The costs are due to the small production run and target user base.
What's really sad is that despite the decision to use small volume hardware, it didn't have any compatibility modifications whatsoever compared to vanilla x86 machines. At the very least, a custom floppy drive controller would have been nice.
They can spout all the reasons the have for their hardware decisions till the cows come home, but at the end of the day, if it's not in my best interests, who cares?
It's painfully ironic that, given the classic Amiga's custom chip design and emphasis on coprossesing, the PowerPC CPU alone was the only thing that mattered when it came to deciding the future platform.
Hyperion said that the future for PowerPC was very bright. People point to the next generation game consoles as a representation of what's possible with PowerPC. Cell is essentially a whole computer on a chip with several FPU units and cost untold millions to engineer, and only follows a narrow set of standards. Stock PPC chips only keep up with x86, and aren't really any cheaper. If the chip is so grand and has little legacy baggage, why doesn't it simply blow away x86?
The insane amount of heat generated by x86 CPUs is due to market demand, not a slack of engineering. People want hot CPUs that are fast, so that's what they get. Transmeta and Athlons that went up in smoke presented new issues, and now we have Pentium M among other choices. Transmeta's future is seriously in question as a result, and PPC is still not working it's way into the mainstream desktop market. ARM pretty much rules the handheld market, too.
People really need to get over their obsession with technical supiriority. It leads to focusing only on a small portion of the total problem. The Amiga needs an OS, killer dev tools, and a slick new graphical interface. It doesn't need another sales pitch as to why CPU A is better than CPU B, and why Amigans really should feel obligated to pay hundreds more for hardware based on standards several years old.
