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Some Amigas are PPC www.phase5.de

www.metabox.de



I'm still looking for a generic PCI/AGP PPC little-endian mode motherboard to port linux to (current Macs are big-endian...)


For general amiga news : www.cucug.org

both new software and hardware are stil being developed for Amigas, including dual G4 PowerPC CPU cards, and the software required to run on them.

www.haagepartner.de

www.phase5.de

www.blittersoft.com

www.powerc.co.uk

QSSL are trying to sell QNX Neutrino as a desktop OS and since Amiga Inc. won't create the AmigaOS 5.x they have been talking about for a year the chances are good that QNX Neutrino will become the successor of AmigaOS - at least they are trying.

Surprisingly QNX will be available for free: "Once the port is completed, the two companies will donate a runtime version of the OS free of charge to the Amiga® community." ( www.phase5.de/amiga/qnxp5e.html )

It depends. If you want to use the OS that this disk actually demos (QNX4) or if you're really interested in embedded applications, you'll have to ask QSSL, and I bet it's not cheap.

On the other hand, in relation to the Amiga... QSSL has licensed their Neutrino OS for use on Phase 5's new Cyberstorm/Blizzard G4 boards for free. (Well, "free" except that you'll spend a few hundred bucks for the PPC board, and you need an Amiga to put it in. ;-) The license might actually apply to the PPC port of Neutrino in general (not necessarily P5's hardware), but I'm not sure about that, better check before you get in trouble. This Neutrino PPC port will come with development tools, probably just GNU stuff like GCC. And instead of being intended for embedded apps, this is intended for use as a general-purpose OS to take over the world, crush Windoze, Linux, AmigaOS, etc, etc. ;-)

Anyway, that's the deal. QSSL is courting Amiga hackers and developers to come over to Neutrino by offering it for $0. It's very tempting and many of us are biting.

I agree that those earlier events were pretty scandalous, but it's all in the past. There hasn't been any evidence this year (yet) that they are still up to these shenanigans. Personally, I'm willing to give 'em the benefit of the doubt one more time, because in my experience, their hardware products really have been quite good, and because of some things Wolf Dietrich posted earlier this year.

What we need to watch out for is a repeat of the PowerUP/WarpUP fiasco, and thanks to experience, I think it will be pretty easy to detect and avoid such traps. We just need to make sure that our Neutrino apps are not dependent on Phase 5's version of (or extensions to) Neutrino. The Extend phase of an "Embrace and Extend" attack will only work if app developers allow it to, by using the extensions.

(BTW, keep in mind that part of the reason Phase 5 had to write all those extensions in the past (PowerUP, CyberGraphX) was that AmigaOS was rotting, and it lacked some important stuff that was needed in order to fully exploit new hardware. With Neutrino, that situation does not exist. Neutrino is still being actively developed.)

This is the beauty of having separate hardware and software companies. If Phase 5 were doing the hardware and a lot of the software (like the situation we had with Commodore, and what the Mac people are currently enduring), there would be a risk of getting locked in to one hardware manufacturer. But as long as QSSL sets the standards and we program to their API, as opposed to some Phase 5 bastardization, we will be Ok. (Yeah, we'll be "locked in" to Neutrino, of course, but I can think of worse things. :-)

It's a hell of a lot safer situation than what Amiga Inc was planning.

If anyone from Phase 5 is reading this, listen up: Don't invest a lot of time/money in OS-level software (except for drivers), unless you're willing to give it away, and see it used by competitors. I have pre-ordered one of your new CyberStorm boards. Next year, I will consider buying an AmiRage if (and only if) Phase 5 has not done anything to trick developers into writing stuff that will only run on Phase 5 hardware. If you play fair, and put me in a situation where I have to choose between an AmiRage and some other PPC box based on the price and/or technical merit of the two competing products, I'll give your product very serious consideration, and we may have a long and recurring business relationship.

Actually it is. IBM doesn't make the G4, Motorola does. But Motorola didn't relaese their specs, did they?

If that's the case, then why is a relatively small-time company like Phase 5 expecting to ship G4-based processor boards for Amigas on October 15? If Phase 5 can get specs and chips in quantity for such a small/niche product, then any serious computer manufacturer can. (This is not intended as a put-down against Phase 5. :-)

Actually it is. IBM doesn't make the G4, Motorola does. But Motorola didn't relaese their specs, did they?

If that's the case, then why is a relatively small-time company like Phase 5 expecting to ship G4-based processor boards for Amigas on October 15? If Phase 5 can get specs and chips in quantity for such a small/niche product, then any serious computer manufacturer can. (This is not intended as a put-down against Phase 5. :-)

Even a cursory look at the phase5 and qnx sites tells a lot about the future of the amiga aftermarket.

G4 accelerators, QNX neutrino, possibility of a G4 ATX mobo, replete with the best in german engineering.

I suspect the "silence" is Amiga's way of keeping their options open after the sloppy way they dumped QNX for Linux a few months back.

QNX site
Phase5 site

He may have pissed off QNX greatly.

QNX has news about the free QNX for amigans who use the phase5 accelerators.

Not only is QNX going to ship with Phase5's accelerators, but it is interesting to note that part of the agreement involves allowing Phase5 to ship "standalone G3/4 based products" -- could this be a rockin' G4 ATX motherboard?

Here are the links:

Phase5 G3/G4 accelerator news

qnx + phase5 announcement

Although it is off-topic, QNX also has news regarding Real Time Java! Which means the garbage collector has been reigned in. Good news.

Real Time Java/QNX announcement

It sounds like Amiga Inc is going to try to do something stupid^H^H^H^H^Hradical, so I doubt they'll get in on it. But I sure hope that Phase 5 and QNX do. A common hardware platform (other than the 20-year-old IBM PC) that could run Neutrino, Linux, and BeOS would be cool. And bonus points if it turns out to be able to run MacOS too.

Actually, the "classic" amiga has dual PPC-m68k processor boards - check out www.phase5.de

Soon, the "classic" amiga range, which Gateway has basically disowned, will have G4 accelerators which do the 68k legacy stuff in software.

gateway are just using the amiga name on a completely different computer. The "classic" amiga is not exactly dead yet, though, in that there's still reams of new stuff on the aminet (www.aminet.org). Please note that there's loads of open-source development done by amiga and former amiga users - the GPL was always very popular on the amiga, and most of the GNU suite was ported to the amiga years ago.

There's quite a capable microkernel from www.haage-partner.de that runs on the PPC-processor side of the (heavily expanded) old amigas, called WarpOS (no relation to OS/2). It's quite pleasant to program for, carrying on the amiga traditions of fast message passing + lists, but adding memory protection, and an OpenGL API (Warp3D)

Also, the m68k "classic" amigas run linux/m68k well ( I have a 50MHz 68060 amiga that hits 100MIPS - technically, the 68060 was a more advanced architecture than x86, let alone PPC, but intel have )

LinuxPPC runs on the PPC cards for the "classic"
amiga (see Linux/APUS on sunsite.auc.dk)

Actually, my last amiga, before I finally gave in
and got a 400MHz PC, consisted of:

An Amiga A4000T motherboard and tower case
A 68060 50MHz + PPC 604e 233MHz dual cpu system
128MByte ram
Ultra Wide SCSI 3 4.3 Gbyte HD
8 MByte Permedia 2 (3D) gfx card
32x SCSI CDRom
Assorted Video Peripherals

The Amiga is STILL better for video editing,
I find. I'm sorry I sold it now, but
at the time I was mainly doing other stuff, like running LinuxPPC on it for fun - so the changeover to a x86/linux system was fairly painless.

x86 is still an incredibly bad processor architecture, the windows of the CPU world, if you will. I enjoyed assembler programming for the PPC, despite it being nominally RISC, the instruction set is /more/ comprehinsive than most CISC processors, and it's all well-rounded and orthogonal, too!

No insane "this must be in that register, except when the moon rises in orion" and so on, that dog the x86 thanks to all the backward compatibility kludges.

I just wish there was a commodity priced, little-endian PPC (PPCs are bi-endian, but are wired one way or the other onto the mobo usually), ATX, PCI, motherboard, that I could run LinuxPPC on.

Ah well.

Amiga people tend to use the 680x0 MMU on their accelerator cards to "softkick" these days - usually, they just copy their own rom into Fast (i.e. 32-bit) RAM, but it is possible to use a different kickstart version. The best amiga ever made, the A3000, loaded the kickstart off HD anyway , and the A1000 loaded it off floppy.
Since the AmigaOS doesn't use the MMU, this is safe.

In fact, this days, if you have a 68040, 68060, or PPC accelerator, you pretty much HAVE to softkick to get optimum performance out of your machine ( that way, the entire OS is in 32-bit RAM on your accelerator card)

Actually, my last amiga was a 68060 50 MHz + 233MHz PPC 604e + 128 MByte RAM + 4 GByte HD + Permedia 2 GFX card. It rocked.

The next lot of accel cards coming out for the "classic" amiga, as opposed to the "NG" Amiga being developed by Gateway, are PPC G3's, emulating the 68060 in software.
If nothing else, they'd make a good LinuxPPC platform ( all the Amiga HW is well-documented + understood)

I only sold my amiga recently, and got a 400MHz PC running linux, but only because I had to have PC-compatibility for University, and couldn't afford to have both. Linux is still clunkier in some areas than AmigaOS - BeOS comes closest to AmigaOS ( some would say "rips off"), but unfortunately, neither BeOS nor AmigaOS are open source, although I suspect Gateway will release the "classic" amiga source to haage+partner when they finish their AmigaNG

check out

www.cucug.org/aminew.html

www.escena.de

www.phase5.de

www.haage-partner.com

strange - my Cyberstorm 604e PPC 233MHz with 68060 50MHz amiga seems pretty real. Think before you write something. Dolt. Look where team amiga are in the RC5-64 decryption tables. Yep. Hovering about sixth or seventh. Not bad, for such a minority eh? PPCs kick x86 butt.
Incidentally, I dual boot AmigaOS 3.1 and LinuxPPC (APUS is the name of the Amiga ppc linux port - it's on sunsite.auc.dk). I have an 8MByte Permedia 2 gfx card, 128Mbyte ram, and ultra-wide scsi 3 4.3 gig HD.

No, it's not a top of the range spec, but I'd say it's not bad.

Makers of the amiga PPC hardware ->
www.phase5.de

Makers of the PPC-side kernel favoured by the majority of PPC amiga users, and the Warp3D Amiga OpenGL API->
www.haage-partner.de

Claim to be developing an amiga G3 card ->
www.escena.de

amiga ppc news->
come.to/amigappc

Amiga ->
www.amiga.com

QNX ->

www.qnx.com

Yes, most decent amiga stuff comes out of the UK and germany, and this is a US site, so some ignorance among the readership of this site is to be expected, I guess.

PS. I suppose my machine isn't a "desktop" - It's in a tower case...

bits that made my system:

http://www.eagle-cp.com/

http://www.phase5.de/

http://www.blittersoft.com/

http://www.powerc.com/

http://www.white-knight.freeserve.co.uk/

check out the amiga sections of

http://www.cucug.org/

http://www.amiga.org/

for american dealers

How much ? Not cheap - but it's been spread out over the years...