Posts: 1387 from 2003/2/15
From: Central Europe
Quote:
amigadave wrote:
I wonder how many of the MorphOS Dev. Team members are looking at that Power9 board and wishing that they could port MorphOS to it, but do so with a break from our traditional Amiga compatible version of MorphOS, so they could run on all 16 cores (more if/when a 2nd CPU is installed).
I wouldn't be too surprised if that number was actually zero.
Talos II sounds like a fun toy to play around with but that is about it.
Quote:
Seems I might have written something like this before, and I may be repeating myself. Someone may have already explained to me why my idea is not possible, and that the switch to x64 is NOT more difficult, once the break away from the Amiga compatible API is made, and that sticking with the dead PPC hardware platform offers zero benefits. I don't know, because I can't remember sh!t!
What you are describing is a reasonable approach for developing and testing prototypes of a next generation MorphOS.
However, there is really little point in taking the time to polish everything and produce a version that is ready to be shared with end users and third party developers if you can just push ahead and go for an architecture that has far more long-term appeal in the consumer / enthusiast space than PowerPC / POWER does. If you produce a "stop gap" release for selected PowerPC systems, then you risk facing a second compatibility break as soon as you switch processors again or being required to deal with fat binaries or similar options to ensure people can run the same software on multiple processor architectures. These things can get complicated very quickly.
Ideally, MorphOS can be run on a variety of hardware choices that cover a reasonably wide spectrum of price points. As reasonable as the Talos II pricing appears to be compared to other server-class hardware options, there are no publically known plans for entry-level hardware options using the same core processor architecture. So, while Talos II looks interesting enough, it represents just a tiny piece out of a much larger set of missing puzzle pieces.
