Here's the first specs for the new Amiga from Amiga Inc.

[jutrem]

This is the low end model (The specs prove that). Wait for the next one, don't waste peoples time complaining about this model.  

[persia]

Amigas were always on the cutting Edge, sure you paid a few dollars more than Wintel, but at least you had comperable hardware.  Now this, $500 for late 90's specs.  Look at the Xbox specs:

Triple core PowerPC running at 3.2 GHz, Xenos graphics processing unit
Playstation 3 3.2 GHz Cell microprocessor, RSX GPU
Wii 900 MHz 705 (G3), Hollywood GPU

Amiga 467 MHz pre-G3 603e clone, no GPU

Which one costs more?
Yep Amiga, low specs, high price.  The CPU is an embedded systems CPU. Why is Amiga, which was known for it's graphics chips producing a machine without a GPU?

What a waste.

TjLaZer wrote:
Well lets see.  If Amiga pulls this off (and I have a feeling they will as they are under new money) this will be great.  I would rather have a non wintel crap crate that runs at 600MHz than a P4 @ 4GHz running an Amiga OS.  The price is just right too, I mean come on!  Under $500 for a new machine?  The Amiga 500 cost more in 1987!

[DrBombcrater]

Playing DVDs shouldn't be a very processor hoggingtask if the player isn't to clogged with bells and whistles, since my Compaq Presario with 233 MHz PII and 64 Mb SDRAM is enough playing MPEG2 compressed DVDs with no lag.

Yes, if by 'bells and whistles' you mean any of the processes DVD playing software uses to improved picture quality beyond the most basic decoded output.

(And you get more Power per MHz on a PowerPC than an Intel).

That is somewhat unlikely when the PowerPC chip in question is derived from a 12-year old core, has no L2 cache and a cut-in-half memory bus.

[uncharted]

bloodline wrote:

Just out of pure curiosity, if I was to buy a complete PC (excluding monitor) for the same price how fast would the emulated Amiga  in UAE be in comparison to this system?

UAE would be MUCH faster.

Interesting.  Perhaps pushing it a bit further,  how close is UAE getting to AmigaOne native speeds?  For example, I wonder what the time difference is between encoding an MP3 in UAE on a reasonable spec PC compared to using PPC native code on an A1.

Why would you bother to spend nearly that much on a motherboard alone... which is out of date, slow and barely compatible with you amiga software... just to run a simple, basic Operating System (with no bundled productivity apps... a la iLife etc...) that has name from your past?

Why?

WHY?

:shrug:

[DrBombcrater]

For example, I wonder what the time difference is between encoding an MP3 in UAE on a reasonable spec PC compared to using PPC native code on an A1.

Not quite what you're after but some time ago I did such a test using Amithlon, which is generally less than 10% quicker than UAE on  purely CPU-bound tasks like MP3 encoding (most of Amithlon's speed comes from its fast disk and screen I/O).

Using Lame on a 33.6MB WAV file took 72.6 seconds for a 600MHz A1-SE, 100.2 emulated on a 1.6GHz Athlon XP 1700, and 69.5 on an Athlon XP 3200.

So I suspect any modern x86 like an Athlon X2 or C2D wouldn't have any trouble running UAE faster than any present or proposed PPC Amiga hardware.

Be nice to have some hard figures on that, however.

[skurk]

drewz21 wrote:
Flex-ATX form factor motherboard based on the Freescale MPC8349E SoC. (400MHz to 667MHz depending on requirements and price target)
1 (one) DDR2 DIMM slot expandable to 1GB using unregistered DIMMs.
1 (one) 66MHz PCI slot for use with readily available graphics cards.

Bah, crap.

It should *at least* have had on-board VGA, that way we would have had a complete "common base", following the true Amiga spirit.

I also imagined something more than a motherboard.  I figured it would be in a minimalistic (small) case, ready for BYOKMM (Bring Your Own Keyboard, Mouse and Monitor).

[ravnen]

@skurk

This new system will be offered at a suggested retail price of $ 489.00 and be a complete offering excluding monitor in a finished design that will provide customers with everything they need to get started.

(From amiga.com)

[skurk]

ravnen wrote:
@skurk

This new system will be offered at a suggested retail price of $ 489.00 and be a complete offering excluding monitor in a finished design that will provide customers with everything they need to get started.

(From amiga.com)

Oh.  Oooh... Oh!  Sorry :-)  Maybe I was a bit too trigger happy there.

Sign me up then!

[Motormouth]

mmmm $489.00

assuming that this is a "complete offering" is $489.00 fair?

~$50.00 for a SATA 80-120 Gig harddrive
~$50.00 for a case and power supply (this is not going to need a very powerful power supply)
~$50.00 for 1 gig of DDR2 ram
~$25.00 for a half decent mouse and keyboard
~$10.00 for a floppy Drive
~$15.00 for a DVD-Rom Drive
~??? video card a PCI one???  I don't know if there was ever a PCI-66 video card out there, but new legacy PCI-32 mhz video cards can still be purchased for industrial use.  An example of a chipset that can still be purchased for the PCI slot is the ATI Rage XL at:  http://ati.amd.com/products/server/ragexl/index.html
we will estimate at ~$25
~$50.00 OS 4.0 assuming that copyright can get worked out.

That is ~$275.00 so far.  It has been a while since i had a  custom multilayer board made (for work) but at the complexity of a computer motherboard ~$200.00 with mass produced components this about right.  If you make a large enough lot this may go down to at low as $125.00-$150.00.  A mass produced low end PeeCee motherboard is $50.00 less processor.  

So my total is ~$400.00-$425.00.  

This leaves ~$64-$89 profit.

yes you can get cheaper hard drives, ram, or keyboard, etc, but not much less expensive.

Is $489.00 fair?  If my assumptions are close to correct YES.
The biggest place one could save money is using a mass produced motherboard.

Things that would be cool, a hardware emulated chipset on an FPGA with a MC68000 on a PCI card, maybe the amiga could dual or triple boot different amiga OSs.

I agree with others video capture/editing and a powerful 3D engine would be very cool and consistent with the Amiga legacy

[Minuous]

Even those hand-cranked charity laptops that are being sold to stone age countries are faster than this (433Mhz). And much cheaper.

They should cut back on the RAM (1Gb is overkill) and ramp up the clock speed.

Yes, there is a high-end model, but so what? I have no doubts it will likewise be overpriced and underpowered.

[shillard]

Such speculation is about as pointless as arguing over or recommending the correct armament for a Colonial Battlestar.

Well, not quite, you're more likely to see a Colonial Battlestar in orbit than you are to see this piece of vapourware in the market.

Come on guys, get off the sauce - this is all sound and fury to keep the lawsuit firing and the creditors/ rubes, er, I mean investors happy.

[persia]

Please no crap floppy drive, they are way to small to be of any practical use nowadays.  It should come with a dual layer DVD writer.

[meega]

Please, floppy drive, 3.5" and high density, they are bloody useful.

[mrmkl]

The biggest shortcoming of the classic Amiga was the inability to read/write HighDensity floppies, which are standard in the PC world. Another one was not supporting IDE harddisks early enough. Third one too late support for VGA-monitors. These three reasons were propably the most significant ones that stopped Amiga becoming the world leader in computers today.

[guru-666]

well that and the fact that there is still to this day no decent web browser.  There where many things that prevneted the the amiga form becoming a mainstream hit "computer".  the amiga strugled then a does not have a shot in hell today...not os4 not morph not aros.... any new run will just be for a few fans... don;t make more than 1000, they won't sell.

[NoFastMem]

Seems a lot of Amiga users are accustomed to apologising for out-of-date hardware. The original Amiga blew the PCs of the time out of the water. The argument's always the same; AmigaOS is lean, you don't need all that extra speed.

But why limit yourself? As though AmigaOS is so lean that it takes anti-cycles to run, it wouldn't benefit at all and there are no applications in the emerging high-def world to take advantage of it?!

We're talking about a gigabyte of RAM as a maximum. You don't have to use it, but that's the most you'll ever be able to use with that board, period. And that's crap, by today's standards.

SATA - okay, but at least parallel ATA is still supported unlike the graphics slot which is two generations out of date, talking genuine back-to-back supersession.

Whoever said PPC @ 600MHz would beat a P4 @ 4GHz, well... Brand loyalty is doing a lot for you and Amigans in general, isn't it?! :-x

Two serial ports... Why?

Two gigabit ethernet ports. Erm. Did someone get a {bleep}load of I/O ICs on the cheap? I guess gigabit is nice. Perhaps this will be handy for downloading all the video you can't play.

Basically, you can shout naysayer, but with question marks over the delivery of the OS you can't blame buyers for wanting to be sure they can run an alternative OS on it at reasonable speed before investing.