ACube announced two days ago that they had completed their motherboard Samantha that it is now on the market...

ACube Systems Site news

Could it be a viable hardware solution for MorphOS?

I wonder a market solution like this:


- Efika + MorphOS for very cheap market as ancient A500.

- Samantha + MorphOS for middle market solutions like A1200 or A2000.

- Pegasos III MPC 8641D + MorphOS for power users and high market... Llike A3000!

(also 8641D is ready for future OS solutions when MorphOS will be released as being SMP and multicore).

- Moana 8641D??? (A2500? A3000?)

- Open Server Workstation PPCG5 = for future OS solutions when MorphOS will be released as being SMP and multicore. (A4000, Amiga Workstation)

I dream of AOS 4.0 running on my Pegasos II, and I am looking forward dreaming MorphOS running on a Samantha board...

Now if only Acube and Genesi/MorphOS team could cooperate, then the Amiga market will be again unifyied...

Listen to me ACube and Genesi, if you are enough smart, you will find a viable agreement, and you will live together in perfect harmony earning more and more money worldwide...

At least any copy of MorphOS for Samantha board will generate renevues...

Any OS4.0 licence sold with Efika and Pegasos III will grow up Genesi and MorphOS team Bank Accounts...

A dream? Maybe... At least who knows that?

Only stupids kill each other in a MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) war.

All comunication channels are open to any SERIOUS proposal.

ACube and Genesi are free to write the last words to this thread!

[ Edited by Raf_MegaByte on 2007/4/3 6:32 ]

Ok

pegasos III you can forget about...

Also i seriously doubt mos port for samantha.. its imho of course

magnetic

I will try to be brief

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Which market that would be?

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Again, which market would that be?

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This kind of market doesnt even exist.

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Why?

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And again, why?

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A market for those who want a little computer as mini-server for home LAN...

(Good for this task if it runs Linux...)

At the same time it is a market for those who want a revival of A500.

You were brief. Should I became VERBOSE in explaining it...???

And remember: If you are smart enough, you CREATE the market for your products.

See for example cellular phones... the Telephone companies had to create an entire market from scratch, tried to convincing people that Cellular Phones were of infinite uses, and mainly for daily use...

It seems they had a certain success promoting that market...

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Just for fun...

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I am too lazy to explain it again...

[ Edited by Raf_MegaByte on 2007/4/3 6:40 ]

[ Edited by Raf_MegaByte on 2007/4/3 6:42 ]

You know, the big problem for AmigaOS and MorphOS is that the train left the station many moons ago, and we were left sitting on our asses at the station waiting for a new one, which never came.

I understand the "fun-factor" in these products. Or actually I rephrase, I partially understand it. Now what kind of FUN is it to use a way too underpowered hardware, can you tell me that?
Add to that, its impossible to create a market based on fun-factor if the product itself is way too pricey. Its like trying selling Lada in the States for the price of a Chrysler claiming its just fu*cking awesome vehicle to drive and keeps you entertained for many years to come.

The way I see it, the fun will come from a proper use of your computer. Be it videoprocessing, watching dvds, soundprocessing, playing games etc. Sam or Efika with OS4 or MorphOS wont help you here, Linux a bit maybe, but hey whats the fun in that?

I will continue a bit as I dont want to sound too negative. I really enjoy using MorphOS on Peg2, just too bad it cant cope with some of the tasks I need to do. 1GHZ G4 offers enough horsepower to do some stuff I like to do, on Efika or Sam I wouldnt use MorphOS even a day.

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With Linux at 667 MHz on Samantha you made nothing, because Linux has a great request in resources...

You must build a MINIMAL DISTRO to run it multimedia...

However with small footprint MorphOS you can easily see DVDs, making soundprocessing, playing games BUT NOT video-processing, because videoprocessing requires high speed over pimped hardware...

Remeber that Samantha being equipped with SoC CPU and onboard ATI Graphic Card has no problems in DMA transferring, so you can run DVD's at maximum speed, and MorphOS it is the ideal OS for it...

Just made yourself such a question if selling MorpHOS package licenses could help Genesi/MorphOS tem to earn money.

I think the answer it is: "YES".

Lots of people will buy MorphOS for Samantha to install it in a partition close to Linux, AOS 4.0, or whatever else OS will be released with this motherboard.

[ Edited by Raf_MegaByte on 2007/4/4 11:59 ]

Hooligan:

Have you used MOS on the Efika already? It is a quite useable system. Not for too much things, but I like it for simple things liek photos, music, mails and other web stuff. For a tiny limited device the Efika is well suited and has an attractive price.
It is of course no desktop replacement computer.
With Linux I feel Efika's limited power quite soon and the fun factor is really limited. Luckiky Linux will be flushed from hd soon.

For the SAM board (at least the shown version) I see no future due to a bad (i.e. expensive!) design.

@Zylesea

Exactly, you understood my message fully, as I said I find Sam-board way too expensive to be a hobby-funtoy. Efika has at least a bit more attractive price making it a luring option for some.

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From where is this "lots of people" coming from? Its not coming from Amiga-market, and its definetely not coming from OUTSIDE the Amiga-market.

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:laugh:

In 1984 Steve Jobs said of Amiga: "Too much hardware"...

Do we see again the same arguing about Samantha... But coming from less important people.

Just remember that Samantha has more or less the same hardware specifications that it should equip Efika2 as stated eons ago on some MorphOS and Pegasos sites and not yet ever seen, because Efika (Efika 1) required a looooong time for the development...

And just think about the fact that Genesi could license Smantha motherboard as being Efika 2...

This will mean that they will prevent further expenses in development and could focus on Pegasos III and OSW...

Also again I repeat that making MorphOS for Samantha will be a sure gain in money...

But I must think that you look at Amiga market as composed only by old people who don't want to upgrade their hardware, and that you have no faith in a future expansion of Amiga market.

Just seems you have only a vision of our market shrinking and shrinking.

So it is not necessary to market any Amiga related product. No Efika, no Samantha, no MorphOS, no AmigaOS 4.0.

Where will be Genesi without any faith in the products they are manufacturing?

They will be only clerks in a supermarket or employees in an insurance company...

With these premises from the userbase, who believe that Amiga has no future at all we will go nowhere. And soon will fade to nil:

So long people!

[ Edited by Raf_MegaByte on 2007/4/4 14:43 ]

Sofar noone has seen a working "SAM", and normaly that should allready be enough to end these kind of discussion.


But then when did "normal" count the last time with anything "Amiga" ?

Dunno bout that Steve Job quote, but I somehow feel it was taken way out of context ....

Back than the A1000 wasn't even finished, and there was quite a good chance that it never would be.

When it came out it was not only late (compared to the AtariST), but also extremly expensive. Even from an Apple-costumer-standpoint.

So yes the statement that the Amiga was to much HW compared to it's competion wasn't so far out.

Luckily C= did come to some senses (only for a short amount of time, but still), and drasticly reduced the price for the A500.

SAM would be nice if it was 300Euro (retail inc. tax), but at the currently suggested price it ain't even remotly competetive.

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You are comparing apples and oranges. The original Amiga was revolutionary and expensive. Samantha is underspecced and by NO means revolutionary. No surprise it is only appealing to a tiny number of Amiga enthusiasts (apart from embedded hw customers).

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Forget about Pegasos 3 and OSW.

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Yes, no doubt ACube will gain a few Euros by selling 26 additional SAM's.

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Upgrade? Who would in fact _upgrade_ to Samantha? I think most would rather have to _downgrade_ to it, since it will be much slower than their Pegasos 2, A1, Amithlon or Winuae installation.

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Huh? How did you come up with this conclusion now?

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Why I must forgot? Just one or two weeks ago BBRV announced to us all that they are using Eval motherboard "Argo Navis" as reference for new Pegasos.

What it is changed in the mean time?


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It is a premise, not a conclusion... and I ended saying that without faith in their products now they will be clerks or employees by other businessman.

Just if you do not caught the spirit of the statement...

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Because those aren't relevant to MOS or OS4 at the current point and it is further questionable that they'll ever become available. I think they won't, but that is just my opinion of course.

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I just wondered how you'd come up with Genesi and their "faith" in their products in this discussion. Has there been any indication so far that they don't have "faith in their products"?

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Unfortunately there is no need to laugh. The SAM board as publically shown is a (IIRC) 10 layer design. That is stupid and irrational if you wanna do something cost sensitive. It is *way* too expensive.
The components by themselves are good and not too expensive, but the entire design is - from an economic POV - totally fu*ked up.
But who knows maybe they changed the current SAM to something which might be producable in a cost sensitive was. Anyway, it has not been shown yet. All what has been shown yet is this 10 layer board which is commercial suicide.

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Does this mean that you have used MorphOS in an Efika board? Could you give further details?

@Zylesa

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Are you talking about commercial viability of Samantha for the embedded market/industrial clients or are you referring to the commercial viability of such hardware for MOS/OS4?

In case you are referring to the latter, let me tell you that I don't believe that _any_ PPC-hardware targeted at OS4/MOS is commercially viable at the current point and there is no sign this will change in the future.

@Raf_megabyte
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There were several AmigaOne-models available, there were two models of Pegasos available .. and the market shrunk. What on earth makes you believe the Efika or Sam would turn the market around?

Its good to be an optimist... but better be a realistic optimist

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Genesi should PASS on that processor and go directly to the new processor PA Semi is currently sampling, it powerful enough to compete directly with the Core 2 Duo

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You mean the PWRficient? It's already a year late. They seem to have the first samples ready, but don't expect to ship any CPUs before the end of the year. P.A.Semi is only a small startup without an own fab. I expect more delays to come. The CPU itself might be all nice and dandy, but it isn't a competitor to the Core 2 Duo and mainly targeted at the embedded market anyway.

Until the PWRficient is available in reasonable quantities it might already be outdated or at least less appealing.

Too little too late.

[ Edited by quadpol on 2007/4/4 19:15 ]

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Too little too late for what?

Could any of you guys honestly explain why Microsoft, the most powerful software company in the entire universe, chose POWER architecture over the Core2Duo for their XBOX360?

If an OS like Morph uses resources more efficiently than Windows, certainly any advantage the Core2Duo had over POWER would not matterin this case.

And before anyone says anything about morphos only being able to run in 32bit mode let me tell you that despite the fact that my system is a 'brand name PC' 64bit AMD, the Microsoft windows running on it is a 32bit version of Windows Media Center! Perhaps with VISTA things are different, but if what I hear about the problems with VISTA 64bit drivers are true, then who knows if the VISTA shipping on the current brandnames PCs are 32bit or 64bit? Do the specs say 64bit installed?

I suspect all PCs for the consumer market will be running 32bit operating systems even on 64bit processors...

Rumour has it that IBM and AMD are working on motherboards that can take either an Opteron or a POWER6 CPU.

Now that would be excellent for our tiny community if we could just buy one of these boards with a POWER chip and run MOS/OS4 on it.

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Total control of the entire ecosystem. MS own the Xenon not IBM.

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Too little too late for the "mainstream" market

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Maybe because Freescale or IBM can give to Microsoft the same power but at a discout price?Who know?

what i know is :
The modified PowerPC used for theXBOX360 can only be bought /used by Microsoft, and the same CUSTOM G3/4 used in my WII can only be bought/used by Nintendo.

So it's not for the mass or "indie" market like we are.


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Maybe this is true, but the CUSTOM PPC processors inside the XBOX nor the WII are always unreachable for us.

So i agree with Darth_X: the mos community (from what we know about the future of MOS) can only follow the processors developped for the "mainstream market" of Freescale/IBM.
Any other "Custom" solution is pratically forbidden .