Calen wrote:
2003 - The year of the Rebirth is a nice little read.
Is that sarcasm without a smiley?
I don't know how well the author Philip Cosby has followed Amiga related news, but there are some glaring errors and strange wordings that I don't think many who have followed the proceedings would have made. Frankly, this article would be very confusing for anyone from "the outside" reading it, especially the stuff about hardware.
Just look at the very first sentence of the article.
2003 is a year of historical significance for Amiga users as this year new hardware and a new Amiga Operating System will make their debut.
There will be no new Amiga hardware.
"AmigaOne" is a trademark that can be licensed to third party hardware vendors. Unfortunately, the only company that has such a license is Eyetech, which is mentioned, who will be among the companies distributing Teron motherboards from Mai Logic.
The hardware to be sold under the "AmigaOne" trademark is not "new". The Teron CX made its debut in 2001, built around the ArticiaS northbridge controller released the same year. The Teron PX is essentially the same board design, but with a connector for a CPU module. They're both based on the POP reference architecture, released for free use in 1999.
In contrast to the A1200 which had a 020 processor, the AmigaOne has a 800Mhz G4 PowerPC processor. According to Alan Redhouse, CEO of Eyetech, “some PPC experts reckon it is likely to deliver several hundred times the performance of an 030/50 with many applications”.
Comparing a reasonably modern "generic" motherboard to an Amiga is ludicrous. The A1200 is ONE DECADE old technology! It was also a proprietary custom hardware platform. An Amiga.
I have no idea why one of the Teron board vendors would want to compare an 800 MHz PPC7451 CPU from 2001 to a totally different and absolutely irrelevant 50 MHz 68030 from 1989. I assume and sincerely hope that - if he really ever said this - he must have been joking ("some PPC experts..." - for crying out loud!) but I don't think this should have been quoted out of its original context in the article. That single quote could make readers believe that the quoted vendor hasn't got a clue about the stuff he's selling or hoping that potential customers are clueless, or that a Teron board is so worthless that it can't stand a comparison to anything but an ancient Amiga. Which is not the case, of course.
In addition it will have all the features of any modern computer system with lots of Ram, hard drive space, a CD-Rom Drive/ Writer and even a DVD Drive if you like.
Yeah, well, after all a Teron mobo
is "any modern computer system", and of course it's got an IDE interface and DIMM slots (even though these are not really modern, but of year 2000 (UATA100) and 1999 (PC133) specs).
Soldier of Fortune is mentioned among the "new" games. I thought that was put on ice / scrapped? I'll be happy to have my suspicions proven wrong. OTOH, after reading the strange list in
"Future AmigaOne Game Releases" (I assume this is supposed to be "AmigaOS 4 game releases") I'm not sure how credible the info on the rest of the site is. I get the impression that this is more of a "general" Rah-Rah Amiga Roolz Fan Site, than a news/reviews site about Amiga gaming.
