From my experience with RISC CPU's is that rating them by Mhz is often times the way to not understand what makes a RISC a RISC and a CISC a CISC.
Let me explain by example.
My MIPS R4400, running at around 120Mhz, I believe, runs circles around my Duron 750Mhz machine here. This is while the R4400 uses sDRAM vs DDR-RAM in the Duron, and the R4400 uses older plain-jane IDE while my Duron runs ATA-100.
I find it nice to boot up my old Indigo2 and play around, it responds so nicely, and renders quite well.
The best part about this for me is that there will be alternative vendors with PPC 970 machines coming out in the future. (say next year or so) In another announcement, they listed two northbridge manufacturers, Marvell and Mai, for the 970. These two northbridge makers have consumer-range motherboards being made by OEM's Genesi and Eyetech, respectively. The chances that one, if not both of these companies will make a 970-based machine sometime in 2004 is quite likely in my opinion.
Then we'll see some real shaking up of the market.
Interested people do not have to wait for the Pegasos II in order to run MorphOS. There are still Pegasos motherboards for sale with several retailers.
Another story on Slashdot discussed Apple's newest p2p service, a pay service (like $1 a song, $10 an album). The funny thing is, Apple's made millions on this in the few weeks it's been running....
And the RIAA is claiming that there is no money to be made?
If I had an option to pay $1 for a music single I liked in MP3 format, I'd jump on it.
I'd also note, MP3 is a lossy technology, even at best sampling, it looses some data.
Might I point out Hyperions port of Shogo to the Macintosh? Things behind objects would be rendered in front of them! Yeah, high quality work, can't even do z-buffer removal.
Slightly wrong, the PA-RISC was never intended as the CPU for the Amiga. It was to be an I/O processor and GPU for the system, alongside a standard 68k initially, new CPU later.
As far as PowerPC'd Amiga's, Escom began that program with some off-ball programmers and a hw company called Phase5. Those programmers turned the Escom "PowerAmiga" project into a new OS, called MorphOS (seen at http://www.morphos.de ) which has been in public beta for several years now. The programme was kept going during Gateway's tenure, as the contract was still valid. But Amiga Inc changed the rules, and nullified the deal. Then announced that they'd do their own, and get it to market before MorphOS (despite the fact that MorphOS was already in public beta).
Crying shame. The PA-RISC GPU in Acutiator would have changed the rules back in the '90s.
The layer arrived.... but with their new partner being Microsoft, it now runs on PocketPC only. All of those SDK's sold to Linux folk now have their software destined to be for Microsoft to resell.
I'm running into this problem of contracting companies demanding material before the pre-set payment period has arrived. Best thing guys is once the contract is in place, if the material is not core to the contract, give them nothing.
Calling Sassenrath a god, when on other posts you go on and on about how his work is obsolete and not worth bothering with? Dissing his work on Rebol to post endless reams on AmigaDE which does the same job?
Exec no longer interfaces the hardware. It might handle task-scheduling, but that is not low-level work here. Message-passing between modules *is* and that is what Quark does. Including message-passing from the ABox to the hardware.
>> Quite a few microkernel based OSes use what >> you call the 2 kernel approach... Are they >> Amithlon like as well?
>Name a few, which do what I have listed before?
mkLinux, HURD, MacOS X
mkLinux is a Linux kernel on top of another microkernel. THe microkernel is invisible to everything but the lowest layers of the OS.
HURD, running on MACH. Can you access MACH? Not easily, due to Hurd's own internal kernel-alikes.
Mac OS X uses the Darwin OS, which again is on top of a microkernel. (I think it too uses MACH, but don't quote me on that)
And you also forget, Exec *IS NOT A KERNEL*. It is an executive library, while having kernel-like functions it is not labelled as a proper kernel except by sychophants that try and beef up what AmigaOS is. Exec, in the ABox, is a library, same as it is in AmigaOS. Programs can call it, utilize it's calls, etc, just like in the Amiga. The key difference here is that Exec no longer handles any of the low-level work; Quark does.
You've read a very old beta statement on MorphOS. The early Beta's of MorphOS needed the AmigaOS ROM's to provide the "fill-ins" for the missing parts of the Amiga API. MorphOS's team has been replacing the Amiga libraries one-at-a-time constantly. Now, no AmigaOS ROM is needed, as all of the libraries have been utterly replaced.
Initial market, of course, is to developers. Notice it's placement at CeBIT (heavily developer-oriented show) and other developer shows. The price is low enough to convince many shadetree coders to take a look into the system, especially those that remember the ease of coding on the Amiga. Lock in a core of developers, you get apps. Once you get apps, then you can attract joe-schmo users. Till then, the best bet is to attract the "way cool" buying folks and developers.
Then look at the other boards they have coming. Eclipsis, a PDA-scaled board... how many PDA's do you know that run the same OS as your desktop? Makes developing for them super-easy. And sharing software and data would also be easy... great USP for businesses and software makers.
MorphOS API's are designed around a distributed setup, message-passing similar to QNX. It would also be simple to make MorphOS-based supercomputers, something many developers will not ignore for long.
Scale upwards with multiple processors quickly (just switch the CPU card). Very useful for many high-end apps.
CPU is better utilized, resulting in a faster machine while using lower-end CPU's.
The Eclipsis board (one of the other products in this family) makes even the strongest PocketPC machine look like a tinker-toy by comparison.
The OS scales better, from PDA's to clusters all running the same OS seamlessly. (Yes, Linux can do this too, but only with patches and add-ons, this does it natively)
As for #2, that's up to the business. MorphOS/Pegasos has an advantage over BeBox in that the hardware is mostly off-the-shelf, just implimented in a more efficient manner. Means a much lower production cost over the BeBox when introduced. Admit it guys, if the BeBox was $1k when released, Be would have sold many more copies of it. Genesi's product range is far more flexible, even moreso than Apple's range. That they're using third-party suppliers means that clones are more than possible (actually encouraged) in that any POP board running OpenFirmware can run MorphOS. This gives these guys the edge for cloning. More PPC machines ship, the lower prices go. As for CPU speed, I think IBM and Mot are about to go after each others market, resulting in greater CPU speeds as each competes with each other. And don't forget that AMD also has a PPC license. If the PPC market suddenly heats up, AMD would have no compultion from jumping into the fray.
What everyone wants to know but is afraid to ask
on
Ask William Shatner
·
· Score: 1
Is that a wig, a weave, joined the hair club for men, used rogaine, had plugs, or have you sucessfully kept your hair throughout the years?
Actually, correction: The A3000+ had 100 units produced, and were standard AGA amigas, running Alice, Lisa and Paula.
The AGA's replacement was AAA, found in the 3 Nyx motherboards. They replaced the 3 custom-chips with 4: Andrea -- replaced Agnus. Added a RISC-like semi-processor to the copper, to speed up operations. Also added new modes to the blitter, like pattern fill. Denise was replaced by 2 chips: Linda -- A line display buffer, could decode video-stream instructions on a line-per-line basis. Monica -- The actual display chip, contains the color-palettes/color decode tables, the HAM display system, playfield decoder, sprite display system, etc. Also had the added ability to do video-input. Mary -- Paula's replacement. This chip actually surpasses even chips availible in PC's now. Contained raw, CGR, MFM, RLL and bitplane mark encoding. The "Floppy Controller" was so advanced it could push a CD-ROM or low-speed hard drive. 64kHz sampling rate, 8 channels, 12-bits of audio volume, could sample in 8 or 16 bits, supported digital out directly, and of course the ability to use channels to modulate another channel.
AAA was on revision 2 when Commodore went under. By all practicality, it was 14-18 months from completion. The design was altered to become the last Amiga chipset commodore worked on: Hombre. Hombre dumped sprtes and planar video, replaced the copper with a PA-RISC CPU with the copper commands added, and PCI support for inclusion on an expantion card. An evolved Hombre could compete even today, but the money needed and time demand makes that a pipe dream as well.
Corporate sponsored shows. They've worked before, such as the "DeSoto You Bet Your Life" gameshow. Heck, the new "Week in Wall Street" show on MSNBC uses exactly such a format. A few by-lines, perhaps the host discussing the product, and that's it. On the radio, Paul Harvey gives a twist to the in-show advertisements he does. It makes things more personable, when a person is speaking about the Bose Wave Radio or Dial-A-Mattress.
Remember Soap Operas? The very term refers back to when these Radio drama's were brought to you every day by various Soap companies. Could you handle "Days of Our Lives, brought to you by Palmolive! Remember folks, Buy 4 bottles of Palmolive, and recieve the 5th on us. See store for details."
There's something more wholesome about product placement, or sponsorships. If I ran IBM, I'd sponsor Tech Today or some similar show. Get your products showcased. Motorweek pulls the same thing with cars, being sponsored by car care products.
I just checked my SEC report on Microsoft. They've listed that the maximum Dividend-Return that any investor could get is $9.94. This is tallying their on-hand cash reserve and dividing it by the number of stocks. Since Microsoft uses a loophole, there is no concrete numbers of total shares it has, but it is estimated to be around 1 billion shares. $40 billion cash reserves mean a div/share max return of $40, not $9.94.... Where is the $30.06 per share?
I've seen this kind of funny papertrail before... when I pulled my money out of Enron at $74.
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From my experience with RISC CPU's is that rating them by Mhz is often times the way to not understand what makes a RISC a RISC and a CISC a CISC.
Let me explain by example.
My MIPS R4400, running at around 120Mhz, I believe, runs circles around my Duron 750Mhz machine here. This is while the R4400 uses sDRAM vs DDR-RAM in the Duron, and the R4400 uses older plain-jane IDE while my Duron runs ATA-100.
I find it nice to boot up my old Indigo2 and play around, it responds so nicely, and renders quite well.
I love my Pegasos's onboard audio, beats my SB32 easily for sound quality.
Of course it doesn't have power-out, so need to use speakers with an internal power supply for it to work. No cheap-o walmart speakers for it.
See, before the 1990's, patents took decades to be approved. They've now gone and made things work the other way, approving them too fast now.
Can someone *PLEASE* find a happy medium between friggin fast and damned slow?
I figure they have, say, a year lead-time before competitors start showing up.
Then let's the price war begin.
The best part about this for me is that there will be alternative vendors with PPC 970 machines coming out in the future. (say next year or so) In another announcement, they listed two northbridge manufacturers, Marvell and Mai, for the 970. These two northbridge makers have consumer-range motherboards being made by OEM's Genesi and Eyetech, respectively. The chances that one, if not both of these companies will make a 970-based machine sometime in 2004 is quite likely in my opinion.
Then we'll see some real shaking up of the market.
Sun wouldn't need to use x86 at all. THey can use SPARC, there are low-cost high-speed SPARC chips availible from Fuji that they could license.
Interested people do not have to wait for the Pegasos II in order to run MorphOS. There are still Pegasos motherboards for sale with several retailers.
Nobody's yet signed up to be a US reseller. If you can recommend
someone, we're always interested.
--
Nate Downes
Genesi SARL
Another story on Slashdot discussed Apple's newest p2p service, a pay
service (like $1 a song, $10 an album). The funny thing is, Apple's
made millions on this in the few weeks it's been running....
And the RIAA is claiming that there is no money to be made?
If I had an option to pay $1 for a music single I liked in MP3 format,
I'd jump on it.
I'd also note, MP3 is a lossy technology, even at best sampling, it
looses some data.
What the heck are you smoking there Mike?
Might I point out Hyperions port of Shogo to the Macintosh? Things behind objects would be rendered in front of them! Yeah, high quality work, can't even do z-buffer removal.
Slightly wrong, the PA-RISC was never intended as the CPU for the Amiga. It was to be an I/O processor and GPU for the system, alongside a standard 68k initially, new CPU later.
As far as PowerPC'd Amiga's, Escom began that program with some off-ball programmers and a hw company called Phase5. Those programmers turned the Escom "PowerAmiga" project into a new OS, called MorphOS (seen at http://www.morphos.de ) which has been in public beta for several years now. The programme was kept going during Gateway's tenure, as the contract was still valid. But Amiga Inc changed the rules, and nullified the deal. Then announced that they'd do their own, and get it to market before MorphOS (despite the fact that MorphOS was already in public beta).
Crying shame. The PA-RISC GPU in Acutiator would have changed the rules back in the '90s.
The layer arrived.... but with their new partner being Microsoft, it now runs on PocketPC only. All of those SDK's sold to Linux folk now have their software destined to be for Microsoft to resell.
I'm running into this problem of contracting companies demanding material before the pre-set payment period has arrived. Best thing guys is once the contract is in place, if the material is not core to the contract, give them nothing.
Calling Sassenrath a god, when on other posts you go on and on about how his work is obsolete and not worth bothering with? Dissing his work on Rebol to post endless reams on AmigaDE which does the same job?
Exec no longer interfaces the hardware. It might handle task-scheduling, but that is not low-level work here. Message-passing between modules *is* and that is what Quark does. Including message-passing from the ABox to the hardware.
I was explaining it on Mike's level, since he doesn't grasp how it works.
Same as the MACH in Darwin is an integral part of Darwin. You won't see MACH-less Darwins nor would you see exec-less ABox's.
*bzt* You've made a classic error, yet again!
Mac OS X runs on Darwin
Darwin runs on MACH
The exact same approach as MorphOS here.
ABox runs on Exec
Exec runs on Quark
Do you get it now?
>> Quite a few microkernel based OSes use what
>> you call the 2 kernel approach... Are they
>> Amithlon like as well?
>Name a few, which do what I have listed before?
mkLinux, HURD, MacOS X
mkLinux is a Linux kernel on top of another microkernel. THe microkernel is invisible to everything but the lowest layers of the OS.
HURD, running on MACH. Can you access MACH? Not easily, due to Hurd's own internal kernel-alikes.
Mac OS X uses the Darwin OS, which again is on top of a microkernel. (I think it too uses MACH, but don't quote me on that)
And you also forget, Exec *IS NOT A KERNEL*. It is an executive library, while having kernel-like functions it is not labelled as a proper kernel except by sychophants that try and beef up what AmigaOS is. Exec, in the ABox, is a library, same as it is in AmigaOS. Programs can call it, utilize it's calls, etc, just like in the Amiga. The key difference here is that Exec no longer handles any of the low-level work; Quark does.
You've read a very old beta statement on MorphOS. The early Beta's of MorphOS needed the AmigaOS ROM's to provide the "fill-ins" for the missing parts of the Amiga API. MorphOS's team has been replacing the Amiga libraries one-at-a-time constantly. Now, no AmigaOS ROM is needed, as all of the libraries have been utterly replaced.
Initial market, of course, is to developers. Notice it's placement at CeBIT (heavily developer-oriented show) and other developer shows. The price is low enough to convince many shadetree coders to take a look into the system, especially those that remember the ease of coding on the Amiga. Lock in a core of developers, you get apps. Once you get apps, then you can attract joe-schmo users. Till then, the best bet is to attract the "way cool" buying folks and developers.
Then look at the other boards they have coming. Eclipsis, a PDA-scaled board... how many PDA's do you know that run the same OS as your desktop? Makes developing for them super-easy. And sharing software and data would also be easy... great USP for businesses and software makers.
MorphOS API's are designed around a distributed setup, message-passing similar to QNX. It would also be simple to make MorphOS-based supercomputers, something many developers will not ignore for long.
Ok, let's start with #1:
Scale upwards with multiple processors quickly (just switch the CPU card). Very useful for many high-end apps.
CPU is better utilized, resulting in a faster machine while using lower-end CPU's.
The Eclipsis board (one of the other products in this family) makes even the strongest PocketPC machine look like a tinker-toy by comparison.
The OS scales better, from PDA's to clusters all running the same OS seamlessly. (Yes, Linux can do this too, but only with patches and add-ons, this does it natively)
As for #2, that's up to the business. MorphOS/Pegasos has an advantage over BeBox in that the hardware is mostly off-the-shelf, just implimented in a more efficient manner. Means a much lower production cost over the BeBox when introduced. Admit it guys, if the BeBox was $1k when released, Be would have sold many more copies of it. Genesi's product range is far more flexible, even moreso than Apple's range. That they're using third-party suppliers means that clones are more than possible (actually encouraged) in that any POP board running OpenFirmware can run MorphOS. This gives these guys the edge for cloning. More PPC machines ship, the lower prices go. As for CPU speed, I think IBM and Mot are about to go after each others market, resulting in greater CPU speeds as each competes with each other. And don't forget that AMD also has a PPC license. If the PPC market suddenly heats up, AMD would have no compultion from jumping into the fray.
Is that a wig, a weave, joined the hair club for men, used rogaine, had plugs, or have you sucessfully kept your hair throughout the years?
They were:
AGNES
DAPHNIE
and
Paula
They becane Agnus, Denise and Paula in rev2 of the A1000. (I happen to have a rev1 A1000 here as well as a rev2, so I see the name differences)
Actually, correction:
The A3000+ had 100 units produced, and were standard AGA amigas, running Alice, Lisa and Paula.
The AGA's replacement was AAA, found in the 3 Nyx motherboards. They replaced the 3 custom-chips with 4:
Andrea -- replaced Agnus. Added a RISC-like semi-processor to the copper, to speed up operations. Also added new modes to the blitter, like pattern fill.
Denise was replaced by 2 chips:
Linda -- A line display buffer, could decode video-stream instructions on a line-per-line basis.
Monica -- The actual display chip, contains the color-palettes/color decode tables, the HAM display system, playfield decoder, sprite display system, etc. Also had the added ability to do video-input.
Mary -- Paula's replacement. This chip actually surpasses even chips availible in PC's now. Contained raw, CGR, MFM, RLL and bitplane mark encoding. The "Floppy Controller" was so advanced it could push a CD-ROM or low-speed hard drive. 64kHz sampling rate, 8 channels, 12-bits of audio volume, could sample in 8 or 16 bits, supported digital out directly, and of course the ability to use channels to modulate another channel.
AAA was on revision 2 when Commodore went under. By all practicality, it was 14-18 months from completion. The design was altered to become the last Amiga chipset commodore worked on: Hombre. Hombre dumped sprtes and planar video, replaced the copper with a PA-RISC CPU with the copper commands added, and PCI support for inclusion on an expantion card. An evolved Hombre could compete even today, but the money needed and time demand makes that a pipe dream as well.
Corporate sponsored shows. They've worked before, such as the "DeSoto You Bet Your Life" gameshow. Heck, the new "Week in Wall Street" show on MSNBC uses exactly such a format. A few by-lines, perhaps the host discussing the product, and that's it. On the radio, Paul Harvey gives a twist to the in-show advertisements he does. It makes things more personable, when a person is speaking about the Bose Wave Radio or Dial-A-Mattress.
Remember Soap Operas? The very term refers back to when these Radio drama's were brought to you every day by various Soap companies. Could you handle "Days of Our Lives, brought to you by Palmolive! Remember folks, Buy 4 bottles of Palmolive, and recieve the 5th on us. See store for details."
There's something more wholesome about product placement, or sponsorships. If I ran IBM, I'd sponsor Tech Today or some similar show. Get your products showcased. Motorweek pulls the same thing with cars, being sponsored by car care products.
It's not a perfect solution, but it might work.
I just checked my SEC report on Microsoft. They've listed that the maximum Dividend-Return that any investor could get is $9.94. This is tallying their on-hand cash reserve and dividing it by the number of stocks. Since Microsoft uses a loophole, there is no concrete numbers of total shares it has, but it is estimated to be around 1 billion shares. $40 billion cash reserves mean a div/share max return of $40, not $9.94.... Where is the $30.06 per share?
I've seen this kind of funny papertrail before... when I pulled my money out of Enron at $74.