A new Amiga with customizable coprocessor
osnews.com
osnews.com
If anybody ever wants to put an end to it they'd better bring some garlic, wooden stakes and silver bullets.
The only other machines at the time capable of doing that were priced way out of ordinary mortals budget.
There as the Acorn 'unicorn', probably the cheapest and then right away big $ stuff like the Apollos.
There was no way I could afford a machine like that (nor the Amiga, for that matter, at least not at that time) so I stuck to my trusty 8 bitter for a bit longer and built the Elektuur 'GDP', a hardware assist for vector graphics.
But it never looked as good as the Amiga OS.
Interesting... This one? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Electron#Slogger.2FElektu...
I never saw a 1000 in person, but I am the happy owner of a 500, and it's a centerpiece of my "interesting computer" collection.
I really miss the 80's in that: you could tell different computers apart. Now even Macs are PCs...
The Amigas were built around TV signal timing. When it became common to run home computers with VGA screens, it took too long for Commodore to build a machine that could drive them. The Amiga 3000 was the first one with a VGA port, but, by then, it was depressingly clear the low-cost PCs had won.
I'm fully aware this is a chicken and egg situation...
(I say all of the above as a total Amiga fanboy from back in the day!)
The XCORE ("Xena") co-processor they've added is exciting, but because of the hard-realtime capabilities / low latency and IO lines, not for raw performance.
PS: 1x Xorro slot with a card that's 102400 MIPS is fast. An example of number crunching would be real time encoding of super? HD (4x 1080p). Or a custom high bandwidth router etc.
For the people who are interested in the XCore, it's cheap to buy USB attached dev-board, so this only really matters if you want to play with a system that may have significantly tighter integration (we don't really know yet how tight).
For the Amiga community, an x86 box would've been a non-starter. The people in the most likely buying segment for this box are people that have stuck to ancient "classic" Amigas, or at best upgraded to sub 1GHz single-core PowerPC boards running newer versions of AmigaOS, that they've paid more for than what you'd pay for a quad core 2GHz+ x86 box. Most of them would've been happy with "just" another PowerPC machine, but the XCore adds some extra excitement and may entice a few ex-Amigans like me to have a go for the fun too.
> PS: 1x Xorro slot with a card that's 102400 MIPS is fast. An example of number crunching would be real time encoding of super? HD (4x 1080p). Or a custom high bandwidth router etc.
The 102400 MIPS is an example based on a hypothetical card that doesn't exist, though.
For comparison, XMOS themselves sells a roughly 25000 MIPS experimental board for $1500, so while you can make it fast, it'd also be fairly expensive and it does require a new product.
I am excited about having the XCORE chip there, and I may buy an X1000 (who am I kidding, I will buy one unless the price is absolutely outrageous), but I am an ex-Amiga guy and would buy it in part because I still really love the whole Amiga experience, without any illusion that I couldn't do most of the same things on a PC much cheaper in most instances.
When it comes to the XCORE what excites me about it, rather than performance, is that it will be standard. In other words, (the few) people who write Amiga software can soon reasonably rely on having it available in the computers of most users of their software. People are already thinking up all kinds of bizarre uses for it.
"We believe that with this easy gateway to the world of 'Software Defined Silicon' and a path to massive parallelism, the X1000 will once more make the AmigaOS platform the best choice for truly creative and unique applications. For custom hardware control from robotics to theatrical lighting, for hobbyist creativity, for hardware hacking and for a multitude of applications we haven't even imagined yet, the X1000 is a dream platform - and therein lies another meaning of 'X', the unknown. It is you, not us, who will define the future."
I thought it was a great way to attract hobbyist developers. A quad core 2+ GHz x86 chip can do an insane amount of computation quickly and cheaply and even a mid range GPU takes that to a whole other level. I don't know how many flops you can get per MIPS on XCore, but if you are handcrafting at that level you can do things for less power than a CPU while having more flexibility than a GPU.
It never really occurred to me that people where still using the Amiga OS. From that standpoint it's much more evolutionary than revolutionary, but still cool.
PS: In my mind computer hobbyists and developer often mean just about the same thing. But, I realize developer makes people think of Software Developer not a HW dev.