> How? No such thing is mentioned in installation guide.

It has been introduced with MorphOS 2.5:

"BootImage boot parameter (usage bi="devicename:morphos.iso")"
http://www.morphos-team.net/releasenotes/2.5

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Did you ever hear about anecdotal evidence ? :)

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Tsts didn't get the last newspeak-memo ?

It's only anecdotal when it's going against your point of view!

Otherwise it's called "life experience".

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Either you have been living under a rock or under a bridge...

> I see it as grat multi purpose thing

As it was explained numerous times in this thread alone, the Cell is not exactly what most would call a multi-purpose CPU. Sure, it can do everything in some way or another, but for many desktop computing purposes it just doesn't cut it.

> Maybe IBM still use or develop it

If there's any truth in what IBM said in public, they don't.

> unlike PWREfficient that was killed as baby.

By Apple, not by IBM.

> much can be stored in way faster GPU memory

256 MiB VRAM isn't so much when to be used as system RAM. Even using all except 64 MiB VRAM as system RAM would give only 448 MiB. Besides, VRAM may be faster than system RAM, but only when accessed by the GPU. CPU access to VRAM is surely slower than to system RAM.

> YDL is reported to be poor just because its ported but not optimized.

You can optimize a desktop OS only so much for Cell. Optimization in Cell-context would primarily refer to the SPEs, and it has already been explained that they are not really suited for desktop computing purposes.

> Soon will come BR Recorders and combo drives ...

Blu-ray combo drives have been listed since at least 2007, external Blu-ray recorders since at least 2008 and internal ones since at least 2009:

http://www.heise.de/preisvergleich/eu/?cat=dvdrom&xf=749_Blu-ray&sort=p#xf_top
http://www.heise.de/preisvergleich/eu/?cat=dvdramext&xf=578_Blu-ray&sort=p#xf_top
http://www.heise.de/preisvergleich/eu/?cat=dvdram&xf=578_Blu-ray&sort=p#xf_top

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... in Serbia.

Anyway, BR is standard, at least for high HDI countries.

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If you carry media (games/movies) from stores home it is standard.

Why whould anyone burn discs, beside making a backup of his computer harddrive? And speaking backup, I won´t even trust these media more than a burned DVD or CD, so I prefer storage on NAS.

In 2014 there are so many cheaper and easier to use ways, than using crappy selfmade discs with a limited lifetime.

Geit





[ Edited by geit 16.01.2014 - 14:21 ]

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I have Amiga backups on CD from 90s and they are 100% readable, unlike
storage media that dies in few years. Your choice.

However, Double Layer Blue Ray is greatest laser disc so far.

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Technology of writing the data and the quality of discs has risen to a top notch level since many years. That said I have still perfectly working cd's written about 15 years ago.. wouldn't be surprised if they outlive me. Having burned thousands of cd's and dvd's in my life I would bet only a fraction is not working if tested today.

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Bluray support is a completely different issue. Bluray support should be added "at some point", regardless of whether or not the development team would be too crazy, and risk getting sued by Sony by doing "proper" PS3 port, or doing crappy useless "OtherOS" version that no-one can run anymore. Both would be without 3D acceleration anyway.

Bluray support should be on the todo list, but with REALLY low priority.

...but of course MUCH higher priority than "Waste time doing useless PS3 port"

By the way, is it possible to have polls on morphzone? Would be nice to have some poll like:
Should MorphOS team do "2D-only" port of MorphOS for PS3?

Yes, OtherOS support is fine.
Yes, but needs to work on newer firmware by using latest hacks (and risk getting sued by Sony)
No, because there are already better platforms, such as Efika, that can run MorphOS better than PS3 ever would.
No, because development time shuld be better spent on supporting sensible targets (more PPC macs)
No, because developemt time should be spent on new OS features instead.

There's certain VERY vocal minority that claims it would make sense, would be nice to know if it would be "bigger-than-1".

Sometimes I wonder if he's an undercover OS4 user trying to damage MorphOS by trying to make the development team waste time on worthless work instead of more important things... Just kidding

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That very much depends on the disc quality and humidity of your area. Very few discs I've written in the past 15 years still work flawlessly. All the cheap ones are properly dead (rather unsurprisingly) and most of the good quality ones have at least a few read errors. DVDs tend to be worse, for some odd reason, even though they should physically be more robust.

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No biggie as you said yourself, the price always matched the quality... its easy to avoid shit quality discs. I did a *lot* of burning with dozens of different brands so I learned to avoid certain brands.. I remember yellow Budget-labeled dics being the worst.. huge percentage didn't work out of the box and the rest died in 1-2 years IF they worked on common drives in the first place.

As for humidity I can't comment.. our climate changes from -35 to +35 celcius yearly and I have had no problems whatsoever.

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I do believe its closest to multi chipset Amiga thing out of all.
And it is still used in IBM supercomputers, and even revised to DDR2.

PowerXCell 8i
In 2008, IBM announced a revised variant of the Cell called the PowerXCell 8i, which is available in QS22 Blade Servers from IBM. The PowerXCell is manufactured on a 65 nm process, and adds support for up to 32 GB of slotted DDR2 memory, as well as dramatically improving double-precision floating-point performance on the SPEs from a peak of about 12.8 GFLOPS to 102.4 GFLOPS total for eight SPEs, which, coincidently, is the same peak performance as the NEC SX-9 vector processor released around the same time. The IBM Roadrunner supercomputer, the world's fastest during 2008-2009, consists of 12,240 PowerXCell 8i processors, along with 6,562 AMD Opteron processors.[24] The PowerXCell 8i powered super computers also dominated all of the top 6 "greenest" systems in the Green500 list, with highest MFLOPS/Watt ratio supercomputers in the world.[25] Beside the QS22 and supercomputers, the PowerXCell processor is also available as an accelerator on a PCI Express card and is used as the core processor in the QPACE project. Since the PowerXCell 8i removed the RAMBUS memory interface and added significantly larger DDR2 interfaces, and enhanced SPEs the chip layout had to be reworked which resulted in both larger chip die and packaging.

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Well, we anyway use top noch avail CPUs. This seems to be enough for I.
Dongarra and his team demonstrated a 3.2 GHz Cell with 8 SPEs delivering a performance equal to 100 GFLOPS on an average double precision Linpack 4096x4096 matrix.

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I haven`t mentioned IBM here, point is Cell reached a lot of potential.
And as far as I read PWR team was used to bring iPhone ARM CPUs.

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Even being a social scientist and not an IT guru, I we seen able hackers and programmers doing quite a lot of magic with even harder restrains.

I am saying MOS Lite Cell, just basic stuff, but well optimized and having some VRAM or HDD Virtual mem.

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If I got 21st and half century (Duck Dogers Stylee) desktop use is today multimedia oriented more then ever.

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Surely, I am talking about prices for massess.

In short: my idea is to have next cheap MOS PPC computer AND great console - SPS3.
And SAM460ex /AresOne PPC as new board. That would give us outer reach even with younger generation. Its impossible, waste of time etc.

If I had money, well I would design a new Cell based board and pay for Fedora 20, Mint 16XFCE, AmigaOS 4.2 and MorphOSm ports in reversed order

[ Edited by vox 17.01.2014 - 11:32 ]

Why am I reminded of someone asking for hundreds of RJ11 sockets on the NatAmi?

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My 2008 MacBook Pro is really fussy about what blank DVD's it takes. Most brands just spin around for a few seconds then get spat out.

Yet blank CD's it seems to like.

It has been established that the PS3 is not a viable target (to weak CPU, little RAM, NVIDIA-GFX, access restricted to old units not been updated for quite a while etc etc....).

MorphOS making proper use of Cell would require about as much of an rewrite than porting it to x86 or ARM. Only difference is that with x86 and ARM 3rd-party apps could use the full potential with little more than just a recompile.

All this to achieve what ? Run on HW that can't be obtained by even remotly normal means (since PS3 is out) ??

> it is still used in IBM supercomputers

The most recent Top500 list contains only one single Cell-equipped (PowerXCell 8i in this case) system on rank 37, which is not from IBM but from T-Platforms:

http://www.top500.org/system/177421

> and even revised to DDR2. PowerXCell 8i [...]

The PowerXCell 8i stopped being produced a while ago, whereas the Cell BE is still in production today (in 45 nm process node since 2008/2009), primarily for use in the PS3 presumably.

> If I had money, well I would design a new Cell based board

...or rather commission the design, I guess ;-)

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Isn't that the True Amigan TM way?

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Its a Mac. Its not supposed to work with standard discs, it needs 3x more pricey Apple iDiscs

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It's an absolutely terrible machine. The 2005 PowerBook G4 I have is better quality.

And don't get me started on OSX, #%£@&£* POS that it is. It's useful for one thing and one thing only. Logic Pro.

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Renoise ftw!

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Renoise looks great but I've never been able to get the hang of trackers. Lack of patience is my problem.

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Well, since it is PPC32 compatibile, I doubt it that hard. At least Linux community has proven that. 3rd party x86 and ARM apps will be easier to recompile then PPC32? I hope you are right.

As much as I see PS3 can still be obtained even in packaed non used state.
I see it as way advanced arhitecture to PPC Macs, even G5 ones in many aspects,
but as you say ... if its impossible, better leave it alone here.

However, I will still get that cheap and ugly gaming platform and use Linux on it.
Proof of concept.

@Andreas

Yes I would pay to what ... Varisys to do such board with high end cell, high end RadeonHD, High end SCSI and SATA, as many PCI and PCI-E slots, Blue Ray Recorder, all card reader and USB 3.0 and different tune you would sing. Especially if it would have both laptop and touschreen versions and do a perfect multimedia of all kinds

And would run PS,PS2,PS3 and older console as well as DosBox, Hatari, UAE JIT and other emulators lincesed and included with ROMs within OS. Even Sinclair 128, CBM 128 and Sinclair QL emu, for historical reasons.

It would come with MorphOS Cell SE and emulate whatever needed system in sandboxes, and include native Fedora 20 sandbox for Linux apps As well as GIMP, Blender and OpenLibre native MorphOS cell only ports. And some last Sound Blaster onboard.

But once I became a millionaire, count on it!

[ Edited by vox 17.01.2014 - 23:36 ]

>> MorphOS making proper use of Cell would require about as much of an rewrite
>> than porting it to x86 or ARM.

> since it is PPC32 compatibile, I doubt it that hard. At least Linux community
> has proven that.

I doubt that a simple port to the Cell PPE is what Kronos meant by "proper use of Cell". And regarding what the Linux community has proven I quote yourself: "YDL is yet not well optimized".

>> Only difference is that with x86 and ARM 3rd-party apps could use the full
>> potential with little more than just a recompile.

> 3rd party x86 and ARM apps will be easier to recompile then PPC32?

No, that's obviously not what he meant. Hint: the SPEs don't implement any PPC ISA.

> I would pay to [...] Varisys to do such board [...] and different tune you would sing.

Such board would surely remove most of the PS3's limitations discussed in this thread, but the Cell would still be the Cell, and you know my opinion on it in terms of desktop computing.

> And would run [...] PS3

Just because a board has a Cell chip doesn't mean it can run PS3 games. There's more to the PS3 than just the Cell.

> OpenLibre native MorphOS cell only ports.

In case you mean LibreOffice here: Cell-only port would imply SPE usage, but I doubt a word processor can make good use of the SPEs.