Hyperion/A-EON introduce us to the AmigaOne X1000. A new beginning?

[billt]

My biggest concern is hardware compatibility.  Those PCIe ports are great but ultimately meaningless if you don't have drivers for more than a mere handful of obscure PCIe expansions.

I've always hated this kind of argument. Where would you like things to begin, have the driver writers working before they have a slot to plug anything into and test? Hans's Radeon drivers should work on whatever chips he already supports in PCI form. (board has PCIe Radeon and PCIe-PCI slot bridge chip) I'll assume that there will be drivers for anything built into the board. And there's a couple old-school PCI-32 slots to use. To me it makes a lot more sense to start with providing PCI-Express slots, then add some patience for driver coders to catch up. And I expect drivers to be provided for stuff on the motherboard, which I do guess to be via a PCI-Express connection.

(My guess is CPU SOC PCIe to what I guess to be an SB600 southbridge, which contains a bridge to PCI32 for those slots, PCI32 to the FPGA, and FPGA to the Xcore, and Xcore to the Xorro, possiblly also FPGA to the Xorro, but that is all just a guess)

[billt]

The XCore chip proposed atm is the lower end version, that, and the Xorro slot suggests to me it's meant to be treated like the Clockport on the A1200 or the expansion slot of the A500. The onboard XCore will therefore mostly handle I/O and communication between add on boards and the OS.

Consider a cheapo PCB to connect a clockport header to the Xorro slot...

[billt]

I guess the intended solution to this is to add more XMOS chips. What I'm not clear on is how this is supposed to happen. You can't just attach a bin and dump a few chips into it, after all. Does XMOS sell a board that plugs into the Xorro slot? I doubt it. PCIe?

Someone will make a Xorro board. I will be suprised if not. What does XMOS want you to use a Xorro board for? What do you want to use it for? There will probably be a number of choices, to provide different kinds of IO at the rear. Ethernet ports? Audio connectors? Midi? Xcore based Minimig port connectors? Joystick? Clock Port? Floppy port?

[billt]

by now I do have to wonder if it's even worthwhile anymore.

That's an appropriate comment if a notably superior successor is getting close enough to buy instead of the much delayed thingamy.

What else is coming that is 64bit, has Altivec, that many slots, etc? Sam460 is a good board, but it's a different performance/feature class item. And for those that want as high-end as possible, nothing else is known to be coming that would stomp all over the X1000, or even just somewhat surpass it.

The only thing I can imagine at this point, considering the PowerPC restirction forced upon us, would be something based on a many-core QorIQ, the 64bit version, with Altivec put back in. It's rumored that Altivec will return and be in some QorIQ chips, but not announced or known for sure, not by we the Amiga public anyway, and certainly not any details about what else would be in "The Return of Altivec" chips.

So, considering what we know about successors to the high-end X1000, waiting is annoying. Yes. But no longer worthwhile, from me the customer's point of view? There's nothing else to eclipse that board, so yea, we'll just go on waiting and waiting.

[billt]

Why not just go with a PPC Mac like MOS has?

Because those who can decide such a thing choose not to. I've tried to suggest it in a better way than "Hyperion should port to MacPPC" forum posts. I've set up a web site to try and collect documentation for chips, as that was one of the big reasons against it. Other big reason was Amiga inc. licensing restrictions I believe, but I'm under the impression that this may not be as much of an obstacle since the lawsuit stuff concluded.

I've got an iBook G4 that I'd love to call my "Amiga laptop". But uncofrunately, that's outside of the rules imposed on us by the deciderers. :/

[billt]

Multi-core, 64bit CPU's doesn't really bring anything beneficial to the table, since Amiga is neither 64bit nor SMP capable.

I hate circular arguments.

10 They won't add that feature because there's no hardware!
20 They won't make that hardware because the software doesn't support it!
30 goto 10

If someone makes such a hardware, hey the X1000 is a dual-core 64bit PPC, then the software guys have something to test on rather than just do theoretical coding. You gotta start somewhere, and I think it's easier to start on the hardware side of this stupid loop.