Yokemate of Keyboards
Posts: 2039 from 2003/6/4
@ takemehomegrandma
Well shifting to another ISA is far from trivial. Even if endianess matches I guess the job will not be done with some ARM defines and a plain recompile...
Look to the ammount of work that is actually necessary to "just" support another ppc processor like G5 or how long it takes to support a new gfx card. The resources in butterfly country are pretty limited. That may be sad (because I think generally MorphOS has the power to sustain on the market), but unfortunately it is a fact (And with these limited resources the MorphOS team does really an *incredible* job). Who will write a powerful ppc emulator? What about a 68k emulator? Dropping legacy support - well then I don't see much beenfit in ARM over x86. In fact rather the opposite. But this discussion is pointless anyway.
*If* one day there is need to switch ISA and do a cut I'd suggest it like I very briefly outlined here (no big deal whether ARm or x86 then):
https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=6570&forum=3#66869
But who is going to do it? I cannot, and most users here cannot either. Those who can are pretty loaded already.
And yes, Denver *IS* the buzz thing for ARM. As well as MS support is. The other ARMs are interesting, but they are not going to lead ARM to the desktop. And *the desktop is what I am interested in, and not stupid gear like a tablet or mobile phone.
The Genesi netbook is one of the very few intersting ARM offerings so far for general computing. Pity Genesi is rather a mouse than an elephant. It's not their fault, it is the market power of wintel.
Now speaking of wintel: That is the big news: nVidia with MS can break wintel. Maybe in future we will have Wintel and "Windia".
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http://www.via-altera.de
Whenever you're sad just remember the world is 4.543 billion years old and you somehow managed to exist at the same time as David Bowie.
...and Matthias , my friend - RIP