OSNews is Exploring the Future of Computing

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 26th Mar 2009 23:34 UTC

Despite the recent emergence of several new ways to actually run AmigaOS 4.0, the supply of machines is still extremely small, and not very future proof. As such, one of the most recurring questions within the Amiga community is why don't they port the darn thing to x86?

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RE[3]: Is it special under the hood?

by SamuraiCrow on Fri 27th Mar 2009 17:41 UTC in reply to "RE[2]: Is it special under the hood?"

Member since:
2005-11-19

Little-endian mode support was dropped from the PowerPC 970 series and therefore may be considered obsolete although the 970 series isn't supported by AmigaOS.

Regardless, any competent port of Amiga OS to x86 would I would hope switch the implementation to little endian to avoid the issue entirely. It might make porting of some low level code a bit more difficult than it otherwise would be, but it would be better in the long run imo.

Little-endianness would kill any backward compatibility that AmigaOS would have ever hoped to have had. Since every version prior to 4.0 was a white-box implementation meaning that the internal data structures were open for the applications to access, it is impossible to make a backwardly-compatible version of AmigaOS in little-endian mode or with full memory protection. If you want little-endian and memory protection join Anubis-OS.

But still, if you think the comparatively minor overhead of byte order swapping would in any way negate the HUGE performance advantage modern x86 hardware has over the dinky PowerPC hardware currently available for AmigaOS your nuts.

I think Intel chips are only faster because of more compact instruction set and therefore more efficient use of the cache. If AmigaOS is going to compete in any market, it would not be the desktop one so the only Intel processors that would compete in the Amiga marketplace are the Atom series which don't perform nearly as well as their desktop equivalents. Therefore the PowerPC 440 series found in the current platforms is competitive for the markets Hyperion Entertainment VOF are targeting.

(Furthermore, for the record, I DO have a mental disability known as paranoid schizophrenia and therefore I am nuts. Do you have a problem with that?)

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