The announcement of the motherboard Amiga X1000
In early 2010, A-eon announced the release of a new AmigaOS-compatible computer.
The release is scheduled for the summer of 2010 and is dedicated to the 25th anniversary of the release of the Amiga 1000, the world's first multimedia computer.
A couple of weeks ago, A-eon was opened with a description and photo.
')
The development of Amiga-compatible computers is constantly experiencing difficulties.
After the bankruptcy of the company Commodore in 1994, which owned the Amiga brand, and produced the now-called “classic Amiga” (on Motorola processors), the Amiga trademark changed hands many times, each of the owners trying to get the maximum benefit, but not invested in the development and support of the platform.
Thus, since 1994, until 2002, there was practically no development of amig, despite the recurring announcements that later turned out to be ducks. Developed for this period by third-party accelerators, allowed to extend the life of the classic models, including the transfer of computers and software from Motorola processors to PowerPC. But too much time has been lost, and it will be ridiculous to talk about any competition with PC and Mac.
At the beginning of our century, finally began to appear new models amig, based entirely on PowerPC processors. Over the past 10 years, only four of these platforms have been released, and only some of them are compatible with AmigaOS 4 , the rest with MorphOS (Fork AmigaOS).
These platforms were actually developed by enthusiastic firms, who often had to simultaneously spend money on litigation due to the Amiga and AmigaOS trademarks. The boards were produced in very small circulations (I think no more than a few thousand boards of each version) and differed mainly among Amiga-community enthusiasts.
So the platforms were released:
* AmigaONE (2002)
* Pegasos (2003)
* Efika (2005)
* SAM 440ep (2007)
At the same time, the technical characteristics of the platforms remained fairly average, the maximum performance was ensured only by the Pegasos II platform with a PowerPC G4 processor - 1GHz, the others were slower.
It is worth noting that The last decade of Amiga-compatible computers had low productivity, programmers had to optimize their programs very much. This leads to the fact that most modern software can run even on amiga with a 68020 / 14MHz processor, with a computer memory of 2 megabytes. AmigaOS4 itself is a modern, but rather light axis, it takes about 30 megabytes in memory and is comfortable in performance even on a 200MHz machine (on those platforms where AmigaOS and Linux can be launched, in most typical tasks AmigaOS runs much faster ).
Nevertheless, there are objective tasks that are physically impossible to solve on weak processors, for example, playing HD video, so this high-performance platform has been in demand all this time.
Announced specification of the new board:
* ATX Formfactor
* Dual-core PowerISA ™ v2.04 + CPU
* "Xena" XMOS XS1-L1 128 SDS
* 4x DDR2 RAM slots
* 2x PCIe x16 slots
* 2x PCIe x1 slots
* 2x PCI slots
* 1x Xorro slot
* 10x USB 2.0
* 1x Gigabit Ethernet
* 7.1 channel HD audio
* 2x RS232
* 4x SATA 2 connectors
* 1x IDE connector
* JTAG connector
* 1x Compact Flash
Consider the characteristics. For the first time for Amiga-compatible machines using a multi-core processor, and a kind of co-processor. The transition from the PCI / AGP bus to PCI-E for the periphery was also implemented and DDR2 memory was used. The rest of the weights (usb, network, sound, sata) we have already seen on previous platforms, there are no striking differences.
Now, about processors:
The processor specification PowerISA v2.04 is a modern multi-core PowerPC processor that supports, for example, hardware virtualization and a hypervisor. The specific version of the processor and the frequency have not yet been published (there is information that the developers provided motherboards with a 1.6 GHz processor for porting and debugging AmigaOS).
The next step forward is the Xena coprocessor. In 1985, Amiga was one of the first to use a special chipset to unload the CPU from sound processing, graphics, and I / O. Now this does not surprise anyone, in modern PCs often the video card overtakes the CPU in terms of computing power. The X1000 went even further. As a coprocessor, a programmable processor (microcontroller) XMOS XCore is used , capable of processing 8 threads with a capacity of 500 MIPS. A coprocessor can independently control any peripheral, operate a DSP, or emulate any other chip (for example, Spectrum lovers will be able to emulate an AY chip in hardware, or maybe the entire platform).
Sounds interesting. We can significantly unload the processor by programming the coprocessor and shifting the work to it.
Do you think that Xena performance is not that big? For further expansion, the board has a dedicated Xorro bus (made in the form of a pci-e slot), which has 64 I / O streams, and this bus allows you to connect external units as a coprocessor containing up to 256 Xena cores with a performance of 102,400 MIPS (performance comparable to Intel Core i7). It is possible to use such boards as a transputer . An example of a test 16-chip (64-core) motherboard for developers containing XCore chips.
Finished machines will be additionally equipped with an ATI Radeon R700, 2GB RAM, 500GB Hard drive, 22x DVD combo. The price of the motherboard and computer has not yet been determined.
For the first time since the beginning of the 90s, the Amiga gets a competitive platform, which initially had great potential for further development (as it was in all models of classical amig).
Of course, this platform will not compete with the PC / Mac breadth of its penetration into all areas of our life. But probably modern iron will allow to expand the audience of amizhnikov, and maybe in the near future to capture some apparent percentage of the market. In the end, the availability of alternatives is always a plus.
The X1000 developer site http://www.a-eon.com/ , although there is nothing aside from the announcement (AdBlock in FireFox can block the bottom menu of the site).
PS It is also worth saying that as yet there are no PC emulators with a PowerPC processor suitable for running AmigaOS version 4 or higher, therefore, on no other platform can you "see what it looks like." The maximum that is emulated is the “classic” Amiga on Motorola processors in WinUAE / E-UAE, i.e. Amiga sample 1994-95.
The release is scheduled for the summer of 2010 and is dedicated to the 25th anniversary of the release of the Amiga 1000, the world's first multimedia computer.
A couple of weeks ago, A-eon was opened with a description and photo.
')
A bit of history
1994-2000
The development of Amiga-compatible computers is constantly experiencing difficulties.
After the bankruptcy of the company Commodore in 1994, which owned the Amiga brand, and produced the now-called “classic Amiga” (on Motorola processors), the Amiga trademark changed hands many times, each of the owners trying to get the maximum benefit, but not invested in the development and support of the platform.
Thus, since 1994, until 2002, there was practically no development of amig, despite the recurring announcements that later turned out to be ducks. Developed for this period by third-party accelerators, allowed to extend the life of the classic models, including the transfer of computers and software from Motorola processors to PowerPC. But too much time has been lost, and it will be ridiculous to talk about any competition with PC and Mac.
2000-2010
At the beginning of our century, finally began to appear new models amig, based entirely on PowerPC processors. Over the past 10 years, only four of these platforms have been released, and only some of them are compatible with AmigaOS 4 , the rest with MorphOS (Fork AmigaOS).
These platforms were actually developed by enthusiastic firms, who often had to simultaneously spend money on litigation due to the Amiga and AmigaOS trademarks. The boards were produced in very small circulations (I think no more than a few thousand boards of each version) and differed mainly among Amiga-community enthusiasts.
So the platforms were released:
* AmigaONE (2002)
* Pegasos (2003)
* Efika (2005)
* SAM 440ep (2007)
At the same time, the technical characteristics of the platforms remained fairly average, the maximum performance was ensured only by the Pegasos II platform with a PowerPC G4 processor - 1GHz, the others were slower.
It is worth noting that The last decade of Amiga-compatible computers had low productivity, programmers had to optimize their programs very much. This leads to the fact that most modern software can run even on amiga with a 68020 / 14MHz processor, with a computer memory of 2 megabytes. AmigaOS4 itself is a modern, but rather light axis, it takes about 30 megabytes in memory and is comfortable in performance even on a 200MHz machine (on those platforms where AmigaOS and Linux can be launched, in most typical tasks AmigaOS runs much faster ).
Nevertheless, there are objective tasks that are physically impossible to solve on weak processors, for example, playing HD video, so this high-performance platform has been in demand all this time.
New
Announced specification of the new board:
* ATX Formfactor
* Dual-core PowerISA ™ v2.04 + CPU
* "Xena" XMOS XS1-L1 128 SDS
* 4x DDR2 RAM slots
* 2x PCIe x16 slots
* 2x PCIe x1 slots
* 2x PCI slots
* 1x Xorro slot
* 10x USB 2.0
* 1x Gigabit Ethernet
* 7.1 channel HD audio
* 2x RS232
* 4x SATA 2 connectors
* 1x IDE connector
* JTAG connector
* 1x Compact Flash
Consider the characteristics. For the first time for Amiga-compatible machines using a multi-core processor, and a kind of co-processor. The transition from the PCI / AGP bus to PCI-E for the periphery was also implemented and DDR2 memory was used. The rest of the weights (usb, network, sound, sata) we have already seen on previous platforms, there are no striking differences.
Now, about processors:
The processor specification PowerISA v2.04 is a modern multi-core PowerPC processor that supports, for example, hardware virtualization and a hypervisor. The specific version of the processor and the frequency have not yet been published (there is information that the developers provided motherboards with a 1.6 GHz processor for porting and debugging AmigaOS).
The next step forward is the Xena coprocessor. In 1985, Amiga was one of the first to use a special chipset to unload the CPU from sound processing, graphics, and I / O. Now this does not surprise anyone, in modern PCs often the video card overtakes the CPU in terms of computing power. The X1000 went even further. As a coprocessor, a programmable processor (microcontroller) XMOS XCore is used , capable of processing 8 threads with a capacity of 500 MIPS. A coprocessor can independently control any peripheral, operate a DSP, or emulate any other chip (for example, Spectrum lovers will be able to emulate an AY chip in hardware, or maybe the entire platform).
Sounds interesting. We can significantly unload the processor by programming the coprocessor and shifting the work to it.
Do you think that Xena performance is not that big? For further expansion, the board has a dedicated Xorro bus (made in the form of a pci-e slot), which has 64 I / O streams, and this bus allows you to connect external units as a coprocessor containing up to 256 Xena cores with a performance of 102,400 MIPS (performance comparable to Intel Core i7). It is possible to use such boards as a transputer . An example of a test 16-chip (64-core) motherboard for developers containing XCore chips.
Finished machines will be additionally equipped with an ATI Radeon R700, 2GB RAM, 500GB Hard drive, 22x DVD combo. The price of the motherboard and computer has not yet been determined.
Total
For the first time since the beginning of the 90s, the Amiga gets a competitive platform, which initially had great potential for further development (as it was in all models of classical amig).
Of course, this platform will not compete with the PC / Mac breadth of its penetration into all areas of our life. But probably modern iron will allow to expand the audience of amizhnikov, and maybe in the near future to capture some apparent percentage of the market. In the end, the availability of alternatives is always a plus.
The X1000 developer site http://www.a-eon.com/ , although there is nothing aside from the announcement (AdBlock in FireFox can block the bottom menu of the site).
PS It is also worth saying that as yet there are no PC emulators with a PowerPC processor suitable for running AmigaOS version 4 or higher, therefore, on no other platform can you "see what it looks like." The maximum that is emulated is the “classic” Amiga on Motorola processors in WinUAE / E-UAE, i.e. Amiga sample 1994-95.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/90975/
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