> As far as I know [...], they only support in the works is limited to Apple AGP cards.
> [...] they have focused on cards that are supported by the machines we are using

Okay, I think this would mean Radeon X800/X850 with R420/R481 GPU then.

> even if PCIe G5 support were to be announced (and I am pretty sure that is not imminent)

"Support for more G5 models" could mean just this. Or it could mean even older PowerMac G5 models than are supported now (is this likely?). It could also mean iMac G5. And considering that both support for more recent graphics cards and support for more G5 models are supposed to come in MorphOS 3.6, which is 3 releases away, it doesn't have to be imminent.

> the focus on Apple supported cards means they won't be that much more recent.

Yes, we know that those don't go above the Radeon X1900 (R580).


Edit: typos removed, links added

[ Edited by Andreas_Wolf 11.11.2013 - 16:24 ]

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Yes, I agree. Under all circumstances I think we can assume that they will stick to Radeon's, meaning that all Nvidia cards are out of the picture.

Then if we look at AGP only (AGP 8x to be more precisely) we have the Radeon R400 architecture from which the two cards X800XT and X850XT came as OEM Apple G5 cards AFAIK. Performance wise they should be better than GeForce 6800 Ultra but below GeForce 7800GS, and could work as a good replacement for the R300 family of cards found as standard in "our" current line of supported PowerMac7,3 G5 computers. This is probably the best there is for Radeon/AGP 8x/Mac. Note that the cards can also be modified to work with AGP 4x/PowerMac G4 by disabling the pins 3 & 11 of the card (if you are buying second hand, it might be good ask questions about this before buying). It seems to be available in good supply.

Well, this has covered "more recent graphic cards" for the *currently supported* G5 models, but the roadmap stipulated "support for more G5 models". So what can that mean when it comes to "more recent graphic cards"?

Well, we have the iMac G5's of course. The first series of iMac G5, the "PowerMac8,1", used GeForce from Nvidia, which goes away. The second series, the "PowerMac8,2" used Radeon 9600, which hardly qualify as "Support for more recent graphic cards". The last iMac G5 series before they went "Core Duo", is the "PowerMac12,1", which used a Radeon X600 Pro, which is a family of chips that basically is the R300, but with PCI-Express instead of AGP. This doesn't qualify as "Support for more recent graphic cards" either!

They could also introduce support for the older line of PowerMac G5's, the "PowerMac7,2" series. But those have also an AGP 8x bus, so the same as above is applied to them, the R400 family's X800XT/X850XT will be the "most recent" graphic cards possible, right?

They could also introduce support for the newer line of PowerMac G5's, the last ones ever built, the "PowerMac11,2" with PowerPC 970MP CPU's and PCI-Express. Unfortunately, all these came with GeForce 6600 as standard, so a GFX card switch is mandatory. Then the best G5 compatible card I can find, is the ATI Radeon X1900 Mac G5 Edition. It should perform slightly better than a GeForce 7800GT. It seems to be available in good supply.

To sum it up, can it mean anything else than the R400 family's X800XT/X850XT for AGP 8x, or X1900 Mac G5 Edition for PCI-Express?

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I guess at least with 3D support. Basic "2D only" could probably be done relatively easily, but why would they bother with a half-assed release, instead of improving Radeon support further?

SMBFS support sounds really great, as my current NAS doesn't like current smbfs at all...

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SFTP and FTP support (via handler or so) would sound much better for me ;)

> X800XT and X850XT [...] as OEM Apple G5 cards [...] seems to be available in good
> supply. [...] ATI Radeon X1900 Mac G5 Edition [...] seems to be available in good supply.

That depends on the definition of "good", I guess. However, there should be plenty enough for usage with MorphOS, given the size of the MorphOS market. One thing to note is that those cards are usually above 50 EUR, even when offered used or refurbished.

Jupp3,
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Mine does..only problem is...is that I can only go down a few subdirectories and then it no longer works. Cant see past, oh, I forget..3 or 4 subdirectories?

This is a great road map in my opinion

I was present at Alchimie,

Some importants things has been said (which was not listed on the top)

For Gfx card support, it will include only Ati cards, also for PCIE powermacs.
Fab talk about shaders support to be added in tinygl.
Fab said that gallium will not be used..

Fab has explained also that a future morphos version is in work, it will take a long time.
Some work has been done on a virtual machine (Qemu maybe)
The Goal is to have a completly new 64bit operating system whith smp and memory protection and virtual memory support.....
A big effort will be done to have the much possible actual components integrated into the new
operating system.

But this will close definitively the Abox wich is limited to his original concept, working again for such features on Abox is a big waste of time for him.

Fab explained that Powermacs will not have smp support...it's not in the road, asmp is possible but softwares must be rewritten for this, but in fact for him it's not impossible ...for mplayer and blender rendering for example.
Fab didn't say if asmp will be really added in the future.

Fab explained also that a grunch like application should be included in morphos but only for third party applications.

The next architecture is not chosen, even we can expect that they work on X64 for now (with qemu)
Fab said it will depend on machines available on the market....
X64 or Arm or ....

Fab also said that Sam460 port is in progress but this is a one man work for now, it will be a bit long.

Thank you Fab for your keynote.





[ Edited by acepeg 12.11.2013 - 21:26 ]

Are you saying that MorphOS as we know It isnt the future? That all will change drastically and will be support other architecture? Perhaps I dont understand well cos my little baby is playing around but dont know if i like what I read.

Ill read it tomorrow again! ;)

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Thanks for sharing this. Beside the coming advancements of current MorphOS I really like to see that the MorphOS team is actually doing some work for the post ppc/Abox time which will inevitably come one day. I think with current MorphOS and current hardware support it will be rather easy to have the required patience.
I am also gladto hear Sam460 support is not canceled (I still think it is very good to have a non EOL RoHS compliant hardware).

If PPC path have to die....why wait for it and no change to other architecture now? Is this a lost time?

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No, of course not, development is continuing in he direction it has been.
As things progress, we will see added hardware.

And I was not kidding about not asking too many question.
Will we see iMac support?
I never had the nerve to ask.

Graphics cards?
Well, just follow the dotted lines guys.
And Andreas is oh so right (like that is anything new), how much graphics power do we need for the platforms we have?

I enjoyed the public confirm of some recent suspicions.
A quick thank to those who relayed the information.

Personally, I'm really pulling for ARM. While AMD64 has really made the X86 instruction set more attractive, I would still prefer to stay with RISC.

And since I'm pretty sure I can't convince anyopen to waiting to see if OpenSparc or Open RISC bare fruit...Arm is the next best thing.

As for the plan in general, to me, the shader support is definitely the most major new feature, and probably the biggest to implement. Of course f.ex. non-native screenmode support for PowerBooks is nice too, as there are way too many badly written games not supporting "any" resolution

Should also be great for people who have PowerBooks with broken display. Not sure if DVI out worked at all yet, or was it so it could only output the native resolution, which many monitors don't support...

But overall, the list is rather short. But then again, I think it's better to announce a "manageable" amount of new features, rather than lots of big things that would eventually end up taking years to complete

@acepeg

Erm, about shaders, i didn't exactly say that... I said the driver infrastructure had been reworked to make it easier to deal with shaders (in fact i think the currently released r300 driver even makes use of this already to implement some features, but i may be wrong on that) . But i didn't say that full shaders support would come anytime soon. It's really a lot of work.

As for the future architecture, i mostly insisted on the fact it was still in thinking phase. One shouldn't hold his breath for this, this is a looong and hard way to go.

As for SAM460, it was a proof of concept. I don't know if it's being worked on or not. I don't have information about this.

[ Edited by Fab 13.11.2013 - 05:27 ]

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To make a long story short, we obviously evaluate future options for MorphOS alongside our current developments as well. This doesn't mean that the current path is about to die anytime soon.

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I wouldn't hurry with that too much, there's still lots of to do with PPC and it'll be adequate for years. It'll be fun to use mature system finally and hopefully finetuning it will continue for a long time.

I guess going to other architecture would revert us 10 years back waiting to things to be written again, and as we saw all people aren't that patient. I don't quite like this eternal longing for something else, while we could polish what we have to better :) No architecture will be eternal, so after the switch, some people will start to talk about next.. some people just can't be happy ever.

@jPV

I am not sure how we are supposed to fine tune single core sub 2Ghz machines which are by far the vast majority of MorphOS systems, in order to prolong their usability. Can someone guarantee that they will be sufficient for everyday web browsing experience? Will we ever see any (port of a) relevant semi-modern game that will match those low and sub standard hardware requirements? Will they be able to play HD videos that are already the norm? If we finally get an office suite, will we be able to manipulate bloatware documents and spreadsheets, or it will be slow as a snail?
Now, picture the above in 3-4 years time frame. Will they be sufficient?
Sometimes, I get the feeling that even if there was an ultra modified and blazing fast Odyseey version, my 1,6Ghz G4 would again hit its limits on many webpages (from YT to to my heavily customized Gmail account and to from my eBanking service to Facebook on HTML5 for example). Hell, even my Core2Duo@2,4Ghz starts to show its age from time to time! At this pace, personally, I wouldn't be surprised if in about 1,5 year from today, cheap smartphones will be reaching the territories of the most advanced (single core) PPC raw power or even outperformed them.

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I think that happened some time ago...

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To put things a bit into perspective, I ran Nbench on both my 2GHz G5 machine and on my Chromebook, sporting a 1.7GHz Exynos 5 CPU. GCC 4.4.5 was used on the G5 and GCC 4.6.3 was used on the Chromebook.

G5 2.0GHz: Memory index: 9.299 - integer index: 11.381 - floating-point index: 13.520
Exynos 5 1.7GHz: Memory index: 11.070 - integer index: 12.591 - floating-point index: 12.016

Their performance is about equal on average, although I suspect that Altivec-optimisations in Mplayer, the G5 will perform quite a bit better for something like video playback. The Chromebook retailed in USA for $250 a year ago, BTW.

>> I wouldn't be surprised if in about 1,5 year from today, cheap smartphones will
>> be reaching the territories of the most advanced (single core) PPC raw power or
>> even outperformed them.

> I think that happened some time ago...

Even if we pretend G5 not going beyond 2.0 GHz, the decision if this statement holds true or not even for the present time will depend on the definition of "cheap".

I'm in for changing architectures. Whatever the next one will be, I'm sure it'll be thought out well and will provide for other software to be ported to MorphOS NG* easier.


* See what I did there

Let's appriciate what we do have at the moment. For the first time in over 15 YEARS I feel I have an Amiga that I can use for my everyday needs. The next system will come, we all know that, but before that we can enjoy a working system TODAY. Let's make that better, evaluate our options and when the day comes; buy ourself a new MorphOS system and go on yet another adventure

Just my 2 cents here: maybe something like this would make sense for MorphOS:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/07/99-arm-based-pc-runs-either-ubuntu-or-android/

Linux is dead slow on these kind of systems but MOS sounds like it would fly despite the hardware's limitations. That's a really good argument for non-Amiga users to switch to MorphOS IMHO.

BUT, I trust the developers to know 1000% better in these matters than I do. The above statement just makes sense to me personally

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Interesting, thanks!

A one year old Cortex-A15 ARM device performing about on par with one of the G5 PPC machines that "we" consider to be top of the line (albeit not the fastest, but OTOH there are a bit more powerful Cortex-A15's as well). And the PPC machine did cost almost ten times as much when sold almost ten years ago, not to mention power consumption, etc. Really puts things into perspective indeed. And the new 64-bit ARMv8 processors are about to enter the scene on a broad scale, and these will absolutely run the PPC's we have into the ground.

These old PPC desktop/laptop machines are truly in the backwater. And if we were to compare to the 4th generation Intel Core i3 / Core i5 / Core i7, then things get *truly* depressing.

Anyway, I like the Mac Mini PPC I have today and MorphOS really makes the most out of it. The biggest thing I miss is enough power for decoding/viewing x264 1080p streams etc. And I am happy with the development pace of MorphOS, and the fact that there is a "roadmap" for a couple of more versions at least, so I will happily continue using it until something better comes along!

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I like that idea. And I'm convinced we will see similar devices powered with 64-bit Cortex-A53/Cortex-A57 CPU's within a year!


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I disagree there! I have an Efika Smartbook and an Efika Smarttop, they are using a single core Cortex-A8 (that even had some bottlenecks removed in a later version). It's not a speed daemon, but Linux with the appropriate drivers and optimizations does not feel dead slow even on that. Rather the opposite, it's very usable, and I know Konstantinos Margaritis of libfreevec fame claimed he used one as his main system at some time.

A Cortex-A9, especially with more than one cores (the device you pointed at seems to be available in up to quad core), is a great deal faster. So I can't imagine how Linux could be "dead slow", something must be terribly wrong there if that's the case.

I think you could generally say that Cortex-A9 is well into "G4" territory, and a Cortex-A15 is in "G5" territory. In 2014, the A53/A57 will leave these territories *far* behind. And it will still be highly integrated, cheap, cool running and power efficient.

I wouldn't mind MorphOS on that kind of a device at all!

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No, I would not either.
But then, you guys were the people that convinced me to take a look at ARM in the first place.
And we are not going to have to wait a year for the A57/A53 cores.

On the other hand, what Frank said is reassuring.
I've grown quite fond of the PPC and if it were not for the pricing issue...
Well this year's cheap dual and quad core A9 products kind of completed that argument.

And while ARM has plans to try to keep the 32 bit cores attractive, if the Chinese start pumping out cheap A53 and A57 products, this whole line may get pushed forward purely because of the economics.

The one thing I am waiting for is an ARM device that has decent support for a discreet gpu. Not that the core should not have one, but an upgrade path would be nice.

And, whatever happens, I'm already planning for future revisions of our current OS.

While it would not run MorphOS on more than one core, I am beginning to wonder if ASMP wouldn't be better suited to say running Linux or BSD on the other cores of a Quad core G5.

But hey, even that is the future.

Frank, Mark, thanks for posting.
I like being reassured, even though, so far, you and your associates seem to have made all the right moves.