Sir Sane's Blog Otherwise Called Shane Gordon's Ledger of Hatred

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So, some of you may have heard about the upcoming machine from A-Eon, also referred to as "Project X" and Hyperion Entertainment's "Most Ambitious Project"

So, what do we know about this machine? Quite a lot, actually.

The first thing to bring up is that Hyperion Entertainment, the company behind developing the AmigaOS 4.x series, now has the sole legal rights to develop and distribute Amiga products, as well as continue development of AmigaOS.

"Hyperion Entertainment CVBA is pleased to announce that on September 30, 2009, it has reached a comprehensive settlement agreement with Amiga, Inc., Itec LLC and Amino Development Corporation, Inc., to bring all ongoing litigation and worldwide pending procedures between the parties to an end.

As part of the settlement agreement, the Amiga Parties acknowledge that Hyperion is the sole owner of AmigaOS 4 without prejudice to any third party rights.

Within the framework of the settlement agreement Hyperion is granted an exclusive, perpetual, worldwide right to AmigaOS 3.1 in order to use, develop, modify, commercialize, distribute and market AmigaOS 4.x (and subsequent versions of AmigaOS including without limitation AmigaOS 5) in any form, on any medium and for any current or future hardware platform under the exclusive trademark “AmigaOS” (Amiga operating system) and using other associated trademarks (such as the “BoingBall” logo).

Hyperion will continue development and distribution of AmigaOS 4.x (and beyond) as it has done since November of 2001."

The name of this machine is the AmigaOne X1000, which reflects the name of the original Amiga 1000 (the first Amiga ever shipped)

The specs are fairly ordinary at first until you look closely:

Custom case with Boing Ball

ATX Formfactor

CPU: Dual-core PowerISA™ v2.04+ CPU (Meaning PowerPC hardware)

Co-processor: "Xena" XMOS XS1-L1 128 SDS

Audio: 7.1 channel HD audio

Memory: 4× DDR2 SDRAM slots

10× USB 2.0

1× Gigabit Ethernet

2× PCIe x16 slots (1x16 or 2x8)

2× PCIe x1 slots

1× Xorro slot (giving access to "Xena")

2× PCI legacy slots

2× RS-232

4× [[SATA 2] connectors

1× IDE connector

JTAG connector

1× Compact Flash

Up until this point, I had never even heard of a "Co-Processor". What is Xorro and Xena?

Xena:

"Capable of eight concurrent real-time threads with shared memory space, at up to 400 MIPS (about 6 68060s worth), Xena gives the X1000 a very flexible, very expandable co-processor. The uses are endless; control hardware, DSP functions, robotics, display - even SID chip and console emulators. "

Xorro:

"To accompany 'Xena', we have 'Xorro', a new slot using an industry-standard PCIe x8 form factor to give access to the 'Xena' IO. This will be the route to Xena's 64 IO lines, which are dynamically configurable as input, output, or bidirectional. 'Xorro' will allow bridging Xena to external hardware for control purposes, to internal systems, or to other Xcore processors. This last point is worth more exploration; XCore is a parallel processing architecture, and if you want more power, you can simply chain more XCores together. Reference boards have been made with up to 256 cores, offering a theoretical 102400 MIPS."

Additionally, they're using an XMOS chip. What the heck is that, you ask?

"XMOS has developed several core pieces of technology including a multi-threaded multi-core processor; an interconnect switch that can route messages between cores, and a link that can be used to interconnect switches and carry traffic using a transition-based protocol."

I just want to say, ever since Ars Technica did a review of AmigaOS4, I knew I wanted it. I've heard nothing but good things about the Amiga platform, and I'm glad to see that it's slowly but surely continuing on.