Pandora A Piece Of The New Amiga X1000 In The Pandora ?

[Magic Sam]

Hi, and Happy New Year !!!

A new Amiga X1000 is coming, made by Hyperion (AmigaOS 4)

More informations here

It features, among other things, XMOS customizable chips !

It's the inheritor of the 'transputer' concept, and it's something we're quite excited about.

Capable of eight concurrent real-time threads with shared memory space, at up to 400 MIPS (about 6 68060s worth), Xena gives the X1000 a very flexible, very expandable co-processor. The uses are endless; control hardware, DSP functions, robotics, display - even SID chip and console emulators.

Could we plug some of these to our Pandoras ?

Bye, Magic Sam

 

[geise69]

Wow this is great news! Finally something nice to run Amiga OS 4 on! The customizable chips sounds like a good idea but I wonder how well it will fare. Also I wonder what the deal is with the CPU. They are secretive about it for some reason. Thanks for the info Magic Sam!

 

[Bosbeetle]

noob here: what are customizable chips and what can you do with them. I can't really imagine how a customizable chip works? Is it hardware that can be changed by software? Sounds really futuristic.

 

[Magic Sam]

@Bosbeetle: I think you're right about what customizable chips are:

we have customisable chips. XMOS calls it "Software Defined Silicon",

The uses are endless; control hardware, DSP functions, robotics, display - even SID chip and console emulators.

I think it's a chip that you can program to be whatever you want it to be It could be quite useful to the Pandora if we can "plug" it to some USB port, it would make emulation easier for example

@geise69: you're welcome I think it will be a rather expensive machine, for the "high-end" Amiga market, that will make the €771 SAM440ep a cheap toy compared to it...

 

[Mutilator]

wow cant believe amiga os is still around. was a great operating system back in the day.

 

[atomicthumbs]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer

I'm guessing it has a bunch of FPGAs in it

 

[john4p]

A new Amiga which isn't compatible to Amiga games, yay! :lol:

 

[hch]

noob here: what are customizable chips and what can you do with them. I can't really imagine how a customizable chip works? Is it hardware that can be changed by software? Sounds really futuristic.

FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays). it's standard hardware for some years now. they can speed up unconventional custom tasks (like inverse cube root taking or such) that are usually not contained in typical C/F/GPUs by a huge factor.

there are complete amiga reimplementations on FPGAs by the by
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimig

edit: @geise69: the CPU is no mystery, sorry. it's a pre-power6 power chip (dual core). not bad but not really up to snuff.

 

[samuraicrow]

noob here: what are customizable chips and what can you do with them. I can't really imagine how a customizable chip works? Is it hardware that can be changed by software? Sounds really futuristic.

FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays). it's standard hardware for some years now. they can speed up unconventional custom tasks (like inverse cube root taking or such) that are usually not contained in typical C/F/GPUs by a huge factor.

there are complete amiga reimplementations on FPGAs by the by
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimig

edit: @geise69: the CPU is no mystery, sorry. it's a pre-power6 power chip (dual core). not bad but not really up to snuff.

Actually the CPU is still a mystery because they say it will work with a variety of them on the http://a-eon.com/6.html webpage. They only specify the minimum configuration as being a pre-POWER6 chip.

The XCore chip (called Xena in the puzzle) is a multithreaded processor with local-store memory on-board. It is no FPGA. It communicates through a collection of serial connections normally. You can get an XCore chip starter kit for $99 at https://www.xmos.com/products/development-kits/xk-1-development-kit .

-edit-
To get the devkit running on the Pandora you'd have to have a reliable LLVM toolchain for the ARM processor. LLVM's open-source branch of the ARM toolchain is experimental at this point. (There is a closed-source branch for the iPhone and iPod Touch so it is definitely possible to run LLVM on ARM.)