AmigaOS and The x86 Question
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 26th Mar 2009 23:34 UTC
Amiga & AROS 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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galvanash
Member since:
2006-01-25

Little-endian mode support was dropped from the PowerPC 970 series...


Thanks, didn't know that.

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.


Use an emulator for existing code - there are already a few that work well... I dont think anyone seriously would consider porting to x86 without first fixing all the broken bits of AmigaOS... Backwards compatibility is a moot point imho.

I think Intel chips are only faster because of more compact instruction set and therefore more efficient use of the cache


Higher clock speeds, bigger caches, faster caches, better memory controllers, faster memory, higher bus speeds, more bandwidth, better fabrication resources, etc. etc. etc. PowerPC is dead outside of the embedded market (and that may not last much longer)...

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.


I think that is kind of the point everyone is making though... Sure, what you said makes some sense, but outside of a few die hards no one wants to be limited to such archaic hardware. Porting to generic x86 is the only way the OS could ever possibly get wide exposure. Im not saying it should be done, I personally dont care (and concede that it would be very very painful to do) - just saying not doing it is dooming it to failure.

(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?)


No, I don't. I am perfectly ok with you being nuts ;)

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