The Vintage Computing Festival 2010- The AmigaOne X1000
Although the focus of the event was vintage hardware, there was at least one brand-new product being showcased: the AmigaOne X1000 from A-EON. The A-EON stand drew by far the biggest crowd of the day, but those expecting to be able to get their pre-orders in were left disappointed by director Trevor Dickinson.
Dickinson demonstrated a Revision 1 Amiga X1000 built by hardware partner Varisys running Amiga OS 4, but announced that a firm release schedule hadn't been decided upon, pending the creation of a Revision 2 motherboard. Trevor admitted that although the system on show had been running a working copy of Amiga OS 4 for the last six months, last minute hacking was required prior to the show as "
only in the last couple of days has it successfully booted off the hard drive."
While the hardware on display matched the originally released specifications - aside from a CPU clockspeed increase to 2GHz - the design left something to be desired: far from an Amiga 1000-inspired chassis as was originally promised, the X1000 was a black monolith with a surprisingly loud series of fans keeping the dual-core PowerPC-based processor cool.
The first new Amiga in years, the X1000, was one show
Describing the X1000 as a "
top-end machine," Dickinson explained that "
compared to mass-produced Intel machines or x86 machines from the Far East this is going to be much more expensive. We're a very small market, we're specialist, we're making very small numbers - [it's] inherently expensive." Although cagey on firm figures, Dickinson did confess that the AmigaOne X1000 was definitely "
going to be north of £1,500," and possibly as high as £2,000, while pre-ordering for the device isn't expected to open before Christmas.
Speaking to us after the event, Dickinson explained that he firmly believed that the 2GHz dual-core processor in the X1000 would be enough to satisfy the most demanding of users, despite its lower clockspeed when compared to current x86 hardware. Describing his early use of a beta-test version of an A-Cube next-gen Amiga using an AMC 440 667MHz CPU, Dickinson explained that "
Amiga OS 4 on that feels as fast as running Windows on your multi-gigahertz whatever - it won't do certain things as fast - it won't do number crunching as fast - but when you're using it, from a users' perspective it's a nice machine to use. So, is 2GHz enough? Probably, if it's multi-core."
The X1000 features a dual-core 2GHz PowerPC CPU
Dickinson also revealed a bonus designed to tempt those Amiga fans who have never made the move to next-generation hardware, in that A-EON is "
trying to build in software some compatibility with the classic [Amiga] range," with one developer working on the project putting together "
an Amiga Classic distro - completely reproducing a fairly souped-up Amiga Classic system - but on [the X1000] in software [to] give the classic people a link into it so they can at least take it on board as they haven't so far with the next-generation Amigas."
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