8 ms·

The A-EON Amiga X5000: An alternate universe where the Amiga platform never died

114 points by satai 9y ago

rbanffy 9y ago
The "mysterious" XMOS part looks like this: http://www.xmos.com/products/silicon/xcore-200 http://www.xmos.com/products/silicon/xcore-200 If it had a DDR3 interface, it'd be cool if it were the CPU. It'd be more Amiga-like.
- TickleSteve 9y ago
  The XMOS devices are simply multicore microcontroller-level parts. Basically, you're going to be using them for low-latency, highly deterministic functions like audio processing. Possibly enough throughput for video tho @500MHz.
- monocasa 9y ago
  > up to 32 logical cores Wait, are there a bunch of real, independent cores on this thing, or are they doing heavy amounts of SMT?
  - makomk 9y ago
    The specific chip in use here has two actual cores each with up to 8 hardware threads ("logical cores" in current XMOS marketing parlance). The hardware executes instructions from the active threads in a round-robin fashion. Due to pipelining, there has to be at least 4 clock cycles between two instructions from the same thread, so maximum per-thread speed is 1/4 the overall clock speed and you can execute up to 4 threads on each core with no further slowdown. Also, the hardware cores don't share memory and communicate only via message passing, and the threads generally communicate in the same way. It's an interesting architecture which no-one's really made any use of on AmigaOne hardware for the whole 5 years it's been shipping with it.
  - Sanddancer 9y ago
    Yes. There are a bunch of cores, plus SMT. The datasheets for their parts give equivalent performance depending on how many threads you have. XMOS chips are in that category of Neat and Weird, which is perfect for an Amiga type system.
erickhill 9y ago
I long for an alternate universe where tired and stupid Amiga trademark battles are ancient history. A universe where the Amiga OS and tech is open-sourced and cared for by the community itself.
unicornporn 9y ago
This badly needs the A1200/A500 form factor to be even worth considering. That and a lower price. :-)
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Those two options are at odds. Right now they are reusing a bunch of PC parts, thanks to following the basic ATX formfactor. Without that the price would likely be even higher...
- cmsj 9y ago
  There's a lower end motherboard in the works, "Tabor" (which will be released as the A1222). It's still a PC form factor, but much smaller (mini ITX afair) so it could potentially be put in an box not unlike the A1200. I'd expect it won't be available until next year, but they've said that the cost of the motherboard will be around 450€ which is pretty nice.
  - makomk 9y ago
    The problem with Tabor, as I understand it, is that its instruction set is not compatible with the existing PowerPC Amiga code and hardware because for some reason they used a chip which doesn't support the standard PowerPC floating point instruction set at all.
- Fjolsvith 9y ago
  Sounds like something a guy could make some money printing with a 3D printer.
faragon 9y ago
IMO, util someone does some kind of "qemu+wine"-like for running Amiga applications and disk images as normal Linux desktop applications, the periodic "new Amiga hardware" will never end :-)
- _pmf_ 9y ago
  Doesn't MAME run Amiga ROMs?
  - smacktoward 9y ago
    Well, there's UAE: http://amiga.technology/ http://amiga.technology/ TFA argues that the experience of running emulated software on this new "Amiga" is substantially better than running it via UAE on Linux/Windows/whatever, though. (For what they're charging for the new hardware, I would say it'd better be.)
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    Since MESS was merged in, it should indeed.
- vidarh 9y ago
  You have a couple of alternatives: UAE, which in its various incarnations runs pretty much everywhere, to run M68k AmigaOS apps, or AROS to run recompiled system-friendly apps. AROS runs on pretty much anything, hosted under Windows, OS X, Linux, as well as native on a wider range of architectures (including on some original Amigas). AROS can get you most of the way there, in that you can do graphics backends for it that run "rootless" on a Linux desktop, but the problem with that is still that there is no direct equivalent to the Amiga concept of screen's in X. Desktops is almost but not quite there, in that an application expects to be able to open them and place windows there. To get that to work smoothly you'd probably at a minimum need a special window manager and patching AROS to talk to one. But the people buying this hardware are those who are not interested in / satisfied with emulation.
  - faragon 9y ago
Animats 9y ago
How does the protected-mode version of the OS do interprocess communication? The original non-protected version passed pointers from one process to another.
- bartread 9y ago
  I have no idea in truth but, if I had to guess, I'd say that this could be made transparent to existing applications using a decent abstraction layer in between. You'd still pass something around that looks like a pointer, and you could use it the same way, but the OS would know it's not really. Of course, that's still potentially open to all kinds of abuse, not to mention a turtles-all-the-way-down counter-argument, so it really is just a guess.
  - Animats 9y ago
    Apparently AmigaOS 4.1 (2008) doesn't have memory protection between processes, despite what the parent article says. No good way to make it backward compatible.[1] [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2008/09/amigaos41-ars/2/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2008/09/amiga...
    - bartread 9y ago
      Interesting, and also somewhat ironic that both articles are by the same guy. Either he forgot some of the limitations [1], or maybe there are additional improvements in the 4.1 release shipped with the X5000? [1] Granted, nearly 9 years have passed, so I don't think it's really fair to give him too hard a time for that.
    - cat199 9y ago
      IIRC in the late pre-10 macos days, there was some kind of memory protection retrofitted to the platform, with some kind of permissions system allowing certain programs to break out of this when it really was required.. that could still presumably be done.. unless e.g. there are hardware restrictions (software expects processor to run in some 'mode', which it is not still in).. even then, that could probably be soft-faulted to an emulation shim in a modern full-featured CPU
amai 9y ago
I think the Vampire 2 FPGA acceleration card for the Amiga 600 deserves to be mentioned: https://youtu.be/8S3B8a8N83k?t=871 https://youtu.be/8S3B8a8N83k?t=871 It seems a lot of fun and is much cheaper (250 Euros).
- bartread 9y ago
  I've always thought stuff like this is cool, and I love the fact there's still this fairly big retro scene around, well, not just the Amiga, but lots of old systems. But what do people do with hardware like this? I mean, after you've set it up and played around with it, and realised it makes your machine loads faster, what do you use it for?
  - erickhill 9y ago
    Play games, explore and use simpler software, and lots of "maker"-y things. Using brand new WiFi 232 boards to get back onto the re-growing BBS scene is a lot of fun, too. Everyone there is totally into it. You use it how ever you want. Much of what we like to do (except the internet as we know it today) is right there. If you like retro gaming and productivity software, it retro-computing can be a ton of fun. For many, just getting the hardware maxed out in various ways is very rewarding. Example: I have an Amiga 1200 that uses a 4GB CF IDE hard drive. It also has a mild CPU upgrade. I also have an Amiga 2000 with 8GB of RAM and a torqued CPU (25 Mhz, which is more than 3X faster than the day the computer was born) and 2GB chip RAM. That all sounds laughable, but it boots in about 14 seconds. How about yours? If it didn't have the hard drive it would only take a couple of seconds. And as soon as I'm looking at the desktop (Workbench) I can launch a program off its new 4GB SCSI HD in a couple of seconds and jump right in. And this is all off the original OS, 1.3. It's a passion and a hobby. "What do you use it for?" I use it for fun and entertainment, and I connect now to BBSes more than Facebook. It's just so much more interesting. I'll take my machine(s) over these new hybrids any day. I don't need emulation except in a worst case scenario (like, if I'm traveling). But to each his/her own. There's no "right way". Just your way. FWIW I don't use the Vampire cards. I mostly use accelerators that were available in the late 80s and early 90s.
bartread 9y ago
I loved my Amiga 500 and, in many ways, it's still my favourite computer of all those I've owned, but I can't help feeling rather sad and wistful every time I read recent Amiga announcements and articles. There's always this sense of them trampling over my rose-tinted recollections of adolescence. I mean, is the X5000 really an Amiga? The thing with the Amiga was that in the 1980s it was streets ahead of pretty much anything else that was available at the time, albeit only for a relatively short period. It had all this super cool custom hardware and a great OS. Whereas the X5000 is a kind of mid-tier desktop computer with somewhat interesting hardware (a point in its favour Amiga-wise, especially that loopy custom chip, granted) and a whopper of a price tag. I like the idea of a widely available computer with a different hardware architecture and operating system than the currently available choices (which basically boils down to PCs... and expensive PCs that run OSX) but, as the X5000 stands, what would I do with it? Where is the software? How could I do my job with it? Where are the games (a big draw on the original Amiga)? I hate to be a downer because I really loved the Amiga but, guys, it's over. It just is. It's been over for decades. And it makes me sad but it's not going to change without, for one thing, a much better capitalised company behind it, as well as an end to all the trademark nonsense.
- starsinspace 9y ago
  I have similar feelings regarding today's use of the Amiga name. I still have my A500 and it's the best computer I ever had, and maybe ever will. So when I talk about Amiga, I like to specifically say "Commodore-Amiga", to emphasize that I mean the Amiga-branded hardware of that specific period only.
- adrianmonk 9y ago
  Where is the software? I think you just answered your own question about whether it is really an Amiga. If you really want to relive the Amiga glory days, isn't that part of the experience? When I bought my Microbiotics 8-Up! card from the local Amiga dealer, they rang my order up on an IBM PC that they used for accounting and inventory tracking and such. I asked if they couldn't do that on an Amiga, and they enthusiastically said they were looking forward to that "just as soon as the software is available".
kenjackson 9y ago
Has there been a device like the Amiga since it came out? A device that was so far ahead of the competition, yet completely overwhelmed by that competition into obsolescence?
- loop22 9y ago
  The original iPhone?
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    Only for those that never had a Nokia 7710 on their hand.
- GoatHerderson 9y ago
  Perhaps the Atari ST for MIDI devices.
- spc476 9y ago
  The SGI computers come to mind. Completely blew everything out of the water through the mid 90s, then couldn't compete once high end graphic cards were available for the PC.
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  I'm an Amiga fan, but the X68000 was released 2 years after the A1000 and was definitely a step up in power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X68000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X68000 For comparison, here's the Amiga port of Super Street Fighter 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMNTcG4OvqE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMNTcG4OvqE Here's the X68000 version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYmQCbBpLTc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYmQCbBpLTc To be fair to the Amiga, there are fighting games with better graphics than the SSF2 port, but I'd say sacrifices were probably made to improve the gameplay speed.
  - kenjackson 9y ago
    I can't believe I never heard of this computer. Very interesting though.
chx 9y ago
Windows S announcement and a new Amiga X ... let me drag up this http://drupal4hu.com/future/freedom http://drupal4hu.com/future/freedom seven year old blog post of mine. Especially because: > Microsoft can [...] make it so that any new app needs to be sanctioned. which came to be true with Windows S. The other half of my prediction where free PCs become "cool, obscure and expensive" computers like the Amiga X series has not yet come to pass. Not yet.
- alxmdev 9y ago
  That's a nice post, thanks for the link. Some may point to various coding apps available in walled gardens, but that means allowing 3rd parties to define what the general-purpose computer is and set its limits. Who are they to say where curiosity begins and where it should end? I want the freedom to run native code on the CPU, and the freedom for others to easily run what I make without jumping through any hoops. I'd like to hear your opinions about the Raspberry Pi and other cheap computer boards where you can load Linux and just plug in a keyboard and screen. I see a future iteration of that as my next PC in a few years. The Raspberry Pi 3 is good enough to run Ubuntu MATE (I was blown away), and if it had more than 1GB of RAM I would start using it full-time today and save myself some money on the power bill while I'm at it :-)
  - chx 9y ago
    Want to hear the doom and gloom version? All it takes is one of these to be found in a terrorist backpack and they will be banned. Consider that 16 years ago one guy tried to smuggle a bomb in his shoe and to this day hundreds of millions of passengers take off their shoes in answer.

114 points by satai 9y ago

The "mysterious" XMOS part looks like this: http://www.xmos.com/products/silicon/xcore-200 http://www.xmos.com/products/silicon/xcore-200 If it had a DDR3 interface, it'd be cool if it were the CPU. It'd be more Amiga-like.

TickleSteve 9y ago
The XMOS devices are simply multicore microcontroller-level parts. Basically, you're going to be using them for low-latency, highly deterministic functions like audio processing. Possibly enough throughput for video tho @500MHz.
monocasa 9y ago
> up to 32 logical cores Wait, are there a bunch of real, independent cores on this thing, or are they doing heavy amounts of SMT?
- makomk 9y ago
  The specific chip in use here has two actual cores each with up to 8 hardware threads ("logical cores" in current XMOS marketing parlance). The hardware executes instructions from the active threads in a round-robin fashion. Due to pipelining, there has to be at least 4 clock cycles between two instructions from the same thread, so maximum per-thread speed is 1/4 the overall clock speed and you can execute up to 4 threads on each core with no further slowdown. Also, the hardware cores don't share memory and communicate only via message passing, and the threads generally communicate in the same way. It's an interesting architecture which no-one's really made any use of on AmigaOne hardware for the whole 5 years it's been shipping with it.
- Sanddancer 9y ago
  Yes. There are a bunch of cores, plus SMT. The datasheets for their parts give equivalent performance depending on how many threads you have. XMOS chips are in that category of Neat and Weird, which is perfect for an Amiga type system.

erickhill 9y ago

I long for an alternate universe where tired and stupid Amiga trademark battles are ancient history. A universe where the Amiga OS and tech is open-sourced and cared for by the community itself.

unicornporn 9y ago

This badly needs the A1200/A500 form factor to be even worth considering. That and a lower price. :-)

digi_owl 9y ago
Those two options are at odds. Right now they are reusing a bunch of PC parts, thanks to following the basic ATX formfactor. Without that the price would likely be even higher...
cmsj 9y ago
There's a lower end motherboard in the works, "Tabor" (which will be released as the A1222). It's still a PC form factor, but much smaller (mini ITX afair) so it could potentially be put in an box not unlike the A1200. I'd expect it won't be available until next year, but they've said that the cost of the motherboard will be around 450€ which is pretty nice.
- makomk 9y ago
  The problem with Tabor, as I understand it, is that its instruction set is not compatible with the existing PowerPC Amiga code and hardware because for some reason they used a chip which doesn't support the standard PowerPC floating point instruction set at all.
Fjolsvith 9y ago
Sounds like something a guy could make some money printing with a 3D printer.

faragon 9y ago

IMO, util someone does some kind of "qemu+wine"-like for running Amiga applications and disk images as normal Linux desktop applications, the periodic "new Amiga hardware" will never end :-)

_pmf_ 9y ago
Doesn't MAME run Amiga ROMs?
- smacktoward 9y ago
  Well, there's UAE: http://amiga.technology/ http://amiga.technology/ TFA argues that the experience of running emulated software on this new "Amiga" is substantially better than running it via UAE on Linux/Windows/whatever, though. (For what they're charging for the new hardware, I would say it'd better be.)
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Since MESS was merged in, it should indeed.
vidarh 9y ago
You have a couple of alternatives: UAE, which in its various incarnations runs pretty much everywhere, to run M68k AmigaOS apps, or AROS to run recompiled system-friendly apps. AROS runs on pretty much anything, hosted under Windows, OS X, Linux, as well as native on a wider range of architectures (including on some original Amigas). AROS can get you most of the way there, in that you can do graphics backends for it that run "rootless" on a Linux desktop, but the problem with that is still that there is no direct equivalent to the Amiga concept of screen's in X. Desktops is almost but not quite there, in that an application expects to be able to open them and place windows there. To get that to work smoothly you'd probably at a minimum need a special window manager and patching AROS to talk to one. But the people buying this hardware are those who are not interested in / satisfied with emulation.
- faragon 9y ago

Animats 9y ago

How does the protected-mode version of the OS do interprocess communication? The original non-protected version passed pointers from one process to another.

bartread 9y ago
I have no idea in truth but, if I had to guess, I'd say that this could be made transparent to existing applications using a decent abstraction layer in between. You'd still pass something around that looks like a pointer, and you could use it the same way, but the OS would know it's not really. Of course, that's still potentially open to all kinds of abuse, not to mention a turtles-all-the-way-down counter-argument, so it really is just a guess.
- Animats 9y ago
  Apparently AmigaOS 4.1 (2008) doesn't have memory protection between processes, despite what the parent article says. No good way to make it backward compatible.[1] [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2008/09/amigaos41-ars/2/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2008/09/amiga...
  - bartread 9y ago
    Interesting, and also somewhat ironic that both articles are by the same guy. Either he forgot some of the limitations [1], or maybe there are additional improvements in the 4.1 release shipped with the X5000? [1] Granted, nearly 9 years have passed, so I don't think it's really fair to give him too hard a time for that.
  - cat199 9y ago
    IIRC in the late pre-10 macos days, there was some kind of memory protection retrofitted to the platform, with some kind of permissions system allowing certain programs to break out of this when it really was required.. that could still presumably be done.. unless e.g. there are hardware restrictions (software expects processor to run in some 'mode', which it is not still in).. even then, that could probably be soft-faulted to an emulation shim in a modern full-featured CPU

amai 9y ago

I think the Vampire 2 FPGA acceleration card for the Amiga 600 deserves to be mentioned: https://youtu.be/8S3B8a8N83k?t=871 https://youtu.be/8S3B8a8N83k?t=871 It seems a lot of fun and is much cheaper (250 Euros).

bartread 9y ago
I've always thought stuff like this is cool, and I love the fact there's still this fairly big retro scene around, well, not just the Amiga, but lots of old systems. But what do people do with hardware like this? I mean, after you've set it up and played around with it, and realised it makes your machine loads faster, what do you use it for?
- erickhill 9y ago
  Play games, explore and use simpler software, and lots of "maker"-y things. Using brand new WiFi 232 boards to get back onto the re-growing BBS scene is a lot of fun, too. Everyone there is totally into it. You use it how ever you want. Much of what we like to do (except the internet as we know it today) is right there. If you like retro gaming and productivity software, it retro-computing can be a ton of fun. For many, just getting the hardware maxed out in various ways is very rewarding. Example: I have an Amiga 1200 that uses a 4GB CF IDE hard drive. It also has a mild CPU upgrade. I also have an Amiga 2000 with 8GB of RAM and a torqued CPU (25 Mhz, which is more than 3X faster than the day the computer was born) and 2GB chip RAM. That all sounds laughable, but it boots in about 14 seconds. How about yours? If it didn't have the hard drive it would only take a couple of seconds. And as soon as I'm looking at the desktop (Workbench) I can launch a program off its new 4GB SCSI HD in a couple of seconds and jump right in. And this is all off the original OS, 1.3. It's a passion and a hobby. "What do you use it for?" I use it for fun and entertainment, and I connect now to BBSes more than Facebook. It's just so much more interesting. I'll take my machine(s) over these new hybrids any day. I don't need emulation except in a worst case scenario (like, if I'm traveling). But to each his/her own. There's no "right way". Just your way. FWIW I don't use the Vampire cards. I mostly use accelerators that were available in the late 80s and early 90s.

bartread 9y ago

I loved my Amiga 500 and, in many ways, it's still my favourite computer of all those I've owned, but I can't help feeling rather sad and wistful every time I read recent Amiga announcements and articles. There's always this sense of them trampling over my rose-tinted recollections of adolescence. I mean, is the X5000 really an Amiga? The thing with the Amiga was that in the 1980s it was streets ahead of pretty much anything else that was available at the time, albeit only for a relatively short period. It had all this super cool custom hardware and a great OS. Whereas the X5000 is a kind of mid-tier desktop computer with somewhat interesting hardware (a point in its favour Amiga-wise, especially that loopy custom chip, granted) and a whopper of a price tag. I like the idea of a widely available computer with a different hardware architecture and operating system than the currently available choices (which basically boils down to PCs... and expensive PCs that run OSX) but, as the X5000 stands, what would I do with it? Where is the software? How could I do my job with it? Where are the games (a big draw on the original Amiga)? I hate to be a downer because I really loved the Amiga but, guys, it's over. It just is. It's been over for decades. And it makes me sad but it's not going to change without, for one thing, a much better capitalised company behind it, as well as an end to all the trademark nonsense.

starsinspace 9y ago
I have similar feelings regarding today's use of the Amiga name. I still have my A500 and it's the best computer I ever had, and maybe ever will. So when I talk about Amiga, I like to specifically say "Commodore-Amiga", to emphasize that I mean the Amiga-branded hardware of that specific period only.
adrianmonk 9y ago
Where is the software? I think you just answered your own question about whether it is really an Amiga. If you really want to relive the Amiga glory days, isn't that part of the experience? When I bought my Microbiotics 8-Up! card from the local Amiga dealer, they rang my order up on an IBM PC that they used for accounting and inventory tracking and such. I asked if they couldn't do that on an Amiga, and they enthusiastically said they were looking forward to that "just as soon as the software is available".

kenjackson 9y ago

Has there been a device like the Amiga since it came out? A device that was so far ahead of the competition, yet completely overwhelmed by that competition into obsolescence?

loop22 9y ago
The original iPhone?
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Only for those that never had a Nokia 7710 on their hand.
GoatHerderson 9y ago
Perhaps the Atari ST for MIDI devices.
spc476 9y ago
The SGI computers come to mind. Completely blew everything out of the water through the mid 90s, then couldn't compete once high end graphic cards were available for the PC.
ZenoArrow 9y ago
I'm an Amiga fan, but the X68000 was released 2 years after the A1000 and was definitely a step up in power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X68000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X68000 For comparison, here's the Amiga port of Super Street Fighter 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMNTcG4OvqE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMNTcG4OvqE Here's the X68000 version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYmQCbBpLTc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYmQCbBpLTc To be fair to the Amiga, there are fighting games with better graphics than the SSF2 port, but I'd say sacrifices were probably made to improve the gameplay speed.
- kenjackson 9y ago
  I can't believe I never heard of this computer. Very interesting though.

chx 9y ago

Windows S announcement and a new Amiga X ... let me drag up this http://drupal4hu.com/future/freedom http://drupal4hu.com/future/freedom seven year old blog post of mine. Especially because: > Microsoft can [...] make it so that any new app needs to be sanctioned. which came to be true with Windows S. The other half of my prediction where free PCs become "cool, obscure and expensive" computers like the Amiga X series has not yet come to pass. Not yet.

alxmdev 9y ago
That's a nice post, thanks for the link. Some may point to various coding apps available in walled gardens, but that means allowing 3rd parties to define what the general-purpose computer is and set its limits. Who are they to say where curiosity begins and where it should end? I want the freedom to run native code on the CPU, and the freedom for others to easily run what I make without jumping through any hoops. I'd like to hear your opinions about the Raspberry Pi and other cheap computer boards where you can load Linux and just plug in a keyboard and screen. I see a future iteration of that as my next PC in a few years. The Raspberry Pi 3 is good enough to run Ubuntu MATE (I was blown away), and if it had more than 1GB of RAM I would start using it full-time today and save myself some money on the power bill while I'm at it :-)
- chx 9y ago
  Want to hear the doom and gloom version? All it takes is one of these to be found in a terrorist backpack and they will be banned. Consider that 16 years ago one guy tried to smuggle a bomb in his shoe and to this day hundreds of millions of passengers take off their shoes in answer.