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Son of Transputer powers new Amiga box

There was only one place to be for Amiga enthusiasts this weekend: a tent at Bletchley Park. Saturday saw the unveiling of the first dedicated Amiga box for some time, in the shape an unusual and technically advanced system that maintains the Amiga's bleeding edge reputation.



The AmigaOne X1000 is a custom dual core PowerPC board with plenty of modern ports and I/O interfaces. It runs AmigaOS 4, and is supported by Hyperion, a partner in the project. The most interesting bit, though, is the use of an 500Mhz XCore co-processor, which the X1000's hardware designer describes as a descendant of the transputer - once the great hope of British silicon.


Trevor Dickinson: over 150 Amigas at home

The XCore allows fine-grained parallel processing and the equivalent of 256 loosely coupled cores. At least eight threads are available at any one time.

The Amiga brought multitasking to personal computing, and when it first appeared in 1985 it made the rest of the market, including Apple's much vaunted Macintosh, look like overpriced toys. Commodore made its last Amiga in 1994. Various companies have rolled out PPC boards compatible with AmigaOS, since the last update in 2006, but this is the first new box for some time.


Son of Transputer powers new Amiga box

Long-time Amiga enthusiast Trevor Dickinson, director of the company set up to create the X1000, A-Eon, said the team hadn't set a price for the box, but suggested it would be "North of £1,500", hopefully allowing the company to make something to reinvest. The X1000 should future proof the AmigaOS for some time.

The event took place at Britain's first Vintage Computer Fair (report to follow) in a tent sponsored by the Amiga enthusiast groups. These seem to be as busy as ever: the AmigaOS looks terrific, and ports of FireFox and OpenOffice are close to bearing fruit.


Inside the X1000
The box also houses an ATI Radeon R700 graphics card, 10 USB ports, four PCIe and two PCI slots, besides much else. A recent interview with Dickinson here provides a good history of the project, and more pics.

Bootnote
Before you all write in at once, yes - the original Amiga could house a transputer board.

I love the idea of using the Amiga OS for everyday work. A great post crusty and music to my ears.

Rock on Amiga

Crusty, can I suggest that we split this Amiga story out into a new post all about the new Amiga One X1000. It deservs its own spot. I will do some new pictures for it as well.

HT, I debated as to whether to post this as a new blog or not, and settled to put it here as it related to the first post. However if you deem the mighty Amiga worthy of a post by itself, by all means go ahead. You also pretty my posts up so nicely!!!!

So sure go ahead. I really like the look of this unit, So which do I get when available? The retro look or this monster?

Just when you thought the Amiga world was finally getting its act together, finally making things a little less obtuse for outsiders, this happens. So, we have the AmigaOne X1000 coming up, a brand-new PowerPC computer, running the real deal - AmigaOS 4. In the meantime, Commodore USA - the one with the sketchy website - has apparently secured rights to the Amiga hardware brand, and is planning to release Amiga-branded computers running AROS. In the meantime, Hyperion, the Belgium company behind AmigaOS, who is working with A-eon on the AmigaOne X1000, claims this is a clear violation of the settlement between them and Amiga Inc., and has notified its US lawyers.
Commodore USA sent out a press release yesterday in which they state they've reached an agreement with Bill McEwen of Amiga, Inc. (one of the two companies named Amiga) in which Commodore USA may use the Amiga hardware brand on computers running AROS, the open source Amiga-inspired operating system.

"We are ecstatic to be partnering with Amiga Inc. in this new, exciting product launch," states Barry Altman, President and CEO of Commodore USA, "The legacy of the Commodore and Amiga trademark brand, reunited once again after so many years, and our reintroduction of the legendary All-In-One computer keyboard form factor, combined with the twenty-five year anniversary of the introduction of the first Amiga computer by Commodore International, is a once in a lifetime opportunity."

My first thought was - wait, doesn't this violate the settlement agreement between Amiga Inc. and Hyperion, which finally settled all the legal mumbo-jumbo in the Amiga world? It appears Hyperion believes that this is indeed a violation, and as such, they have asked their lawyers in the US to investigate the matter.
Commodore Gets Rights to Amiga, Hyperion Takes Legal Action: Wed 1st Sep 2010

"Our American lawyers will take action against this," Hyperion states, "This is blatant violation of the rights Hyperion Entertainment secured in the settlement agreement with Amiga Inc., Itec and Amino."

The facts here are that if there's two companies I would blindly trust in the Amiga world, it's Hyperion and ACube. These are the only two companies that have kept their promises and delivered actual working products we can buy today. Everyone else - including A-eon (until they ship the X1000) - are fair game.

The only conclusion I can draw from this is that my initial distrust of this Commodore USA thing was more than justified. Their website (shoddy doesn't even begin to describe it), their rebranded products, their unilateral press releases which can't be confirmed anywhere else but on their site... It all reeks of a massive con. Are their products even shipping, after months of promises?

Unless proven otherwise, I'm assuming for now that Commodore USA is, at best, a hoax, and at worst, a very inept con. They are properly registered as an LLC, though.