What would be your move now that you know the price of the X1000?

[jorkany]

£1700 for a system that runs outdated hardware?
What exactly is the strategy for these systems? What are they supposed to do?

They're supposed to be like the original Amiga was, with custom hardware in this case represented by the presence of an XMOS chip and a deliberately b0rked PCI-e bus. The multicore processor I guess was intended to stand in for the preemptive multitasking ability of the original Amiga. Only problem is, none of that is used on the X1000. The strategy failed, so now it's just a somewhat faster board to run OS4.

Who do they expect to buy them?

It's laid out in the original copy from the A-eon website: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayPOZfxNzg8

From the transcription:
"we're aiming at the high-end first, with a powerful desktop computer aimed at the professional and serious hobbyist markets"

In a later version of the website, but prior to the one now, regarding the XMOS chip: "Scientific users take note!"

The strategy would have made more sense if it wasn't a flop.

[jorkany]

Huh?

Sorry, I meant PCI-e *slot*, aka Xorro. You can't put a real PCI-e card into it and have it work.

[jorkany]

I was under the impression that, while the slot is physically the same, it's aligned differently so you can't put a standard PCI-e card in the slot and have it match up with the backplane, and there's a PCI-e x1 slot in front of it. So, only a PCI-e 1x card will fit, and if you fit one of them it will work as expected, but will block use of the Xorro slot. No damage done. Similar to the ISA and Zorro slot layout on big-box Amigas... That's how it looked in the board layout pics that were floating around a while back anyway.

Edit: I see you don't take billt's word for it, so you probably wouldn't take mine either so. Far too easy to jump on the bandwagon. Anyway, here's a pic of the top of the PCB. You can more easily see there how it's laid out to avoid just that confusion, and to allow the use of PCI-e x1 in that slot.

With XMOS driving the card it isn't going to do much.

[jorkany]

*sigh* I'll bite once more. Maybe you haven't bothered looking at the pictures yourself (I'm sure it's much more fun for you to just go on hearsay), but the PCIe x1 board won't go into the Xorro slot, and so would have nothing to do with the XMOS. The "Xorro" slot is physically the same as a PCIe x8 slot, but is mounted further in on the board, behind the PCIe x1 slot. That means the position can only be used by either a PCIe x1 card (and will be used as such) *or* whatever weird contraption someone might come up with for the Xorro slot. A PCIe card will not fit the Xorro slot without breaking bits off it. And a Xorro card won't fit any PCIe slot either for the same reason.

Okay, point taken, I see what you mean. You would end up having to bust off a bit of the connecting edge to plug in a PCIex8 card, and I'd be willing to bet we will see a few examples of this sometime next year! Also this doesn't change my opinion that it's a deliberately broken PCIe slot, just that I see it's broken physically as well as functionally.