A-Eon AmigaOne X1000 [LWN.net]

A-Eon AmigaOne X1000

Posted Apr 8, 2011 10:41 UTC (Fri) by jwmittag (guest, #43097)
Parent article: The New Commodore 64, Updated With Its Old Exterior (New York Times)

I dont get it. What about this is a C64? Its just a PC!

Now, the A-Eon AmigaOne X1000, thats a different story. This is the first system since the Amiga 4000 that actually deserves the name Amiga.

First and foremost: it actually runs AmigaOS. And it has a very interesting architecture, just like its grandfather, the Amiga 1000 from which it very consciously borrows its name.

The most exciting piece is probably the Xena coprocessor. It is a customizable coprocessor intended as an evolution of the custom coprocessors of the original Amigas. Its actually an XMOS XCore XS1-L1, which is in some sense a successor to the Transputer. (XMOS was founded by, among others, a guy from Oxford Semiconductors, a guy from ARM and the chief architect of Inmos who designed both the Transputer and the Occam programming language.)

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A-Eon AmigaOne X1000

Posted Apr 8, 2011 21:57 UTC (Fri) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

The XMOS chips are potentially interesting, and I'd encourage anyone who is interested to buy one, in the form of an XMOS official developer board from under $100.

A-Eon on the other hand (it will come as no surprise in this thread) is yet another tiny company making announcements with old brand names. About 1.5 years ago now they announced the imminent arrival of their mysterious AmigaOne X1000 (they have a license to the name 'AmigaOne' via a similar chain of dodgy business deals to those described earlier).

Mid last year they announced that lucky "beta testers" would get to hand over a large quantity of money via irreversible international funds transfer to have the opportunity to buy the unfinished and as-yet untested bare motherboard for the X1000.

Some unknown number of people "applied" by sending money and filling out forms acknowledging that they're not consumers under EU law, and most recently A-Eon has seen fit to release some poor quality photographs of a handful of these boards being manufactured. Will some of the people get their chance to "beta test" this product? Sure, it could happen.

The device itself is a fairly uninteresting dual-core PowerPC system of the sort Apple were unable to get shrunk down into laptops fast enough to retain customer interest last decade before they went Intel. Plus an XMOS chip is included on the motherboard for no particularly good reason except that it encourages rationalising of the sort jwmittag attempted - the Commodore Amiga had custom chips, and this is a customisable chip, so it's kinda similar?