New Hyperion Entertainment Website http://a-eon.com/ - The Mystery Continues

[EDanaII]

...though I am curious what they intend to do with this that couldn't better be done with another 400MHz of host processor juice.

They can sell it to the PPC zealots who scream "give me PPC or give me death!"

[Zac67]

The e600 is only compliant to the PowerPC spec, not Power Architecture 2.04.

Duh! There goes my theory...

[redrumloa]

@hazydave

Good to see you lurking and posting here, it gives a unique perspective.

[Crom00]

@hazydave

Good to see you lurking and posting here, it gives a unique perspective.

Yep... God only knows how uniquely qualified he is to comment on the matter...

[AeroMan]

What, you don't want a KITT simulator for your PC? :-P

Hans

Only if they sell me a talking Pontiac with a Xorro board interface
(A black Trans Am.... coooooool!)

[SamuraiCrow]

The PA6T from PA Semi also fits the description, but who knows how they would get their hands on it now.

I've heard that Texas Instruments was a partner to P.A. Semi before it got bought by Apple.  Maybe they've still got some production rights.

[Ancalimon]

I think if the unknown CPU turned out to be a really really powerful CPU, some people here would start saying that this is an overkill.

[GadgetMaster]

Yep... God only knows how uniquely qualified he is to comment on the matter...

It's always great to hear from Dave Haynie or anyone else who was involved in the original Amiga project.
 
I bet they never imagined there would still be interest in the Amiga in 2010. :cool:

[BinoX]

But, if you're dedicated to outdated concepts like the PowerPC, this is probably as good as it gets.

You're telling Amiga entusiasts about outdated stuff? lol Nice to see you posting here though

I guess we'll see what Hyperion / A-Eon pull out of the magic Amiga hat and how well it works Only time will tell.

[zylesea]

Apple's "HD" video has largely been 720p... I don't think they're doing full 1080p AVC decoding on a 1.5GHz PPC, certainly not without serious GPU acceleration of the video decode.

The Mac mini 1.5 GHz running MPlayer/MorphOS does a 720 movie at about 2/3 cpu load. 1080 is possible under some certain circumstances (has beed demoed a while back), but not in a manner that you could say it is an everyday solution.

The inclusion of the XMOS chip is pretty mysterious. It's not a huge expense.. you can buy the four-core version at DigiKey for about $20 (they sell at devkit at $99, including demo board and software). But this is a weird chip... four fairly lower powered cores, each of which runs eight threads. They claim 1600MIPS, but that's going to be peak... every thread in use. There's some weired connection matrix, so you can arrange these things in different orders.. maybe interesting for simple audio processing. But overall, less of a CPU than an ARM Cortex A8 (eg, regular smartphone chip), with the FPU and SIMD units taken out. And there's a slot for this? Weird... though I am curious what they intend to do with this that couldn't better be done with another 400MHz of host processor juice.

The only outstanding feature of the XMOS chip I figured out so far is that the threads are hardware warranted real time. Thus, sub tasks can use RT features even in a non RT envirionemnt. But this surely has its limits once interaction with the Host non RTOS on the host cpu is involved, because then it is again a question of how the interruped triggered by the XMOS gets processed.
And I fail to see the need to include that XMOS chip on the mainboard, a pci(e) card would certainly do as well, for many purposes (when no dma master is required) even a usb extension would work

[dammy]

The only outstanding feature of the XMOS chip I figured out so far is that the threads are hardware warranted real time. Thus, sub tasks can use RT features even in a non RT envirionemnt. But this surely has its limits once interaction with the Host non RTOS on the host cpu is involved, because then it is again a question of how the interruped triggered by the XMOS gets processed.

And I fail to see the need to include that XMOS chip on the mainboard, a pci(e) card would certainly do as well, for many purposes (when no dma master is required) even a usb extension would work

That's the reason it smells like SAM440ish to me, designed for something else.  Look at it this way, this is truly a make or break mobo for Ben and his partners.  Why in the world would they spend that type of additional money to add complexity to a mobo that has to be nearly bug free to recoup any ROI. That's a significant risk to undertake for S&G reasons because the components are cheap and there is no demand for it within the Amiga Community.  So it does sound like this mobo was in existence and was either bought out or perhaps exclusively licensed to avoid another AmigaOne:Teron PR disaster.

[a1200]

I guess they never thought what would be of interest next year, it was pretty much a mad journey from one project to the next by the anecdotes on the Deathbed Vigil and great publications such as On the Edge. I wonder what the living members of the C= Amiga team could come up with now if we locked them in a room with a few dev machines and lots of coffee!

It's always great to hear from Dave Haynie or anyone else who was involved in the original Amiga project.
 
I bet they never imagined there would still be interest in the Amiga in 2010. :cool:

[Zac67]

... if we locked them in a room with a few dev machines and lots of coffee!

Don't forget the beer! @Dave

[dammy]

I guess they never thought what would be of interest next year, it was pretty much a mad journey from one project to the next by the anecdotes on the Deathbed Vigil and great publications such as On the Edge. I wonder what the living members of the C= Amiga team could come up with now if we locked them in a room with a few dev machines and lots of coffee!

Other then consoles or low end systems, I don't know what they really could produce that would be significant as far as desktops are concerned.  20+ years is a long time in desktop evolution for any group to produce something that would shock and awe the mature desktop market.

[hazydave]

Quoting hyperion:

"We know it means eceptional. Remember when Amiga hardware was eceptional, not just the OS? You won't need to remember much longer. Nemo brings Amiga back to the high-end."

So in other words, it will be up to par with high end 2000 Euro+ PCs? You know, I would have settled for something less powerful, and a matching price.

They'd like to claim the high end. That doesn't mean they actually there, any more than any other of the zillions of Amiga-industry promises made since ESCOM closed the Amiga Technologies doors.

Whats high end now anyway? 3 SLI Video cards, quad cores, 4 gigs RAM and all that?

i7 CPU, 6-12GB DRAM, certainly at two full PCIe x 16 slots (well, at least they tried on that... they have two full lenght PCIe slots, but they degrade to x8 if you use them both... so there's really only one x16 slot).

So, in other words, the new Amiga will do stuff that current PCs dont? Nice. With which OS?

Well, they're letting you fill in that assumption, rather than just outright saying it. It would be really nice if Amiga wanna-be computer companies stopped doing this.. what's the point of raising Amigaoid hopes once again, just to smash them. I would like this to not be another one of those, but really... not much to expect here. PowerPC CPUs have a hard time beating Intel Atoms on performance these days (and the ARM may be a valid competitor, soon). I can't imagine how this is going to be anything but overpriced and underwhelming.

And I'd love to be proved wrong.

[EDanaII]

Unfortunately, you won't be. All of this is being approached from an idealistic standpoint rather than a practical one. If they were being practical, they'd be producing a machine that fans can buy. Not a empty "dream" machine with a price range that's out of reach.

The Amiga curse continues...