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[News] Vote on Ars Technica for Amiga One processorANN.lu
Posted on 30-Jun-2000 15:34 GMT by John Waters3 comments
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Ars Technica has an article linking to the GamersDepot interview with Amiga's CEO. This has prompted them to put up a poll. Vote Here for the processor of the Amiga One.
Vote on Ars Technica for Amiga One processor : Comment 1 of 3ANN.lu
Posted by Joe "Floid" Kanowitz on 29-Jun-2000 22:00 GMT
On the offchance that someone at Ars is trying to bone up on the Amiga goings on and happens to notice this... *sigh*
Way back whenever: I load up Ars-Technica and read about HP's Dynamo architecture.
A month or so later, I find out Amiga is going to use Tao's tech, which is part of the same general concept-family as Dynamo and the Crusoe chips.
I look around for any real writeups on Tao's stuff, but nobody's done an in-depth look at the actual architecture (or at least not translated it into something that someone who doesn't code ML/ASM daily can understand)... Just a lot of press releases and news articles saying It's Good.
I send an email to Hannibal of Ars. "Hey," I ask, "can you do a writeup on Tao's stuff? It's a more mature variant of the sort of thing you covered with Dynamo, and since Amiga just decided to buddy up with them, it'd be quite useful to know what, exactly, is going on under the hood, in terms of benchmark numbers and actual architecture."
Of course, no response.
Today, I pop up ANN, see the news, go over to Ars, and see 'Well, we really haven't had a clue Amiga was doing anything until now. Bill mentioned Alpha, so let's put up a poll with a few CPUs and treat this as something that is going to be forever tied to one processor architecture.'
I'm not voting, because I'm really not sure what should go under the hood. The AmigaOne is a confusing little box when you think about it. We've all been drooling about crossplatform for a while, but the AmigaOne forces us to consider what should be the flagship for the OE, the real-world demo, if you will. Do we want performance over all else? Price? (It should undercut the iMac, at least.) Price/performance?
Currently, I'd guess that the PPC offers one of the better price/performance ratios, in terms of producing a box that's as fast/faster than x86 for similar money, but if we're shooting for something with a really excellent price and high performance, I'd almost go for something ARM-ish, and Alpha for all-out performance.
There's an obvious reason for not going x86- it's going to run on x86 anyway, and it shouldn't be too hard to convince a PC vendor (Dell, maybe? :)) to add AMIE to their preloading options. The A1 is going to be like the BeBox (without the failings of its platform-tied OS)- it's there to wow the public and satisfy the True Believers, while hopefully making some money from sales to both markets.
Personally, I'd like to see something interesting and new come out of that Japanese consortium we've heard of, and see it power the A1... but after reading about the potential difficulties involved in such DIY-Emotion-Engine projects, I'm not sure if anything will really be ready for prime time soon. I'd avoid the Emotion Engine (in its current incarnation), too... It's good at raising the 3D gaming performance per MHz ratio, but you'll notice that the Dreamcast is whipping the PSX2 using off-the-shelf parts.
Final thought (one of those things that pops up while I write rants like this):
The Amiga is going to need a killer "regular" app to go along with its gaming performance. Considering that most of the people who have money to plonk on new hardware right now have made it in the stock market, how about some market tracking and analysis software that kicks any of the proprietary PC junk in the shins? Give it an open backend interface so a user can tie it to any online brokerage or quote provider who supports it... On the PC or Mac right now, you're stuck reloading webpages (or watching ugly little applets with few display options), using whatever software your brokerage gives you, or paying $500+a subscription service fee for a real tool. We could be looking at the next Quicken here.
Vote on Ars Technica for Amiga One processor : Comment 2 of 3ANN.lu
Posted by XDelusion on 30-Jun-2000 22:00 GMT
Well I voted Alpha. As for my logic at voting at all well:
If the Amiga users want a piece of hardware that bares the name Amiga on it, just to
feel all funny inside, then fine. I figure as long as that is going to go on, I might as
well vote on what is to me the fastest CPU out there (or am I wrong). Seing that
Amiga will run on just about anything, you might as well not worry about price, since
you DO NOT have to have an Amiga 1 to run the new OS. besides Amiga users have always
payed out the ass for the best in hardware, or at least good stable reliable hardware, so
if we must have an Amiga 1, it might as well not be a concern on how much it costs, it should
simply just KICK ASS.
Other than that, I don't care if the Amiga 1 ever makes it out. I have my eyes
set to a Mac G4 to host my new Amiga OS, either that or those new Boards IBM has been working on
that support multiple CPU's, which the Amiga 1 should as well.
Vote on Ars Technica for Amiga One processor : Comment 3 of 3ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous Coward on 01-Jul-2000 22:00 GMT
Why not use the processor designed to run Taos/Elate as mentioned on the Slashdot article at "http://slashdot.org/articles/00/06/04/044227.shtml"?
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