My point in suggesting ARM as something to consider and discuss, is that it can be scaled from something as small and cheap as the Raspberry Pi, to the monster servers and workstations that Andreas Wolf linked to, and NewSense complained about the price. X64 cannot be scaled down to something that can be sold for only $35, but still provide enough speed and power to run MorphOS.

I am sure that more companies will be building ARM desktop and laptop computers in the near future, and that in the not too distant future, we may even see ARM challenging Intel and AMD, as a true competitor in the consumer computer marketplace. Look at how popular the Maker community has become, and they are very fond of small ARM boards to control their projects. It would not be hard to convince many of those people to switch to an ARM based computer, either desktop, laptop, or tablet. Personally, I dislike tablet computers, so I hope that the laptop form factor will continue to be in demand enough to warrant the interest of several different manufacturers.

[ Edited by amigadave 25.02.2019 - 11:16 ]

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Exacly my mantra since years. x64 is still leading and will stay significantly in business for the next decades and hence it is the most logical choice. It'a a conservative approach indeed, but for MorphOS with its limited resources and user base a conservative approach may be the safest option.

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So, this ARM Desktop System being ONLY £1,360 ... is ONLY £1,200 too MUCH, or probably about 80% percent of these amounts $1.774.86, or 1,565.77 Euro too much, IMHO !

Comparing it to the X5000 is all very well, but that hardware is too expensive as it is, for our "hobby" Amiga systems.

If we had a full office package that was compatible with other systems, and integrated graphics software, along with other more advanced features we still don't have then .... maybe .... it might be worth paying more for a system. However, as it stands, for MorphOS the Apple hardware does all that we need, apart from some limitations browsing, and slow-downs as a result of the PPC hardware getting over-worked with JavaScript and the like, but then the hardware is only costing £60 on average, plus the cost of the licence, which I feel is good value for money, and well worth the commitment to remain on our OS. I'd like to be able to donate more, but I'm regularly and all-too-soon out of spare cash for donating, but when I can I do.

> Their other desktop ARM offering [...]. Here is the link to the ARM desktop:
> https://store.avantek.co.uk/avantek-32-core-cavium-thunderx-arm-desktop.html

There's even a third offering in the desktop/workstation category, which lies between those based on ThunderX and ThunderX2, with regard to both price and performance:

https://www.avantek.co.uk/ampere-emag-arm-workstation/
https://store.avantek.co.uk/ampere-emag-64bit-arm-workstation.html

I think Apple's attempt to move their desktops and notebooks to ARM will fail, and I wouldn't want to be on ARM in case that happens. Not that it will affect the family on mobile (no chance of that), but the higher end ARM designs could end up PowerPC'd.

It's a feeling more than anything else. For one, Apple's move is very ambitious - probably too ambitious. I've seen a lot of danger signs too about Apple hardware over the last few years, how they now cut corners on components and build materials to shave money off, where once Apple was renowned for build quality. This, I think, has been responsible for their slow decline, that and a distinct lack of investment in MacOS which has now left them some years behind.

TL;DR: x64 still seems the brightest prospect. Stay away from anything Apple does, they have the smell of slow death on them.

[ Edited by KennyR 26.02.2019 - 14:36 ]

Quote:

All of that stuff is flawed. The apple stuff is the best working but a lot of models have serious problems, ibooks, certain g4 powerbooks fall to bits, powermac G4s are loud and blow up their PSUs.

Then you look at the MOS and OS4 bespoke hardware. Pegasos I was ruined by a bad chipset, the Efika has no ram. At least Peg II was comparable to a Powermac at the time it was made.

On the OS4 side we get the original AmigaOne motherboards that went out of production before they actually saw an OS release, the sam440 with it's soldered down ram, and the x1000 which shipped with redundant sound and Ethernet cards because they didn't bother making drivers for their own bespoke motherboard. After a decade their lauded "xorro" chip still doesn't do anything. I won't even mention the prices on those boondoggles!

All in all just a mess really.

>>> as [...] buggy [...] as any of the PPC attempts of the past 20 years

>> That's not the impression I got from the Apple, bplan/Genesi,
>> ACube and Varisys/A-Eon PPC hardware.

> All of that stuff is flawed.

Your claim that I quoted and thus referred to was about hardware bugs in particular.

> a lot of models have serious problems, ibooks, certain g4 powerbooks
> fall to bits, powermac G4s are loud and blow up their PSUs.

After how many years of usage? How does x86 hardware compare after same time of usage?

> Pegasos I was ruined by a bad chipset

The chipset bugs were remedied by the April2 chip, which, while slightly lowering performance, means that the bugs were not exposed.

> the Efika has no ram.

The low amount of RAM on the Efika 5200B is not a bug.

> the original AmigaOne motherboards

...is not part of "that stuff" that I mentioned, for a reason.

> the sam440 with it's soldered down ram

Not a bug either.

> the x1000 which shipped with redundant sound and Ethernet cards because
> they didn't bother making drivers for their own bespoke motherboard.
> After a decade their lauded "xorro" chip still doesn't do anything.

Again, no hardware bugs.

> I won't even mention the prices on those boondoggles!

Prices are not bugs.

> All in all just a mess really.

And virtually nothing of this mess has been caused by hardware bugs, at least when applying the generally accepted meaning of the term.

Always in these threads you forget in the MorphOS team because they develop the os for the architecture and they will have a 68k emulation plus a PPC to can runs the current software available.

Quote:

Wrong on two counts. One, April2 did not fix all the bugs - my Peg1 still had DMA hangs from time to time. Two, it wasn't slightly lowering performance - the April chip bottlenecked the whole system and made RAM speeds ridiculously poor, and AGP not even worth having.

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But also it made it incredibly unsuitable for desktop. The 5200B was aimed more at fixed kiosks.

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They were untested CPUs, ballasted by untested chipsets, mounted on untested board logic. Almost nobody else in the world used them. Anyone who tried would learn the bugs the hard way. Of course part of the mess was caused by hw bugs.

Why won't you ever accept that PPC is dead because of these problems? You continue to argue forever while the world moved on 20 years ago.

[ Edited by KennyR 26.02.2019 - 14:43 ]

@Andreas
In Kenny's point of view "bad design" is also some kind of bug

Well.. all of these 'porting MorphOS to another CPU architecture' discussions are nice, but a bit pointless - unless you are a Dev with MorphOS source code access.

If you want to run some AmigaOS on other archs you can already do this with AROS. Here you can already help/improve existing ARM or amd64 support. Which in turn could even be a benefit for MorphOS in the future if some Dev wants to have a look at already working AROS ARM code for instance.

Quote:

Are you proud of what you wrote here? It's like you have some sort of internet-caused brain disease resulting in pedantry so extreme you miss the weight not only of what others say, but what you say also.

You've gone down my post with a big checklist going "technically not a bug! technically not a bug! I win I win!"

you're right in that a soldered down, useless low amount of ram is not a "bug" itself... so my corrected statement: These computers are overpriced, buggy, unsupported, and also: badly designed.

> April2 did not fix all the bugs - my Peg1 still had DMA hangs from time to time.

Interesting. My April2-fixed Peg1 did not. Where can I read more about those remaining bugs, preferably from people who know what they're talking about (like bplan engineers, Linux developers, MorphOS developers)?

> it wasn't slightly lowering performance - the April chip bottlenecked the whole system

April2 lowered the FSB from 133 MHz to 100 MHz. Of course, it's debatable whether a 25% bus speed decrease is a slight decrease or a significant decrease and I can easily accept any opinion favouring the latter view.

> and made RAM speeds ridiculously poor, and AGP not even worth having.

You mean compared to the Eyetech AmigaOnes which had the FSB running at full 133 MHz? I mean, wasn't even the Peg2's fake AGP x1 faster than the Eyetech AmigaOnes' "real" AGP x2 that was not hampered by April2 in speed?

>> The low amount of RAM on the Efika 5200B is not a bug.

> it made it incredibly unsuitable for desktop. The 5200B was aimed
> more at fixed kiosks.

Absolutely, and thanks for confirming that it is not a bug.

>> virtually nothing of this mess has been caused by hardware bugs

> They were untested CPUs

No, they were not. Not one single type of CPU in any Apple, bplan/Genesi, ACube or Varisys/A-Eon PPC hardware was untested. And I'm confident enough to even extend this list to all the CPU types used in MAI/Eyetech hardware. Most of these CPU types are/were used in high-reliability systems in various fields of application for many years, which was for a reason.

> ballasted by untested chipsets

...in case of the Peg1. Can you name the other "untested chipsets" used in Apple, bplan/Genesi, ACube or Varisys/A-Eon PPC hardware?

> mounted on untested board logic.

Untested Apple boards? You must be joking. The lists of bugs of "untested" Apple, bplan/Genesi, ACube or Varisys/A-Eon PPC boards must be huge compared to the list of bugs of tested x86 boards. Where can I find these lists?

> Almost nobody else in the world used them.

Not true. For instance, Apple purchased less than 5% of the PPC CPUs produced by IBM, so the other customers together used about 20 times as many IBM PPC CPUs as Apple did. That's certainly not "almost nobody". And then there's Motorola/Freescale who also sold the major quantities of their "desktop class" PPC CPUs to customers other than Apple. These non-Apple customers of IBM and Motorola/Freescale also used the PPC-specific, non-Apple support chipsets. The Apple chipsets and boards were used by all Apple users of the PPC era, which is a significant number. And most chipsets on bplan/Genesi, ACube and Varisys/A-Eon boards have been deployed on x86 boards as well.

> Anyone who tried would learn the bugs the hard way.

That's true for all hardware developments exceeding a certain complexity and involving complex circuits, regardless of ISA.

> Of course part of the mess was caused by hw bugs.

A part that amounts to virtually nothing compared to the parts of the mess caused by other things, and a part that's not significantly bigger than the counterpart in the x86 world.

> Why won't you ever accept that PPC is dead because of these problems?

Because bugs is simply is not why PPC is dead. It's dead because of various reasons, but none of them is bugs in CPUs, chipsets or boards.

> You continue to argue forever while the world moved on 20 years ago.

That's because you continue your attempts at rewriting history. PPC may be dead, but facts shouldn't be changed after the fact (if you pardon the pun), no matter the time passed.

> Are you proud of what you wrote here?

Are you?

> It's like you have some sort of internet-caused brain disease [...]

What disease is it that causes someone to resort to insults when he lacks arguments?

> you miss the weight not only of what others say, but what you say also.
> You've gone down my post with a big checklist going "technically not a bug! [...]"

You claimed that all PPC hardware "of the past 20 years" has been buggy. I challenged this claim and what you came up with in response made clear that you didn't even grasp which claim in particular I was challenging, although it was in the quote.

> you're right in that a soldered down, useless low amount of ram is not a "bug" itself

And neither is any of your other examples.

> so my corrected statement: These computers are [...] buggy [...]

I see what you did there, and it's still untrue :-)

> the MorphOS team [...] will have a 68k emulation plus a PPC to can runs
> the current software available.

The question is whether this will be a transparent emulation like Trance is now, or just an encapsulated emulation like UAE, especially considering that MorphOS NG will most likely be a little-endian OS for reasons of software portability.

Your argument style is just to scrutinize posts on a line by line basis, looking for imagined grammatical flaws in casual speech to attack, rather than actually engaging with the meaning of that speech.

This causes you a big problem, you're obsessed with the Efika's ram "not being a bug". Nobody said it was, it was brought up as an example of how PPC Amigaish systems have generally sucked. What does this weird grandstanding over if it's a bug or not get you? It's still a shit and useless amount of ram, although now you'll probably dance on the edgecase of a pin to dispute the word "useless".

I told you I'm not interested in your turbo-pedantry already, so I dunno why you think doubling down on it will get me to take you seriously now. My main reaction is contempt for your socially maladjusted nature, reinforced by how adenoidal you sound complaining about me making fun of you for this.

[ Edited by khorse 27.02.2019 - 00:14 ]

Quote:

You are most likely correct, this discussion is pointless, unless one of the members here actually points out some valid suggestions as "Pro's" for using ARM instead of x64, and one or more of the MorphOS Dev. Team members happens to read it, and then think . . . . maybe choosing to port to ARM64 isn't such a bad idea. That one team member then talks to the other team members, and they have their own discussion behind closed doors, to make sure they still want to go forward with the port to x64, or if they want to look at possibly porting to ARM64 as well, or instead of, x64. They are free to change their minds, if they have evidence that one choice is better than their current plans.

I still stand by my statement that there are certain "Pro's" to porting to ARM64, instead of x64. I'm not sure if there are enough "Pro's" in favor of ARM64, to outweigh the "Con's", or if the "Pro's" for x64 don't outnumber the "Pro's" for ARM64, but I think it is worth having a discussion about it. Unfortunately, most of the replies to this thread have nothing to do with the discussion I had hoped would take place.

Edit: I don't know how far along the road to porting MorphOS to x64 hardware has progressed, but if it is further than just a concept, and actual x64 code has been written, there is no point in further discussion about the Pro's and Con's of x64, ARM64, or any other possible architecture change. Since MorphOS for x64 is going to be so radically different than our current MorphOS3.11 for PPC, I'm assuming that there is still a long way to go before we will be seeing a public demo of MorphOS for x64, and still longer before a public release and sales begin. I'm also guessing, that any coding work that has begun, can probably be more easily ported from x64 to ARM64, than the job of porting MorphOS3.11 for PPC to MorphOS for x64.

Can we please get back on topic, and discuss the Pro's and Con's of using ARM64 as a future target to port the Next Gen version of MorphOS to, instead of, or in addition to x64 hardware?

[ Edited by amigadave 26.02.2019 - 16:16 ]

There are no pros or cons in the context of a consumer, nor a software developer beyond this:

Is it already a cheap commonplace item in this market segment? yes/no

Stuff like power consumption blah blah is for the interest of hardware developers. In other words, irrelevant. You can have a new CPU arch that actually generates electricity and reverse global warming, but I'm not going to write software for it until it's shipping in all of next year's dells.

> Your argument style is just to scrutinize posts on a line by line basis

Rather on a proposition-by-proposition basis.

> looking for imagined grammatical flaws in casual speech to attack

No, I tend to ignore grammatical and orthographical errors. Not being a native speaker I make enough of them myself after all.

> rather than actually engaging with the meaning of that speech.

What is the meaning of the word "buggy" you used with regard to PPC hardware, if not the presence of bugs?

> you're obsessed with the Efika's ram "not being a bug".

No, I merely stated that this is not an example of the alleged bugs you claimed.

> Nobody said it was

Then why did you mention it as an example in response to my objection of your "buggy hardware" claim?

> it was brought up as an example of how PPC Amigaish systems have generally sucked.

Then you replied to the wrong comment it seems, as my comment you replied to was objecting your "buggy hardware" claim (which you then repeated in comment #21, so apparently you really mean it).

> What does this weird grandstanding over if it's a bug or not get you?

Probably the same that your insistence on "buggy hardware" gets you.

> It's still a shit and useless amount of ram

Yes, I have the very same low opinion of the Efika's RAM amount and stated it numerous times here on MorphZone and elsewhere since its release.

> although now you'll probably [...] dispute the word "useless".

You may have lost the plot here.

> I told you I'm not interested [...]

Indeed you did, but serving your interest isn't my incentive anyway :-)

> you think doubling down on it will get me to take you seriously now.

That's not what I think. Repeating unfounded claims about buggy hardware is doubling down, I think.

> me making fun of you for this

I'm sure you can do better :-)

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Is this forum site turning into Amiga.org, or AmigaWorld.net, where most of the threads get derailed by useless arguments? (not specifically blaming you Andreas_Wolf, just adding this comment to the end of this thread)

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Hacking people's posts into singular tiny fragments to interrogate only makes you miss that your point of interrogation is answered in the next few words.

You're ruining your own argument and wasting time saying redundant things because you won't read properly.

[ Edited by khorse 27.02.2019 - 13:27 ]

Quote:

The argument is that that desktop ARM is likely to have the same problems as desktop PPC, namely that those using them are big companies who can design their own support chips and quickly work around any hardware bugs. And will promptly close off their own designs so MorphOS would take years to run on them anyway.

In that context, none of this discussion is off topic.

Here's the thing about PowerPC and MorphOS/AmigaOS: it was tried. And tried. And tried. We aren't relying on any guesses or opinions here.

The original Pegasos fell foul of a northbridge with cache coherency bugs and the fix was expensive and hammered the system's speed. The original AmigaONEs did not fix the issue and much of the board's functionality was replaced by extra cards to avoid triggering them. The hardware had unadvertised bugs.

The Efika was almost useless for desktop because it's SoC had never been designed for it. The hardware was insufficient for intended use.

The Pegasos-2, while faster in every way than the Peg-1, was on paper inferior in several ways because the Marvell just wasn't as advanced as the Articia. The hardware was limited.

The X1000 ran out of the supply of PA6Ts to continue the line, simply because they weren't available any more - and even when they were, they were too expensive.

More recently, the Tabor has been endlessly delayed because every time the board is finalised, some component or another is no longer available.

PowerPC, as a direction for MorphOS, failed because of these reasons: price, availability, power and robustness. It would seem to me that if you want to choose a new CPU family and not fall foul of this again, then you should:

* avoid proprietary hardware
* avoid non-mainstream hardware
* use specifically designed desktop or notebook hardware
* Use only well-tested designs

Right now, that means x64. The only way this will change if desktop ARM flourishes and diversifies... and isn't just controlled by Google.

[ Edited by KennyR 27.02.2019 - 16:08 ]

Completely sound analysis, but prepare to be ignored by the true believer.

>>> it was brought up as an example of how PPC Amigaish systems
>>> have generally sucked.

>> Then you replied to the wrong comment it seems, as my comment
>> you replied to was objecting your "buggy hardware" claim (which
>> you then repeated in comment #21, so apparently you really mean it).

> you miss that your point of interrogation is answered in the next few words.

My point of interrogation was your "buggy hardware" claim referring to any (not some) PPC hardware of the past 20 years, thus including the Apple, bplan/Genesi, ACube and Varisys/A-Eon PPC hardware. I don't see where you answered this. If you did and I missed it, you can surely quote it. (Honestly, your claim is so ridiculous that I cannot even imagine how it could be proved seeing as it could be falsified by no more than one single counterexample.)
My opinion on this: The PPC hardware designed by professional hardware designers like Apple, Varisys or bplan is not significantly more buggy than any random x86 hardware.

> You're [...] saying redundant things

Yes, I know that I'm somehow repeating myself in my replies to repeatedly uttered nonsense claims.

> you won't read properly

Apparently it's you who didn't read properly what he replied to as you failed to mention any bugs of Apple, bplan/Genesi, ACube and Varisys/A-Eon PPC hardware in comment #15. The only part of your comment that is contentually connected to what you replied to is your mention of the Peg1's "bad chipset", the bugs of which I still believe are remedied by the April2 in connection with FSB clock reduction. And even if they are not, the Peg1 is just one single of a three-digit amount of (desktop/mobile) PPC hardware released in the past 20 years.