You're right, my memory served me poorly. My own Powermac G4 was a single CPU model, though ;)

I'd not even consider an AMP system, it'll be a ton of work for very little gain.
Even ported stuff than could use multi-core wouldn't run so it'd have to be heavily modified.

SMP is the only sensible way to go. The "Q-Box" type solution proposed (many) years ago is still a solution. It involves what is essentially a different OS with existing MorphOS running in a box or VM of sorts.
The problem is a new OS is a massive undertaking and that's not to mention whether you want to run on a different architecture.

Everything is multicore these days. I can get a MK809 III off eBay for 37 Euros (including postage). That's a quad core 1.6GHz with 3GB RAM and 8GB flash. Even watches are dual core (no I'm not joking!).

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It is closer to 90% of all G4 & G5 PowerMacs will have stock (from Apple) Dual CPU cards in them and if the MorphOS Dev. Team plans to stay with the PPC architecture, almost all NEW PPC CPUs will be multicore.

But as I said before, if the MorphOS Dev. Team thinks the benefit for applications and speed is small and the work to implement AMP is very large, it makes no sense to do it at all.

I completely trust the members of the MorphOS Dev. Team to make that decision (except for Bigfoot, who does not know that almost all G4 PowerMacs were sold with factory dual G4 CPU cards in them).

[ Edited by WB_Coder 05.06.2014 - 13:31 ]

May I ask, how many new hardwares contain more than one processing core? Are these CPUs? Are the single core CPU becoming endangered species? Eventually, MorphOS should somehow be supporting more than one CPU core if that is all that becomes available. ...unless MorphOS Team wants to make custom hardware with single core CPU.

(And it seems that all major Architecture have been increasing their productions of multi-core CPU computers.)

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For the G5 thats obviously true, but for the G4 thats utter nonsense.

Dual (stock) configs prior to MDD/FW800 versions make up only a very tiny fraction of whats being offered around here on ebay or elsewhere.

Comes with little suprise considering the hefty pricetag these units had back in the day compared to the rather limited gains they offered (remember lots of Mac users were still on OS9 at that time and even the early versions of OSX weren't as SMP-friendly as today).

Add the fact that most MorphOS users locking for such a unit in the past few years would have prefered single CPU configs due to heat/noise/power considerations.

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IMO: it would be futile to design/produce a board with single core CPU.
Multicore variants are not that much more expensive and by using multicore SoC, the HW might be interesting also to some Linux/Android geeks etc..

For example Quad core T1042 will be available for USD65...USD80 and T1022 will surely be cheaper.
When the system price will anyway be around USD250...300 or more, a few 10USD in SOC price is not that important.
So I personally would leave singecore T1 PPC models out of the question.


The board that I'm looking forward to buy and experiment with: T1042RDB-PA ~$1,100

> almost all G4 PowerMacs were sold with factory dual G4 CPU cards in them

No. As I said, almost all G4 PowerMac generations *include* factory dual-CPU models. This doesn't mean that almost all G4 PowerMacs were sold with factory dual-CPU cards. In fact, the majority (61% going by the number of models, not by the number of sales) of the MorphOS-supported G4 PowerMacs is made up of models with factory single-CPU cards.

Nice to see this conversation continuing.
Obviously, our future systems will all be multi core.
My Macs have been at least dual core since I upgraded my Quicksilver to 1 GHz.

While single core PPC processors are still available, from a price perspective it does not make sense to use them.

Since Andreas first mentioned the T1042, this has seems the ideal processor to focus on.
Not surprisingly, Andreas was also one of the first people to mention the e5500 core.

If we could find a good carrier board that would just require a CPU card, the T1042 could help us realize a low cost PPC platform.

> how many new hardwares contain more than one processing core?

Very many ;-)

> Are these CPUs?

Yes, CPU chips today usually come as symmetric multicore. GPU chips have been massively symmetric multicore (100s to 1000s of cores) for even longer time. And then there're SoCs, which are chips that are asymmetric multicore with 1...n symmetric CPU cores plus (for instance) 1...n symmetric GPU cores plus 1...n DSP cores plus...

> Are the single core CPU becoming endangered species?

I'd say yes, except for CPUs for some low-performance niches.

> Eventually, MorphOS should somehow be supporting more than one CPU core
> if that is all that becomes available. ...unless MorphOS Team wants to
> make custom hardware with single core CPU.

Of course it's perfectly possible to just support one core of a multicore CPU and ignore (or better put to sleep) the other cores. At least it makes more sense for producers of a single-core OS to just support existing multicore hardware in single-core mode than producing their own custom single-core hardware.

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T1022 and T1042 SoC cards should be coming available now.
(there seems to be small delay, LE for several releases was April 2014)

And when using separate carrier board, it means higher cost than stand alone board with onboard T1. And as these Qoriq chips have so huge amount of things built in (like connection to four PCIe card slots, basic built in graphics, etc.) there might not be carrier that can handle enough.

Too bad that when there is so limited amount of SW developers, there is even less next gen HW developers. Only ACube? (A-Eon outsources the R&D for highest cost)
But then there is a lot of HW gurus spitting out classic HW stuff...

To me it seems PPC chip options are better than a few years back, so perhaps we see nice things happening soonish. (also crowd funding seems to have become usable as well)


continuing about multicore...
We do not have R&D resources for it, but all modern PPC SOC support HW partitioning and virtualizations to allow several operating systems to be running at the same time. So it is perfectly doable to have MorphOS3 on core0, AmigaOS4 on core1, Multicore64bitmemoryprotectedOS on cores 2...23.

[ Edited by KimmoK 06.06.2014 - 11:05 ]

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Does that mean we could run a hypothetical "Classic MorphOS" and a "NG MorphOS" at the same time?

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Yes.
Example drawing: http://eecatalog.com/images/multicore/2009/pg_14.jpg
(old source)

(something more uptodate (pdf from freescale))

[ Edited by KimmoK 06.06.2014 - 11:55 ]

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Yes, many of the newer PPCs can enable hypervisor support.
Even the G5 should have had it (I understand it is disabled).
So, with a few minor modifications our current OS could run concurrently with a more modern 64 bit version.

To sum it up: technical possibility is one thing. Feasibility, needed worktime and their relation to achieved outcome is another.

@Krashan

Of course. We just hope it can be done, someday, somehow. I'm prepare to donate to a bounty for that. We got G5 support that way, so I guess it's a way

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If the MorphOS Dev. Team members ever thought it was a worthwhile effort, I would also support a bounty. From what I have read in this thread though, it does not appear to be worth the effort, because the benefit would be too small and the effort to create it is too great. One or both of those things would need to change, to make any kind of multiprocessing project & bounty worthwhile.

I wonder if the effort to do AMP on AmigaOS4.x will turn out the same as their laptop/netbook, and we will see an announcement 6 months or a year from now telling us that, after further review and working on the project, it has been cancelled, for what ever reason.

I don't wish for anyone to fail at their efforts, but always want real information and updates on progress.

@WB_Coder

Multicore, better MP and all that kind of stuff only make sense if you have to break compatibility no matter what you do. My "wish" was rather directed to a 64 bit version. Memory handling in MorphOS works quite well (you can never do anything about bad code: it crashes on MOS as well as Windows) and the system doesn't feel sluggish even on 10 year old HW.

I'm a little wishy-washy when it comes to MorphOS and these kinds of requests. On the one hand I would really welcome new, modern hardware (even expensive hardware if it was worth it) and a 64 bit version. On the other hand, as soon as I remind myself that just changing HW doesn't mean that users nor new (or even old) software will automatically appear, I become less enthusiastic. My bet is that a lot of the people on various Amiga forums who claims they would buy an Amiga system if it was cheap wouldn't really. They would start complaining that there are no software etc.

That's why I think the best approach would be to make the 64 bit MorphOS on a G5 so you could have a dual boot. It would give programmers a way to start porting to that system. But it also only make sense if you stick with PPC (let's see how Open POWER works out).

Damn if you do, damn if you don't ...

Silly SMP implementation in AROS is open and you can follow its progress with little effort. You knew it already but I wanted to remind about it because it attempts to preserve maximum source code compatibility.

@itix

Yes, I heard that it was very slow. Too slow to be at all usable even.

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Not sure, but I don't think it's any less unusable than "no SMP" version. Just not offering enough benefits to bother writing something like it for MorphOS.

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It is less usable than non-SMP version. AROS developers are trying to make it usable but as now it runs slower and is unstable.

[ Edited by itix 14.06.2014 - 12:22 ]

>> I heard that it was [...] Too slow to be at all usable even.

> I don't think it's any less unusable than "no SMP" version.

Sounds like you're in complete agreement ;-)

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It's imposible to say on that small quote alone. It can also mean it's "actually making things even slower than non-multicore version", which I doubt...

>>>> I heard that it was [...] Too slow to be at all usable even.

>>> I don't think it's any less unusable than "no SMP" version.

>> Sounds like you're in complete agreement ;-)

> It's imposible to say on that small quote alone.

Actually, my comment was making fun of entanglement in a chain of negations, so that what's written comes out as the opposite of what's meant :-)

https://facebook.com/414578091930728/photos/a.583390791716123.1073741829.414578091930728/674728855915649/?type=1&theater

[ Edited by Intuition 16.06.2014 - 07:59 ]