Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/the-a-eon-amiga-x5000-reviewed-the-beloved-amiga-meets-2017/

Tempting.

ITYM X5000.

As an Amiga, cool. It's clearly the most kick-@$$ Miggy you can get. I think the Xena will be a waste of motherboard again, though. Does anything actually do anything with it? Did anything on the X1000?

As a PowerPC computer, eh. The P50xx series are not exactly barnburners, and a decade-plus-old 2.5GHz G5 will crush the P5020 easily; see http://www.generationamiga.com/2017/03/ ... 040-64bit/ . Assuming their numbers are in any way accurate, the current implementation would not even get in the ballpark with the Quad until they get the P5040 on board and AmigaOS to support SMP. Note that I can't figure out from that graph whether they're comparing against the DC 2.5GHz G5, or the 2.5GHz G5 Quad. If it's the DC 2.5, that's even sorrier.

As a general purpose computer, well ... uh ... that's not its market

I'm not likely to spend the money until the P5040 is an option, because it doesn't really tick both the first two boxes for me yet. But I'm impressed at how far they've come.

Yes, but a G5 is much more noisy, power hungry and potentially has poorer longterm reliability, especially the water cooled models - the pump isn't going to last forever and last I checked they stopped making replacements. Of course, you prefer to use MacOS, so this wouldn't even be an option. But I like the idea, because it is potentially decent enough to run a BSD or Linux on and use it regularly. Of course, if I wanted the best performance I would honestly prefer a P6 or P7 box but those are much more expensive and difficult to run, plus louder.

Just read this, and then did some more research. It seems like the Xena is developed by XMOS, which is apperantly a descendant of INMOS, developer of the Transputer. Apperantly it's theoretically possible to connect other XMOS Xena chips over the Xorro bus, daisy chained to get a crap ton of processors.

Also, apperantly the browser is actually decent, which is seriously impressive. I know of the difficulties Nekochan has had porting Webkit to IRIX (in fact, we've never done it at all) and they seem to have it on AmigaOS 4.1.

Regarding browsers... I guess it helps if you have full-time employees working on the problem.
I really like the idea of the programmable chips as well. I bet some people will find great use for it/them.

The review is not that great, though. I miss the old style Ars reviews.
I was curious about number-crunching performance (a few benchmarks would not have hurt). It doesn't cover power consumption, it doesn't mention whether it supports ECC memory or not...

I'm looking for a new 24/7 machine to replace my AMD G7 HP MicroServer and thought that could be an interesting candidate, but the review lacks key information to help making a rational decision. I would not dare to leave my Quad G5 up 24/7... my power bill is already too high.

The solution is: a couple of macmini-G4 stacked in a tower.
Well, here I have four units, two are intel-i2, two are-G4.
The whole satisfies all my personal and professional needs.

p.s.
MacMini-G4 is the best solution even if you want to experiment MorphOS.
Check it out: it's supported, and the license comes with a discount.

The Xena clearly has potential, but I don't know if anyone has actually done anything to exercise that potential. It seems to facilitate custom I/O; it's channel rather than buffer driven, which would certainly make things like using it for SIMD or as a true copper more complicated. Is there anything out there that meaningfully uses it?

It just seems like a solution looking for a problem that no one wants to do the work for.

Similarly, another thing I forgot to point out is that the P50xx lacks AltiVec. The G5's VMX implementation isn't too flash compared to the 7450 G4 (it's basically the old 7400 G4 AltiVec design that IBM bolted on), but it's got it, at least.

I'm harping on its performance mostly because if I bought a new PowerPC computer, it would be to run NetBSD or some other still-supports-big-endian-PPC-Unix on it, not primarily AmigaOS (I have an A4000T) or MorphOS. It's not likely to be this until it has a chance of being faster than what I'm already running.

ClassicHasClass wrote: Similarly, another thing I forgot to point out is that the P50xx lacks AltiVec. The G5's VMX implementation isn't too flash compared to the 7450 G4 (it's basically the old 7400 G4 AltiVec design that IBM bolted on), but it's got it, at least.

I'm harping on its performance mostly because if I bought a new PowerPC computer, it would be to run NetBSD or some other still-supports-big-endian-PPC-Unix on it, not primarily AmigaOS (I have an A4000T) or MorphOS. It's not likely to be this until it has a chance of being faster than what I'm already running.

I mean if we're looking for top of the line POWER performance we pretty much have to go for Tyan server mobos, there's not a single PPC embedded core that really can stand up to the G5. But, you get far less power consumption, a far more reliable piece of hardware (again, unless there's a source for water pumps for the G5, I can't see them lasting indefinitely, and the air cooled ones have their own issues) and faster memory, so there's that.

TDP and power consumption are important to me because the G5s I had were exceedingly power hungry and I couldn't have many other devices on the same breaker circuit before it tripped. That's one reason I've held off on finding a cheap P6 deskside server.

Don't know about the X5000 performance, but even the X1000 runs Linux...

As tempting as new hardware is to an oldtimer Miggy enthusiast like me, the cost and lack of portability just puts me off. It's perfectly possible to go down the minimal road and run fs-uae with PPC JIT via qemu and run AmigaOS4.1FE Classic on it. That's what I do. Costs a lot less. And I can take it with me (on the laptop) wherever I go.