X1000 CPU is PWRficient PA6T

[KimmoK]

In at least 2 or 3 posts on AW.net and iirc in an AF interview.

Also at the A-Eon site: Our hardware designers had a brilliant idea: "Why not add an XMOS chip?"


And the rest of their text about xena:
"Once there were custom chips; for the AmigaOne X generation, we have customisable chips. XMOS calls it "Software Defined Silicon", we call it 'Xena', a nod to the old custom chip names. It's the inheritor of the 'transputer' concept, and it's something we're quite excited about.

Capable of eight concurrent real-time threads with shared memory space, at up to 500 MIPS, 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.

Xena is not simply strap-on extra adding an extra half GHz of processing power, it's a different kind of thing to a general purpose CPU altogether. It's an event-driven processor, which means it can respond immediately to events such as external signals, rather than having to wait on an interrupt. This makes it appropriate to true real-time functions. It has many input/output lines which are software configurable, making it ideal for ultra-low latency data sampling applications and extremely easy to turn into control hardware for... well, virtually anything. The I/O can also be configured to communicate with extra XMOS chips that can run the processor's code in a highly parallel fashion, and for serious power applications you can just keep on adding processors.

The Amiga has seen some truly ingenious hacks and add-ons; Xena can take this to a whole new level. It will take a while for the full possibilities to be realised, but we urge you to visit XMOS and discover more for yourselves."

Seems pretty ok description of it's capabilities. In the teaser phase they were perhaps more "enthusiastic".

Also I recommend to read their xorro description as well. It has about all the public details of the connections of/to xena.

[KimmoK]

Anyway the issue is A-EON are marketing it as the second coming,

I think that's because they have now the control of Amiga & OS developments.
First time since 199x AOS devs have control of AOS future.

And the HW is a big jump forward in terms of performance (IMO, it's 5...10 fears forward from SAM) and up-to-date expansion slots (15 years forward from SAM) + GPGPU etc.

(xena is there mainly/just to bring some I/O flexibility over standard HW, like the video slot of original Amigas, waiting for people to utilize it, or like the geekport of bebox, just like they seem to say now, after the tease is over, since january)

about CPU performance:
It should be like p3@2Ghz. A lot better than P4@2Ghz. + it has integrated RAM controllers + integrated PCIe bridge + more cache , unlike those 2ghz pentiums, unlike any other PPC on desktop. It should significantly outperform systems like original xbox360. And whole system (HW) is more modern than the last G5 mac. Only time will tell how many years it takes for the SW to support it fully.

@everybody

A-Eon does not seem to plan to sell many hundreds of x1000. Surely they "just" pave the way for next gen multicore HW & ASMP AOS4.

[KimmoK]

Isn't that a bit premature considering there isn't even 3D support for the included Radeon X700 card yet?

As far as I can tell both ATI and nVidia are keeping their GPU stream processing drivers closed source (and binaries are only available for x86 and amd64). So where is this GPGPU stuff coming form then?

No idea.