AmigaONE X5000 (A-Eon Technology Ltd on Facebook)

[amigakit]

I have not seen that quoted before.
That would be a great improvement in pricing.

It would be nice to get down to that pricing level, but with the high engineering and design costs and small production runs, it will not be achievable, unless boards were sold at a loss.

[amigakit]

If you are going to go for an F- in economics at least build something that more Amiga users would afford. Or else pay Hyperion to port OS4 to cheaper systems (x86/Arm/whatever)

Building a custom x86 or ARM board in the same quantities would yield the same high design, manufacturing and engineering costs.  The answer lies in the scale of production.  The "fun" starts at 10,000 units.

[amigakit]

@EverBlue,

OK, one example scenario: A-EON buys 10,000 units of off the shelf x86 motherboards without CPU at about $1m cost, which will likely be discontinued stock in 3-6 months in the PC world.

Then Hyperion takes at least 18 months to port the OS to it.

What will happen?  Will customers want an x86 board in 2 years time branded as an "Amiga" that has long since expired its shelf life in PC world terms?   Or will they accept that it?  Will be be able to sell 10,000 units?  These are the business risks that would have to be taken.

In addition to the hardware, every third party software that has been written for PowerPC AmigaOS needs to be recompiled for the new x86 ISA under AmigaOS.

[amigakit]

If you do not choose a product based on one specific x86 motherboard, A-EON or Hyperion will need to commission a wide ranging development of drivers and firmware for the any supported x86 motherboard because no two x86 motherboards are alike.

The developer resources (and financial cost) to keep pace with current x86 motherboard hardware developments would be significant, due to the short shelf life of x86 hardware.  Then you are paying to support motherboards that are discontinued within a few months of release.

It would be better from a practical and anti-piracy point of view to concentrate on a limited set of x86 motherboards.  Apple do exactly this.  However, an investment in securing these boards for the 2 years+ product life would be required.

Today's Linux community can support a wide range of x86 boards due to the huge pool of developers willing to write drivers and provide support for different hardware configurations.  AmigaOS developer community in contrast is very much smaller.

[amigakit]

aros has proven that it is possible to maintain "amiga ng" system not only on x86 hardware.

Absolutley no disrepect intended to AROS developers: I can imagine how much hard work it is to maintain distributions for specific systems, the key to a viable business is having a current product that is available and in demand.  AROS Devs are always reactively developing their system to x86 hardware that has hit the retail shelves already, so hardware quickly becomes discontinued.  

Despite the long time AROS has been available since late 1990's, I do not see a plethora of AROS retailers out there and a lot of AROS machines sold.  I expect the AROS team continue development from a love of the original Amiga spirit, as we all do.  The big business question is: if you are confident that x86 Amiga is the commercial future of our platform, over the years why has AROS not attracted a significant market share yet?  Is it because of the pace of keeping up with x86 hardware changes?

[amigakit]

The main problem (for all camps) to win real new users is missing software

Yes, I agree with you.  People buy computers for the software they can run on it.

That is why A-EON is developing AMIStore (an app store for AmigaOS) and the emphasis from A-EON in 2014 will be on software production, supporting the AmigaONE X1000 owners out there first and foremost and creating a base for future models such as the X5000.

[amigakit]

My personal interest is to recreate (to a certain degree) a platform that is interesting for commercial development (f.e. for small INDY developers)

Yes, absolutely right: this is my personal goal too.  I think for too long a time,  small talented indy developers on the Amiga have not received any financial recognition of their work and ultimately gave up on Amiga and left our community.  The Amiga has suffered because of this talent drain away from the platform.

An App Store should be a good step in the direction of encouraging bedroom coders again for the Amiga.


@Andre.Siegel
Interesting information that I didn't consider about the industrial x86 boards.

@EverBlue

Instead of A-Eon investing in an "Amistore" why don't they invest in the software directly? Software drives hardware sales alongside to affordability.

I agree.  A-EON is doing both: investing in both AMIStore (a platform and delivery mechanism) and engaging with software developers directly to promote development.  However, we need to consider that results will not appear overnight.