video RAM and the way how GPUs were designed to process some graphical filters efficiently.

IIRC the technique involved creating an image map for the sound and running it through the graphics buffers in a similar way as you would with 3D modeling.

This technique allowed for the more humble system to truly parallel process audio in a time before dual core/processor PCs were common place on the desktop / smaller studio.

Have any sites talking about that? That sounds really cool. I've heard vague mentions of this sort of thing, but never any in-depth. I find stuff like that very interesting

Apologises that it's as most in depth link as you were looking for (it was a quick and lazy Google at work), but the following link from 2004 shows the concept and some of the guys behind the work:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/audio-supercomputer-hidden-graphic...

People used to do something similar, by loading raw PCM data into image editing programs and running various effects on it...

That sounds amazingly cool... I wonder if that can be done in GIMP?

Very true.
In fact, now you mention it, you've reminded me how the practice of converting photos to audio is/was fairly common among some electronica acts (one of the more known instances is how Aphex Twin's face appears if you play the intro of "Come To Daddy" in a spectrograph).

IIRC the process is very straightforward too as all you need is a grey-scale image and you can (for want a better term) "reverse spectrograph" it (in that the image light waves are converted to sound waves and the 2D width element of the image would be translated as time in the output audio so the wider the picture the longer the audio clip).

Needless to say, unless you're careful, the output is usually just noise. But many artists used this trick to place hidden images in their work

Yeah I used to do that in the old Octamed/ProTracker days.

Seems like only GIFs made good sound effects though, JPEGs were almost always straight noise.

In terms of GHz, you're right, but these days clock speeds are a poor indicator for a chips performance.

"Capable of eight concurrent real-time threads with shared memory space, at up to 400 MIPS"

400 MIPS? A Pentium Pro from 1996 does 541 MIPS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Million_instructions_per_second#Timeli...


"Reference boards have been made with up to 256 cores, offering a theoretical 102400 MIPS."

A single Intel Core i7 965EE CPU does 76383 MIPS.

xcore is not a conventional cpu so no direct comparison can be made

Edited 2010-01-05 20:09 UTC

It's unconventional 400 MIPS then...

oh, boy! another sisoft sandra benchmark poster ...
I hope you at least understand how theoretical MIPS are calculated (MHz * sustained ips).
I could even guess the site you have copy+pasted your data from

*facepalm*

The 400 MIPS refers to the COPROCESSOR. COPROCESSOR.

CO.

Got it?

The PPC offers few architectural advantages over a modern Intel x86-64 chip an certainly any company producing this new PPC won't have the technology to implement their chip so that I could outperform intel on any level.

A dual core 1.5Ghz PPC is going to perform no better than the cheapest budget CPU from intel.

Running Logic Pro on my 1.5Ghz G4 and 2Ghz Athlon64 showed that the G4 was half as powerful as the Athlon64.

The OSX fat binary solution requires more HD space, but only one chunk is loaded into memory... The chunk with the correct instruction set... The PPC version of OSX only loads the code relavant to it, it has no effect on speed of execution...


The PPC couldn't get enough money behind it to keep development equal to Intel and AMD, the CPU architecture offers few advantages over the x86-64 and has not had the same level of implementation development work done it... No PPC solution got offer the same price/performance ratio as x86-64... Apple were wise to get off that platform!

Edited 2010-01-05 16:36 UTC

As long as ancient G4 have Front Side Bus stuck just at 266MHz it does not surprise me.

G4 had suffered for any data transfer waiting for raw data to be input and elaborated data to be output.

BTW Was not Athlon64 FSB running at 800MHz?

Modern PPCs have more performant FSB running at decent speed so they do not suffer anymore of bottlenecks in data transferring with their peripherals and RAM.

Edited 2010-01-05 17:30 UTC

The Athlon64 has an integrated memory controller and as such lacks a conventional Front Side Bus. It's hypertransport interconnect does run at 800mhz, but this was mostly irrelevant for single socket performance.

While the PowerPC ISA is more elegant than the AMD64 ISA, comparing the G4 micro-architecture with the Athlon64, the G4 has a nice vector unit but loses in things such as maximum instructions in flight and issue width. So it is no big surprise the Athlon64 is faster. It should be expected to remain faster even if the G4 had a fast FSB.

Modern PPC chips are either too expensive and power hungry for desktop systems (POWER) or extremely specialised and largely unsuitable for general purpose computing (ie general purpose apps perform poorly) like the chips used in gaming consoles where the code is optimized specifically for the cpu.

The G5 chip doesn't perform very well compared to an Athlon64, they are only available in dual core form at up to 2.3ghz (maybe 2.5?) which can no way compete with modern 4 and 6 core chips from intel/amd.

Mac OS X never got slower on PPC after Universal Binaries were introduced.
In fact x86 and PPC code is entirely seperate, just glued together afterwards by GCC. It's easily possible to delete x86 code using either Monolingual or TrimTheFat. The only gain is saved disk space, not performance.
You can easily check by compiling some open source app as single-arch app and Universal app. There is no performance difference.

Ha, all the Apple half truths about PPC being so much better than intel bit them in the behind when they switched the Mac's processor and the intel machines at the same clock speed ran much, much, much faster....

Actually, it didn't come back to haunt them at all: Apple switched the line over to "now our machines will be cheaper and faster", and the Apple fans pretty much bought it without a second thought.

I think, if Apple started claiming that chewing broken glass had restorative properties (It cures ailments of the foot! Try it!), then probably about half of current Mac users would at least try it.

MacOS 10.4 initially launched without fat binaries on PPC...
Later versions shipped with fat binaries for x86...
10.5, which was the first full fat binary version actually runs faster than 10.4 on PPC, having fat binaries did not halve performance from the previous versions of MacOS which were PPC only.

Also, you can strip the unwanted sections from fat binaries. Doing so saves you some disk space, but doesn't improve performance.

It's not fat binaries that slow down PPC, its the fact that the PPC chips being used by Apple were far slower than x86 chips... The only PPC chips with any level of performance these days are either extremely expensive (POWER) or very specialised (Cell).

A PPC native snow leopard would be perfectly usable, but why would Apple spend so much effort on an architecture which they have fully migrated away from?

Claiming that a 1.75GHz PPC will compete with a 2.4GHz x86 doesn't mean much, modern x86 chips are available at considerably higher speeds than that, quad and even 6 core are widely available too.

Because its awesome. That's why.

Why is it that every time someone does something a little bit different, people start going on about how they should just use well established technologies. Pretty sure we'd still be using upgraded IBM 604 calculator machines if more people thought like that.

By the flip side, with computing technology, for every innovation that catches on, there's probably a hundred brilliant little innovations... that are solutions in search of problems, that don't catch on and fall flat. While it's good to have an open mind, it's also good to be a little discerning, and to wait for some real-world performance data and use cases before you start saying how awesome something is, and all the wonderful changes that it will bring.

True enough

Heck, why not use standard PC parts and a Core i7?

Because that wouldn't be an Amiga, that's why.

Before computers got all trendy and serious bussiness, geeks used them to make all kinds of crazy stuff that made no sense but was awesome.

I'd really like one of this things. Just for the sh!ts and giggles

So basically the definition of an Amiga, as far as hardware is concerned, is: "something not built out of cost-effective and powerful components"?

Don't be so rude. The new Amiga certainly is more powerful than a Nintendo Wii.

Of course, the Wii costs only costs $200 and is actually available. Those are two very important differences.

As long as Amigas were considered by the public just as game machines, they just weren't.

And you cant use Wii as desktop computer.

It is just a game console, so figure out you are really Mario and continue your tireless joking as Janitor on Wii. We are talking of computers here.

But be careful that nigga could stole your Yoshi and your Wii too...

Janitor? Mario is a plumber.

The original Amiga, hell no. Hardware-wise it was years ahead of the competition, back in its time of course. This one is a clear wink to die-hard Amiga fans that want a modern platform for Amiga OS with a few interesting hardware bits that aren't common to other platforms.

I'm not talking about then, I'm talking about now.

Edited 2010-01-05 19:18 UTC

So this new computer is not a real Amiga, because it uses PCIe slots, DDR2 RAM, SATA, IDE, and USB?
OK.

@MORB:
@KugelKurt:

Ok, I get it guys, I get it

But they don't get it ;-) - they only see MHZ and nothing else - i guarantee you they've never sat with an Amiga 1000 with 7 mhz, and screamed "my god its fast" like many of us did.

My most favorite gaming system has only half that MHz (the Super Nintendo). That doesn't mean that I want to edit photos and convert videos with it.

Actually, SNES had more like 3.5MHz 16-bit CPU... but point taken

I wrote "half of 7 Mhz". How much is 7 divided by 2? 3.5! Yay!

My most favorite gaming system has only half that MHz (the Super Nintendo). That doesn't mean that I want to edit photos and convert videos with it. "

I don't knew any serious use of Super Nintendo, did you?

While the Amiga revolutioned the world of computing with just 7 MHz CPU.

It was a matter of facts.

If you are nostalgic of 3,5 MHz Super Nimbimbo then aim at your garage and search for the box in which you left your Nintendo getting dust.

I think they do. Some people like exotic platforms, some do not. KugelKurt just seems to be bored, or maybe his cat got hit by an Amiga computer, who knows

I don't have a cat. Never had.
I'm bored and on top of that I had lots of fun making Commodore and Amiga jokes with friends when Escom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escom_%28computer_corp%29 owned the brands. I still have some shitty Commodore-branded CD tower somewhere!

Exactly. Awesomeness carries infinitely more weight than something that is practical and therefore lame.

Well, one can always troll when one is wrong.

You can say "I told you so" as much as you want to, but that doesn't make you right.

No matter what they would come up with, you would say "I told you so". If they came up with a port to x86-64, you'd say "I told you so". If they added multi-user support to that, and memory protection, .Net/mono, Java, Wine, NTFS read/write, coffee-making capabilities (which they did, sort of), and found a way to turn lead into gold, you'd still say "I told you so".

Alas, you'll never now what I would have said if they didn't announce something ridiculous, because it didn't happen.

Why?

Because it it reconfigurable, and extreamly power efficient.

You want AES encryption? Ok, here you have 1 unit with pipelineing. Do you need more parallel AES encryption? You want, 2, or maybe 10 units? Why not. Which one, 128 or 256 bit? It will reconfigure to this you really need, saving some gates.

Maybe you want other cryptographical instructions? MD5, SHA1, RSA multiplication?

Or maybe FFT? Audio filtering? AI in silico? Own fast floating point precission? Or reconfigure it to perform raytracing in realtime? Financial computations? N-body problems? parallel Decoding/encoding of mp4 to ogg and flv? Build your own specialized pipeline. Etc, etc.

Sure you can perform many of this on CUDA with very big performance gains. But, graphic cards adds lots of latency, and are very power consuming.

Posibilities are endless. For sure there are some creative pepole which will use this power to amaze us.

So don't ask "why?".

Yeah, the concept of programmable chips that can do anything is new and unheard of.
Oh wait, it's not "programmable", it's "reconfigurable". I guess that calling it differently makes it a completely new concept.

Ever since my Warp-Engine A4000 went bye-bye after almost 7 years of constant ON I have been stuck in the pc world.

Boring! Now I get to go back to Boing! Oh yeah!

Gotta get back to the A-EON site so I can hit the
pre-order button as soon as it pops up.

Of course, in those days, a basic, entry level computer usually costs upwards of $1500 (in 80's money).

There is something to be said about commoditization. I rather like knowing that I won't have to sell my car should my computer decide to stop working.

You can just afford it in 1 year and a half if you decide to stop smoking (at least if you are smoke addicted) as a packet of cigarettes actually costs about 4 euro.

A netbook is a fraction of the size, completely different class of machine. That said, a netbook will more than compete with one of these machines in it's default config.

If i want a desktop system with thousands of mips, ohh maybe i'd go for a Core i7, which running at 3.4ghz can aparrently achieve 106182 MIPS (source: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/page-262886_10_0.html)

If i wanted an even faster system, i could go for a desktop system with 2 of those processors and almost double the performance.

This would be a standard, well understood system that doesn't require any custom programming to make use of.

The 1990s called. They want their 32bit CPUs back.

*RING* It's them again. They want their joke back, too.

So a XCore and a joke go to a 90s party....

You dont have much to do if all you have to do is make jokes on Amigafans internet threads..

He probably does'nt have a life. You can hate Amiga as much as you want,but i bet the real reason is that you can't afford having a hobby as expencive as that. Go back to your 1% marketshare linuxbox,and enjoy.

How do YOU explain that Im sitting typing this on a AMD PC 2,8 ghz and have about 5-6 more PCs of different types around the house, and actually enjoys my newoldstock Amiga1200 with a measly 40 mhz 68030 and 18 meg ram the most ?

Sure I use the PCs for day to day work... But the Amiga gives me vastly more REAL fun ... !

Morb.

What are you talking about? Is it a crime that we happend to like AmigaOS? We are not saying that Xena is the best thing since sliced bread,it just happends to be a part of the MB,nothing else. All i care about is that we got more powerful hardware than before. And for your information,i do have a lot of computers in my home,and i am running different OS's on all of them.
And i do have Windows 7 on my i7 975(6GB DD3,and a ATI Radeon HD5970) My Debian distro runs on some older AMD 4800+. Most Amigans today own some kind of PC,MAC,or Linux box,so saying that we are not in touch with reality,is just stupid(yes,i do think you are a narrowminded,stupid clown) We just happens to like AmigaOS,that's all!

I guess the fact that AmigaOS is PowerPC and m68k code doesn't compute for you, does it? I assume you port operating systems across architectures on a weekly basis?

You're quite arrogant. I'm not even an Amigan and even I find that you are simply in the wrong place. If you dislike alternative software and hardware, then please leave OSNews. You are ruining it for the rest of us, and please do remember who owns this place.

you just forget one simple fact:

most of the amiga enthusiasts DO have a second or third computer at home, that is NOT an amiga.
and then it is mostly a pc, linux or mac box.

so most of the people DO know what it is, to run such a system. they still prefer and love their amiga.

Edited 2010-01-06 18:26 UTC

Nope... Simply we do not have seen any AmigaOS running on Intel processors. When we will see one version running on this architecture system based on Intel, then we could decide to buy even Intel hardware.

As long as AmigaOS remains on PPC architecture, it is normal that we Amigans pretend at least to have latest version of PPC running, with enough GHz, enough cores and enough FSB speed to avoid any bottlenecks.



Yes we had. Many of us have Intel PCe at work or at home with enough horsepower.

Personally I have Pegasos II G3 600 MHz and Pentium IV 3 Ghz socket 775 both at home.

And I think that if I could run AmigaOS on top of Pentium IV, it could had given me more performance than to run mindless Windows chaotical Operating System, In which there is an enormous caudron called C:\Windows (C:\Windows\System and System32 directories in which all things are installed and mixed up as in a soup, and sure it is a very crazy and ugy mess mindless solution Microsft had adopted...)

And also I think an AmigaOS Intel based had made my pentium IV more performant than any Desktop oriented Linux Distro and far better more friendly and responsive to final user.

But actually we must deal with PPC based AmigaOS. Point.



it is the fact that this Xena thingie is a processor aimed at high speed I/O and with extreme abilitiy in dealing lightspeed muxing/demuxing big amounts of data stream, at least as stated from PDF documents online and home site of the manufacturer.

This makes us very excited, beacuse it is a very interesting complement processor being added to Amiga that OTHERWISE could being perceived just as quite classic hardware architecture, with no difference from any normal PC except for the processor adopted on it.

If this processor keeps its promises sure it is a really amazing things to have one in an Amiga environment, and sure for the first time Amiga will be again on top of innovation, by giving for the first time on the market a moderboard based on this innovative solution.

it is sure new and something still unseen on any other Wintel or Mac architecture (nor PPC neither Intel)...

I have seen only some obscure evaluation motherboards spotting something like Hi-Speed higly configurable multi-purpose co-processors with high nubmner of I/O Channels.

These are barely supported by experimental Linux drivers and no one had used it for the common market, neither in any commercial OS.

Amiga had a great cofidence in the use of co-processors, keeping Amiga experience far more btter than any other platform in 1990 age, and amigan devlopers know ho to make very good use of such a XENA processor and tie and improve capabilities of this new co-processor with the long awaited availability into Amiga of 3D Extreme 16X PCI-e GPU based graphic cards.

If this solution will work flawlessly freeing the central CPU to deal with high speed Data streams (the future of HD-TV and Internet communications of tomorrow) then Amiga will lead again lead the innovation in computer world, and teach the path to any other system by showing with its performances, reliability and low consumption of resources, that the future architectures should integrate high speed multipurpose configurable multi I/O channel chips on any of the motherboards of next generation machines whatever it will be PPC based, Intel based, or any kind of future proceesor it could be seen in the market.

Also if you will be more open-minded you will see that without being backed by a big firm such as it was Commodore, the Amiga community and the little firms producing hardware for Amiga, had made a completely new and innovative product.

They just not limited them in filling the gap with mainstream Intel solutions in hardware, and making just an obscure machine featuring nowadays common SATA, USB 2.0 and PCI-e.

No... They made something really innovative.

And you must admit it is very interesting and amazing news that such a little platform believed dead as Dodo since 16 years from the demise of mother firm Commodore is still alive and capable of such an innovation with very few amount of money than big $$$ hardware firms.

These are the facts that made us amigans so excited!

Edited 2010-01-06 19:04 UTC

While on the desktop Linux may have a small (but growing) market share, it does have the advantage in the networking world to all other O.S's ... Google's O.S can only increase the desktop share..

So I will go back to my Linux desktop thank you, it works great and most (non-games) software is released from this platform - unlike for the Amiga with it's 0.00000000000002 % desktop market share

btw : I love the amiga and always have.

The reason I love Linux is due to its similarities with the Amiga..

The reasons I hate Linux it is beacuse it is completely different.

Geeky, not-responsive desktop-GUIs, system for directories made for geeks only, installation and configuration may vary in quality and reliability thru various distros, by spotting some that are really low quality, medium quality and high quality in the well known public distros.
If it fails something you must find in manuals what of the dozens (literally dozens) script files that require Linux has the fault text string that must be edited by hand.

Whose firmware needs to be modified to be PowerPC-compatible.
Even Apple struggled to have current-gen PowerPC-compatible graphics cards back in the day.

Whose firmware needs to be modified to be PowerPC-compatible. "

Not necessarily. EFI is designed around a virtual machine, so in theory any EFI capable firmware should work on any EFI based platform. The original intention was to produce a single firmware for both IA32 & IA64, but in theory (and I say that without even investigating this at all) you could have a PPC EFI firmware that could work with standard EFI capable devices.

Wrong. Pegasos II architecture is able to handle non modified graphics cards.

They don't. And stop trolling.

What the Amiga-fans usually find disgusting is the way standard PC parts are often used (e.g. non-coherent compared with platforms where parts are designed to fit together perfectly). And of course the x86 instruction set.

Personally I find the x1000 strangely intriguing, though I doubt the price will be reasonable, considering the price of the sam440ep.

What the hell is wrong with you? Are you forced to read Amiga news articles or talk to Amiga fans? NO. f--k off. Dear god. I've never even touched an Amiga in real life and I'm still interested in this. I'm interested in it because its something new that isn't a bog standard x86 machine.

And, no, Amiga users do not hate commodity hardware. Go look at all the upgrades/mods to classic Amigas that involve commodity hardware.

Nothing. Just a bit bored and Amiga fans and their constant belief in the 2nd coming of Christ are always good for some fun.

The AmigaOne, SAM440 and Pegasos series machines have a primitive 386 emulator built in to the BIOS flash memories so they can use Intel-style firmware in the graphics card.

Only for the firmware, the OS can initialize the card itself but the bootup will be blind.
You could use various PCI videocards on Sparc and Alpha based machines, Linux would usually support most of them.

Let's hope that 2010 hardware runs circles around 2005 hardware.

"Those of you interested in high-end imaging or scientific applications" (<-- quote from TFA) certainly can't wait to get their hands on shiny 32bit CPU goodness!

Who said it was 32-bit only. I think I recall somebody who works for Hyperion saying that there was quite a workaround to get the OS to not assume 32-bit values for pointers. That suggests that the new version of AmigaOS will be more than 32-bit.

The DSP will be 32-bit but not the main CPU.

"It comes with a dual-core PowerPC processor, conforming to the Power ISA 2.04 standard."

Compliant cores ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Architecture#Power_ISA_v.2.04 ):
# The PA6T core from P.A. Semi
# Titan from AMCC

P.A. Semi was bought by Apple and does not ship any PPC CPUs any longer.
And "Titan is a family of 32-bit Power Architecture-based microprocessors designed by Applied Micro Circuits Corporation (AMCC)."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_%28microprocessor%29

--Taken from A-Eon.com
Notes: "...and newer standards.", "...variety of CPUs..."

OK, then let's look which CPUs support newer PowerISA standards:
POWER6, POWER7, and e500mc.
I seriously doubt that a high-end server POWER6 or 7 CPU will be build into an ATX computer, not to mention that POWER6 starts at 3.6GHz, not 1.x.
That leaves the e500mc which "is a 32-bit Power Architecture-based microprocessor core from Freescale Semiconductor". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC_e500

So yes, 32-bit.

Edited 2010-01-05 21:37 UTC

Notes: "...probably never seen one in the wild."

Ever seen a Titan APM 83290 CPU in the wild?

But hey... if you believe hard enough, you'll get a 64-bit CPU... for sure!

You misread. It conforms to the 2.04 version of the standard which is the PA6T from PA Semi, which is 64 bits.

So, 64 bits.

Sure! After Apple bought PA Semi two years ago, Apple will happily ship PWRficient chips to Amiga, just because Apple likes Amiga sooooooo much!

TheDax your naughty your missing the first bullet point....

it also supports Cores that comply with the Power ISA v.2.03 stadards.

And these include:
Freescale Power PC
IBM PowerPC Power5 & Power6
IBM Cell which is in effect a 64bit chip

And for those of you talking about GHZ these processors range from between 3.2 to 5GHZ.

Another point to make is that one of the guys involved with A-eon is Ben Hermans, who used to be CEO/Director of Hyperion Entertainment, and he has always been a big fan of the Cell processor.

Edited 2010-01-06 00:17 UTC

IBM axed Cell a short while ago. Some Cell tech will be incorporated into future POWER processors, but Cell itself is dead now.

Ohh... Sony is producing millions of consoles with axed&dead chip. Probably they don't know the truth you know.

Edited 2010-01-08 15:28 UTC

HDRLab is working in the 2D part of Radeon x500+ support under OS 4. Although a massive achievement (and may very well be ready when this X1000 thing ships), this is still very far from having any sort of modern 3D support in the Amiga platforms.

Most likely, you'll never see any modern, competitive 3D hardware working in Amiga.

XCore is not a customizable processor. It's just an 8-threaded embedded DSP with 8k of ROM and 64k of shared local-store SRAM built into it.

https://www.xmos.com/products/xs1-l-family/l1lq64

Edited 2010-01-05 19:48 UTC

From that website:
An energy-efficient, general-purpose device ideally suited to a wide range of embedded applications and systems including audio DSP, USB peripherals, networked LED displays and robotic motor control. Integrate any of these functions without compromise to cost and power requirements.

It is customizable. It is a processor. And as such is a customizable processor. This is not invalidated by the fact it is optimized for digital signal processing (a poorly chosen word, since any treatment of data processing in a digital computer (and any kind of processing of a digital signal) qualifies as digital signal processing).

general-purpose != customizable

General purpose simply means it is suitable for a wide range of tasks, kinda like a regular CPU. PPC and x86 chips are general purpose, but not customizable after manufacture.

Customizable generally means either a FPGA, or the design is customized prior to manufacturing.

Nobody claims that Xena is a FPGA. It is clearly stated as a "programmable CPU". Programmable also means customizable, though not necessarily at hardware level as you claim it has to.

It is the functionality/usage that is customizable, and not the physical layout. It is essentially a general-purpose co-processor, rather than a specialized co-processor.

You'd known that if you had read what Thom wrote, and if you had read what it says at the a-eon website

Maybe... in some imaginary world. Customizable means instruction set can be modified and/or hardware blocks can be added/removed at customer request.
Programmable just means programmable.

Hardware like this is already in processors like Tilera (http://www.tilera.com/) and the Zii StemCell (http://www.ziilabs.com/). The latest Zii device I read of has an array of 64 programmable floating point elements (http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/ZiiLabs-Zii-SiVo-Digital-Ho...). Personally, as someone who BOINC's, I'd be interested to see what one of the Zii StemCell co-processors could do for something like the docking modeling programs used by different projects. (For example, the protease inhibitors for HIV [FightAIDS@Home] or dengue fever / West Nile virus [Discover Dengue Drugs], or for receptor blockers [Fight Childhood Cancer].) If this Amiga reincarnation makes heterogeneous co-processors on desktop systems look appealing for serious design, then I think the whole Aeon project will be well worth it. One group tried with an IBM Cell BBE card to accelerate video encoding, but the price of that was... "prohibitive".

Would I buy a Zii / XMOS PCIe card to make BOINC projects run faster? If I had the money, oh, yes.

Old hardware is tied to TV refresh rate. You'll need extra sync/output step anyway.
Lets launch 2-3 emulators or emulator and something what utilizes this hardware. They need to virtualize/ multitask the chip. That means limited direct access and/or complicated job/task schemes.



This is OS problem only. ~5ms sound buffers are good enough and should not cause any extra CPU load.


It doesn't have floating point. Dealing with fixed point quirks/precision problems is an 80s style of doing things.


For Amiga now it is better to focus on software, but not niche exotic hardware.

This is OS problem only. ~5ms sound buffers are good enough and should not cause any extra CPU load.
"

Are you denying this device will help with solving this issue?

I consider it a flaw of modern hardware that can at the best be reasonably fixed, a perfect fix on the OS level is hardly possible. There aren't many operating systems that'll get you a 100% guaranteed 5ms switching latency. For example Linux has a context switch granularity of 4ms with HZ=250, which is usually the default nowadays. One scheduler choice to anything else than the sound mixer and you have a buffer underflow... Configure some app to a 5ms buffer and try dragging some windows and you'll hear the effect.

Also, seems you have never experience real hardware wavetable as in Gravis Ultrasound..., you would talk different how much better hardware implementation is. It's not easy to describe the experience, but it is a plus that you always get the high quality hardware implementation rather than mixed quality software implementation, and it is a plus that you have no latency at all while never ever hearing a sound interruption.

While never have been an actual Amiga user, I own an Amiga 500 and the experience of a GUS and an Amiga regarding sound is very similar... I think it's this feeling that many users are missing on current computers.

Wether this device can really make a huge difference, I can't tell. It's just an interresting architectural choice, and Hyperion have to prove its usefullness.

Edited 2010-01-09 21:34 UTC

You're right! Who needs 64-bit, memory protection, IPv6, modern software, advanced 3D graphics, Blu-Ray, or powerful multi-core hardware?

Just imagine how fast those 20 year old Amiga programs will run, not to mention all 10 or so of the new Amiga programs will will come out in the next couple of years!

After all, there is no more noble use of a computer than nostalgia!

The next Amiga will surely ship POWER6+ CPUs! Just believe in it! Then Amiga will finally be faster than gaming consoles!

Well, I do. Oh well, not the Blu-ray part, but the rest of it is essential. Oh wait... the question was rhetorical... I see :p

The co-processor could be useful in turning your Amiga X1000 into a 3D-capable coffee maker - this way you could automagically have coffee ready by the press on a button - all while you're playing Quake III (or whatever you are doing). Not bad at all :p

Hum. Seems to me your attempt at trolling is more pitiful than irrirtating, as you are no even informed about Amiga availability of software and commodities, but mainly for the fact you are unaware that Amiga world is slowly advancing but steady evolving.

- 64 BIT: Actually 64 bit is already supported in AmigaDOS (certainly is in the DOS of MorphOS), and kernel64 seems to be work in progress as stated by some innuendo "preview" rumors coming directly from Frieden btothers, the programmers of AmigaOS kernel.

- Memory protection: Memory protection is already partially implemented, and it still remains partially to make elder AmigaOS application still to run in actual Amiga hardware.
It will be fully implemented the moment old AmigaOS legacy will be deprecated.
Let us make things step by step, at least we have few money and few programmers to make giant steps like as in very supported and very $$$ rich Operating System development teams.

- IVP6: Hummm... Let me think...
Was not IVP6 implemented in MorphOS Internet TCP-IP Stack?
It seems to me it is IVP6 ready...

- Modern software: We already have all modern software we need at the moment , for example the latest version of mPlayer, Blender, Python language, our own Internet browser called OWB (based on Safari Webkit), mail programs, our own Jabberwocky, MSN (SabreMSN) and Twitter programs, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

Forgive poor Amiga Software for not using same FAMOUS AND WELL KNOWN names of software of very famous $$$ brand $$$ Operating System.

But I know that it is diffcult for the only neuron in your brain to understand that an Amiga software runs the same as software in other OSes even if is not called "INSERT_NAME_OF_FAMOUS_SOFTWARE_HERE".

Amiga software can compete flawlessly with famous software in other Operating Systems, but just the fact it has a different name does not prevent you being a fool of yourself by not knowing anything of Amiga software scene.

(And perhaps you look just a fool of yourself by being intolerant and desperately trying of get joke of people thinking different from you)

- 3D graphics: We have BLENDER running on Amiga that is a very superb Open Source piece of software, it is enough for any usage.
More software like Lightwave will sure return on Amiga as soon as it will be available new AX1000 motherboards and Accelerated 16x PCIe graphic cards.

We lacked modern hardware on which to run modern accelerated 3D grapahci cards. Now we have it.
So what?

- Blu Ray: Actually I use it as standalone tied to my HD-Ready LCD TV.
I found Blu Ray readers for PCs still too much buggy and they not perform the same as dedicated stand alone Blu Ray Set boxes.
I read in some forums that some recent new Blue Ray readers are now out of any defects that I found previously in other readers actually on the market.
So I will buy one and perhaps I will connect it in my next brand new AX1000.

Time will see.

- Powerful multi-core hardware: TOday we achieved dual core, tomorrow we will achieve multi-core.

Amigans learned how to advance in little steps, and learned to be patient.

At least Amiga manufactuer are very poor compared to big $$$ names manifacturing PeeCees, so we Amigans as any poor family we live on compromises and must save money by saving any cent.
But savings hundreds of cents make real money and then we will buy the facilities we need.

There is no any nostalgia in being poor and little (not in real life neither in a big market such as computer market), but just sacrifice and honest tireless labour in order to emerge!

Edited 2010-01-06 07:07 UTC

It has... Even Thom Holwerda of OSNews wrote an article about it when trying OS 4.1 on the road...

http://www.osnews.com/story/21826/sam440ep_AmigaOS_4_1/page4/



It is the modern age Honey...

There are no more killer applications making an OS more amazing than others.

And there arte no more killer apps that are not available in other systems in less than 6 months... (just the rime enough to be ported).

Maybe perhaps some little pearls are still available in Amiga that aren't in other systems, for example the YAMM mailer or WookieChat, or the image viewer "Show Girls" in MorphOS that could circle around any other piece of software on any other operating System.



If you don't care of Blue Ray, why you ported it as exaple of diminishing of Amiga?

Was it a nice try in trolling?

Multi-Core: No, you don't have it yet. You have a product that's been announced. Like many other Amiga products announced in the past couple of years, it isn't on the market yet.

Actually MorphOS system Quark microkernel already supports multicore Simmetrical Multi Processing capabilities. It was programmed having already in mind this feature.

Unfortunately ABOX Amiga compatibility sandbox that runs into MorphoOS doesn't allow morphOS to perform multicore facility as main hardware drivers are hosted into it.

It is just time to develop better the QBOX part of the MorphOS and run the Amiga subsystem just as emulated and deprecate old legacy, so SMP could be featured in its full beauty.

[quote]
Little steps aren't enough when Linux, MacOS, and Windows are all taking big steps.
[/quote]

All I saw as big steps in Windows world is letting the OS booting faster.

it is just a dirty trick by booting the OS without loading processor stressing Win-Services that are loaded later, during normal desktop activity.

Apple already make its big step by deprecating its whole old MacOS and making EX-NOVO its whole nes OS... a Mix of Mach Kernel, FreeBSD, Darwin and a clone of former MacOS interface, and calling it MacOS-X.

There were no real big steps improvements since then.

Linux is currently trying to deprecate whole X11 graphical engine and rewritting it more small and performant in X-ORG to make at least became Linux performant as Amiga in Desktop activities. But still they need almost two or three years to cacth the Amiga tail and being finally a Desktop Operating System performant almost as Amiga is nowadays...

And perhaps main big steps from other OSes its just develop Desktops with 3D eyecandies.

You can call it REAL development...

It was just baroque trompe-l'oeil to make astonshing ingenuous users saying "OOOH..:" looking at 3D new graphic features in these Desktops GUI...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trompe-l'%C5%93il

[q]But I know that it is difficult for the only neuron in your brain

Really, this is what happens when you get emotionally attached to operating systems. "

Actually we are meotionally attached to an operating system that is really configurable by the user, obeys flawlessly the user commands making no hidden services dirty tricks (windows). It does not require a comuter science degree to be used in its deep as does Linux and does not threat the user as such a little child who must be stopped by its on Operating System Desktop barrers to dig the whole operating system as does MacOS.

Macintosh desktop it is like momma saying the child "NOT TOUCHY THERE YOU BIMBO USER.. IT IS DANGEROUS!"

In MacOS only those who dare to dig inner the OS, and bypass the desktop could choose to activate/deactivate all its hidden features and make new and interesting things, but again as being a UNIX-Like BSD based, you need to have a computer-science degree to unveil its real potential.

Amiga it is far better beacuse it is easy, not resource consuming, leaves processor free for heavy usage, it is easy inconfigurating and upgrading. It is maore than emotional approach.

It is just the best OS ever.

Hyperion didn't let us down so far. It's the only company that really stood up for Amiga,since the fall of Commodore. Sure there have been other companies that tried,but with no luck. It's not easy to rise from the "dead" when there is'nt money to back it up.

To those that critize the spec of AmigaOne X1000. Do you really think it's easy to just build the ultimate machine,and expect a community of not more than a few 1000 members pay 10th of thousand of $ for that kind of computer? If Hyperion and A-eon had the financial backing of the likes of Microsoft and Intel,and a userbase of millions,it would not be hard to come back into the limelight,but this is not the reality! AmigaOne X1000 is not the most powerful computer in the world,but it's a good enough computer so our community can see some growth.

I am infact amazed of what Hyperion,and partners has achived,with so little resources! And you should be too!

Exactly Caveman2.

You also have to remember that there is a move to "good enough computing" as witnessed by the sales of Netbooks. All recent computers can really accomplish anything any other recent computer can do, with only moderate differences in the time they take to do it.

For instance, I am finding my netbook surprisingly usable for things I used to rely solely on my desktop to do. Others might not, but I don't believe people are returning their netbooks to stores in their droves which some people(probably with vested interests) like to portray. For crying out loud, my eeePC netbook is happily running two instances of Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 Management Studio, with Firefox, IE and Lunascape, along with a few of my .NET applications and the program I am debugging. And while I could probably notice a launch time of a second or so longer, actual usage to my Core 2 Desktop(which is by no means a speed demon) is negligible.

It really comes down to, how good is good enough. Yeah, the latest PC might rip an MP3 faster. Big freakin deal. I don't notice such things. I just want the thing to work the way I want it to. Amigans want the computer to work the way THEY want it to. You may want it to work another way, which is fine. There is enough room for everyone. It ain't all about GHz any more. It is about the user experience. Getting the speed up around the latest technology opens up a whole lot more possibilities, but it doesn't have to beat everything out there.

The big apps will come, and there are substitutes for practically everything. In terms of software development the Amiga is the wild west. Which makes it all the more fun.

If you are THAT Rich, then invest in amiga just one or two million dollars for the design of the new motherboard and pay the Frieden brothers full fee to allow them working full speed to port AmigaOS to ARM processor.
Then in more or less than a year you will have the new computer and AmigaOS ported to ARM...

What? No money? So we will be stuck to PPC architecture.

Well, at least even if we are stuck to PPC architecture, now we have modern PCI-e BUS and modern set of peripherals, so at least we filled one of the three gaps that left Amiga behind the mainstream OSes.

Next gap to fill is to improve the AmigaOS.

The biggest problems in Amiga are the lack of a brand like Commodore backing it, and the lack of inverstors who gavemoney to develop Amiga.

When two months ago Hyperion was entitled by Amiga Inc. to have full rights in te usage of the Amiga name, brand and IP of AmigaOS 4.x, Then Amiga was again lead in the market by a firm who believe in Amiga and has right projects and a clear plain roadmap for it.

And sure it is more than expected.

I hope that the new solid management from Hyperion, the new hardware project, and the clear plains that Hyperion just demonstrated about Amiga and AmigaOS could attract new investors in Amiga.

Edited 2010-01-06 07:28 UTC

The XCore is a general purpose CPU and *not* reprogrammable. It's only special feature is that it can do multithreading in hardware ((context switch every clock cycle) with Quality of Service which makes it terrible usefull for real time tasks. Something which modern computers are very poor at.

Skimmed the spec docs and you're right -- my bad. The merits of "go to the source" instead of just reading the sum-up...

It seems it divides its clock cycles between each core as well, which somewhat lessens the usefulness of a multi-core design.

In other words, a general purpose CPU at a nominal 2.5 GHz clock frequency will have 1x nominal freq per core but the XCore only 1/n per core, where n is the number of cores.

By real-time tasks I suppose you refer to hard real-time. All general-purpose processors do soft real-time well enough -- well, actually, the operating systems do. You certainly are able to watch your videos and do your software-mixing of 128 audio tracks without hickups -- all inheritly soft real-time tasks (dead-line with escape strategy).

One could argue that all dead-lines are merely a matter of resource availability/use (excepting execution strategies that include prediction)...

An interesting property is the ability to quickly scale down the frequency automatically or as explicitly directed to 1/100th the nominal power, making 256 processors use 2.56x the power of 1 running full steam.

Try that with a modern C/GPU.

They're probably using an 8-stage pipeline in the processor. In this case switching between the threads on each clock cycle is used to avoid collisions between the data of the independent threads. It's a cheap trick but it gets the job done.

Adding cores in parallel only increases the number of I/O lines. To get added speed you have to add processor chips in parallel rather than using more cores per chip with this one. It's probably because the multicore chips have only one local-store bus to fetch from. Maybe it's a good thing that A-Eon is using the cheap chips.

It sounded like you were thinking that the XCore is an FPGA. I agree, an FPGA as a standard part of a desktop computer would be brilliant. I'd love to see hardware acceleration on-the-fly for more tasks. I would think that an FPGA would have been a natural choice, especially given the success of the MiniMig in emulating a classic Amiga.

I would have prefered to see the OS come supplied with a standard API to use the GPU as a DSP. This is already proven technology. If you need more power, you could always add a second PCI express graphics card.

About I/O XENA has its own indipendent interface slot that A-EON called Xorro in honour of ancient smart Amiga Zorro bus.

As stated in A-eon site:

http://www.a-eon.com/6.html



AND

The tools are open-source and written in C++. Furthermore they have LLVM underpinnings so porting code to XCore will be absolutely no problem.

See: https://www.xmos.com/technology/design-tools-source

I agree. I owned an Amiga 500 back in the day, and in the end finally had to jump ship for OS/2 and Linux. It was a step back in terms of multimedia, only mitigated by the cheap CPUs and hardware. The faster processors could brute-force the effect of hardware acceleration... kinda. It wasn't as sophisticated. My interests went into C++ and MUD programming as a result; it's what it was easy to get gratifying results from.

Now, with MorphOS, AROS, Anubis and all that, the Amiga OS has lived on, though I've been wondering to what effect they do so. This announcement is cool. It actually has a claim to recreating what was so cool about the Amiga: innovative use of hardware acceleration. Having a nice, lean multitasking OS on top was just icing on that fancy cake.

I still think they need an FPGA in there as a standard! It works to recreate the A500 in the MiniMig, so the backwards compatibility could be greatly assisted - but then, you have an FPGA, and you could hardware-accelerate all kinds of things right on the fly. I hope they do it! If you have a general purpose CPU, a GPU, a grid of XCore processors, and an FPGA right there, you have a serious swiss army knife of hardware-accelerated computing that could do cutting edge computing. Come now, they already have LLVM to help leverage it all. That kind of spec would be worthy of the Amiga name.

Edited 2010-01-07 19:36 UTC