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[minator]

Originally Posted by Hammer

Since you made a claim on PPC vs X86 I'm restarting PowerPC vs X86.

You're comparing 2003 machines to 2006 machine and are what - surprised?

There are plenty of benchmarks on this, but x86 are stronger in some areas (branchy integer stuff) while PPCs are better in different areas FP and especially Altivec.

Apple were very clever with the timing of their switch because it meant they went from lat year's PPCs to next years x86s and of course the x86s were faster.

Actually according to the benchmarks published at the time there wasn't that much of a difference between them, in fact the G4s could rip music faster than the first mac x86s.

It was only after the Core2Duos appeared that a clear gap emerged, but by then development of desktop PPCs had already stalled.

[minator]

On the question of is PPC viable for the future, well I'm sure they'll do for now but after MOS supports the G5s and the X1000 eventually ships, where next?

PPCs are still moving forwards but their market is exclusively embedded these days.
If you want to stay on PPC you have to accept that you are going to pay a lot of money for machines that will be beat by x86 and also by even cheaper ARM machines.

The fastest Amiga this year is likely to be the Sam460 which with OS, memory etc will cost in the region of £800 or more*. Today I can get a Toshiba AC-100 10Z smartbook with a dual core 1GHz Cortex-A9 for £250**.


*based on an estimate from Amigans.net

**in stock at Amazon.co.uk

[Hammer]

Originally Posted by minator

You're comparing 2003 machines to 2006 machine and are what - surprised?

There are plenty of benchmarks on this, but x86 are stronger in some areas (branchy integer stuff) while PPCs are better in different areas FP and especially Altivec.

Depends on the FP workload. Did you miss Cinebench benchmarks? SSE is missing some non-desktop application targeted SIMD instructions.

AMD K8 already has 128bit wide FADD SSE and built-in memory controllers. Each of K8's FADD, FMUL and FMISC has it's own instruction issue ports.

Originally Posted by minator

Apple were very clever with the timing of their switch because it meant they went from lat year's PPCs to next years x86s and of course the x86s were faster.

Actually according to the benchmarks published at the time there wasn't that much of a difference between them, in fact the G4s could rip music faster than the first mac x86s.

One problem with testing CD ripping speeds is the speed of the optical drives involved.

Did you factor in iMovie HD benchmarks?

Apple MacBook Pro (2.0GHz Core 1 Duo)/Apple MacBook Solo (2.0GHz Core 1 Solo)
vs
Apple PowerBook (PowerPC 7447A 2.0GHz upgrade)

Originally Posted by minator

It was only after the Core2Duos appeared that a clear gap emerged, but by then development of desktop PPCs had already stalled.

Have you forgotten AMD64? The topic here is not about Apple's switch to Intel i.e. the topic is PowerPC vs X86(includes AMD64)

[takemehomegrandma]

[the_leander]

Originally Posted by commodorejohn

What are you talking about? Ten years ago it wouldn't even have been a possibility, let alone a realistic one; now, we're finally starting to see some progress towards a more powerful Amiga-compatible (note the emphasis on "compatible," as in "not just a generic PPC/x86 system that's adopting the Amiga name?")

What am I talking about? 10 years ago PPC was still broadly speaking a contender. It had active development behind it for the desktop market. The Amiga community was ten times or more the size it is today, we still had large numbers of commercial grade apps being developed for.

By 2003 that was all gone. All of it.

Originally Posted by commodorejohn

The market doesn't have to be split binarily between "direct recreations of original hardware with no extra power or features" and "bog-standard x86 clone system running software that's somewhat modelled on an older OS people liked."

This is exactly the kind of nonsense that I'm talking about.

The desktop market is saturated. It is mature and unless you have a bank balance not unlike either Sony or IBM, you are not going to make a dent into it. There is no place for Amiga outside of the retro set.

Originally Posted by commodorejohn

Assuming that the people behind projects like NatAmi do see them through to completion, and transition them to a business sanely (where "sane" is defined as "not charging $2300 for a 2GHz computer,") it can work.

Within the hobbyist sense maybe, as a viable business, not so much. It is doubtful the developers will ever sell enough to recoup the development costs of the natami. That's not to say however that they won't make a few quid out of it.

Originally Posted by commodorejohn

We live in a world where $50 will buy you a clone of a game console that used to cost $200-300; producing an affordable boosted-but-not-bleeding-edge clone of the Amiga is perfectly within the realm of possibility.

Who the hell said otherwise dingus? But a Natami is in no way going to be a contender outside of the retro crowd. As a piece of technology it is interesting and will no doubt have some pull at the geek crowd. As a mainstream desktop? Hahahah. My Tocco Lite feature phone packs more of a punch.

[lsmart]

One thing everyone seems to forget is availability of CPUs and innovation cycles. The x86 chips have very short innovation cycles and you can´t get the same kind of chip for more than a couple of years. A small platform however has to sell the same board for a much longer time to get back the costs of development. So unless you have the power to redesign your board every 2 years at least, you should probably choose a CPU that can be manufactured later in licence (ARM) or something that has longer cycles (maybe PPC).

If you continue on this thought, you will notice that drivers for other components suffer from the same problem, and that the main reason Linux is ahead of other alternative PC operating systems is that they get the drivers faster than anyone else.

[Omega Space Protons]

I voted for x86.

Omega Space Protons