A-EON Technology, the company behind the AmigaONE X1000, has not exactly been sitting still. They’re hard at work developing the successor to the Nemo motherboard (which powers the X1000): it’s called Cyrus, and is built around Freescale QorIQ processors, ranging from 32bit 1.5 Ghz (the P3) to 64bit 2.4 Ghz (the P5). Users have been invited to join the beta test programme for this new board, which will eventually power the successor to the X1000. On top of that, A-EON will invest $1.2 million in their partnership with Varisys, the company that builds the Amiga hardware.
Hyperion, the company that develops AmigaOS, hasn’t been twiddling their thumbs either. The biggest hurdle the AmigaOS 4 developers are facing right now is SMP, but work on this issue is progressing.
One of the major hurdles right now, as AmigaOS Development Team Lead Steven Solie implied, is getting the AmigaOS Exec-kernel to support multiple CPU cores. As part of the process, a new so called “scheduler” is being implemented. The new scheduler is apparently already running in the current, internal builds of AmigaOS although Steven suggested there will be room for improvement and optimizations prior to an official release. AmigaOS 4.2 will also introduce the Gallium3D WinSys API for hardware accelerated 3D graphics.
As always with these niche products built by and for enthusiasts, it’s hard to tell where it will lead to. However, fact remains that the X1000 was apparently a big enough of a success for A-EON to invest into the next generation, and for Hyperion to continue work on getting AmigaOS to support SMP – something that only benefits A-EON’s machines.
While everyone else is whining about iOS and Android, the Amiga people are still doing their thing. You have to respect that.
I think an SMP kernel will also benefit ACube so they can finally use the AMC-MPcore cpu’s instead of beeing locked to the aging single core versions.
It’s nice to see them mentioned on here. A-EON are coming up with the goods in the Amiga world lately. They also announced at AmiWest 2013 that a new DSP sound card (the Prisma Megamix) for classic Amiga computers was in the works and would be released soon. My A1200 is crying out for one of these.
Now if only a RTG card would appear on the horizon.
Thats a load. SMP was promised back in 2011, yet no sign of it. The netbook project, cancelled. Reportedly, because of pricing but some question whether its existence was real or made simply because MorphOS had a major release about the same time the Netbook project was announced. The community is ripe with people who cannot acquire machines, sales have been refused to people who want to buy machines. Users upset because support requests are not being honored and when they complain about it their support forum credentials are revoked. The last year in Amigaland has been nothing but attacking outside developers, attacking users and issuing legal threats regarding IP and trademarks that they dont even own and arent even valid. At the helm of it all you have Steven Solie. Now its public knowledge he is Canadian, guess what the Obamacare website was developed by Canadians. See the correlation here. In 2015 we will all sign onto OSAlert.com and what the headlines will read, still, is “Hyperion promises SMP support in AmigaOS 4.x” Development is non existent as a platform, you cant even watch a DVD with the thing, it crashes every hour and a half. AmigaOS doesn’t even support half the hardware on the X1000 and probably supports less than half on the newer machines if I had to make a prediction. If you are a hobbyist and want something you have to tinker with constantly, AmigaOS is for you. As a major platform that suggestion is ridiculous. A-EON’s hardware is great for PPC Linux and PPC BSD that’s the only place you will find a true return on investment. Otherwise take the 4,000 dollars it costs for an AmigaOS system, buy a couple of x86 PC’s and use Linux.
I was really looking forward to a ‘cheap’ netbook that ran AmigaOS4. I own a decked out Amiga 4000D, but would like to ‘play’ with AmigaOS4. I just don’t see much of a reason to sink so much into the hardware for it though.
Hopefully the attempt at OpenAmiga.net will help standardize the APIs so that writing something for the Classic, Aros, MorphOS, and AmigaOS4 will all be the same thing.
Besides, instead of buying cheap x86 hardware and putting Linux on it, if you want an Amiga-like OS, get the hardware that Aros supports and go that route.
Or one of the old PPC Macs supported by MorphOS.
What’s your problem with Canadians? The healthcare.gov website was not developed by Canadians, it was developed by Americans at CGI Federal, which is a company owned by a Canadian Company (CGI Group), but staffed by Americans. Nice try, you can’t even get blame right. Also, I’m pretty sure the Amiga was dangling from a thread long before Steven Solie took control.
Can’t tell if trolling. If not, here’s a hint: correlation does not indicate causation.
As someone who has completely lost all interest in the sad tale that is the US being brought in to line with most of the rest of the developed world for Healthcare – I don’t event know why the Obamacare website is so controversial. Do you have a link with a potted overview of the issue?
I haven’t followed it that closely either, not being from the US. But my understanding is that the problems with the healthcare.gov website are essentially a textbook example of what happens when IT projects are attempted without proper management, organization, and/or planning.
This article on Ars seems like a pretty good overview:
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/10/the-seven-dea…
There’s talk about SMP in AmigaOS since decades now. Even C= developers tried to do it, see the Gemini prototype boards for example. Then it appeared on “AmigaOS 5.0” roadmaps in the early 2000s, when current OS4 history started. So please talk about it again “when it’s done”, not when someone announced they’re “planning” to do it…
BTW, it’s a wide consensus among 3rd party Amiga developers, that true SMP (as in: symmetric and 100% transparent to apps, without special API to access further processors) is *NOT* doable on Amiga.
I’m still curious tho’, who will be right in the end…
Finally something interesting that’s not a “Phone” .. seriously, this site has been struggling to hold my interest in the last 3 years with anything vaguely meaty. There’s too much “OMG! Phone os with new widgets and now on tablet!” .. dull.
So, thanks Thom.. really enjoyed reading this and the links.
Maybe I’ll start checking back more frequently than once every 3-4 weeks.
More O/S stuff.. less ‘its a phone’ stuff.
Phones run operating systems too.
Deal with it.
It’s not that it’s not possible… it’s that they are trying to “hack it in” to an existing AmigaOS that was never designed to have it.
The hardware is so non-Amiga (everything Amiga-wise is emulated, to my knowledge), it’s any wonder they can get it to work, period. But… don’t blame the hardware… blame the OS. They hacked together this PPC version of AmigaOS, to work with this hardware, while trying to maintain some legacy support. Bad combination.
Make a clean break… make it look and act like AmigaOS, but leave the legacy cruft behind. It’s time to move on. This way, you can implement SMP right, from the very beginning. Stop trying to figure out how to shoe horn it into the existing structure… it will only make it a problematic mess and a larger mess to add anything else to.
But goodness knows, nobody in the Corporate world ever listens to an end-user… we’re too stupid to know what we’re talking about, right?
I guess you are right, but what use is yet another non-supported by the rest of the world operating system?
AmigaOS for me only has value if it can run all the classic Amiga software. If it can’t why not install Linux, Windows or buy a Mac?
If they can make a more modern AmigaOS that can run classic software that would be great and it wouldn’t need SMP anyway.
Shit, with UAE and an AROSm68k kickstarter ROM, Linux will run AmigaOS3 software better than official AmigaOS 4 does.
Oh yes!
Try to add 68xxx software and AOS3.9 all the common modern features like True Color graphics, 24 bit audio, and a skin like the standard from Amikit, and be happy discovering how much Windowish slooow becomes the UAE emulated interface even on high clocked Intel processors…
Thanks to God at least we have already PPC Operating Systems and Software like OWB.
Leave the Motorola 68K software for retrocomputing fun. It has limited benefit use, shrinking day by day its value for practical anyday job.
Edited 2013-11-18 15:16 UTC
Fully agree.
The magic of Amiga, was the architecture it offered in terms of UX and hardware capabilities in comparison with what the competition had to offer.
Today’s hardware architecture takes the specialized chipset roles in the Amiga many steps further, with OS that exploit them fully.
Yes I still recall the days I spent with friends watching demoscene stuff, reading 68000 Assembly books about Paula, Denise and friends, playing around with Protacker.
But in a day and age, where both my laptop and mobile phones have 4 cores with a GPU, capable of OpenCL/CUDA/Direct Compute and a programmable sound card, there is only room for nostalgia.
The problem with today’s software is a low utilization of hardware capabilities. Almost anything is based on archaic libraries/languages, developed in times when multicore was not mainstream.
Yeah, but developers are the ones to blame, always taking the easy way out to code something.
I learned about multitasking back in the Amiga days.
moondevil,
“Yeah, but developers are the ones to blame, always taking the easy way out to code something.”
In so far as we wrote it, yes. Some devs are really incompetent. However the fault also lies with the companies that stop investing in quality products, push for accelerated timelines, fail to invest in employee training. There’s not really much incentive to NOT take the easy way out under these circumstances, there’s just too little reward. And it doesn’t help that the business managers who are the least technically qualified on the team are usually the ones calling the shots.
Yes, I agree with you.
X1000 have enough CPU power to run UAE?
Unbelievable, these guys still active. Amiga strong.
It’s interesting to see somebody producing PowerPC motherboards for desktop PC’s, but there’s no doubt in my mind that they’re going to be expensive when they’re finally released (case in point: AmigaOne X1000.) The only consumer-oriented PPC “computer” available right now is the Wii U; perhaps A-Eon could have pursued some kind of co-production agreement with Nintendo and IBM to produce a PPC computer based around the Espresso chip?
As far as the Amiga platform goes, it was great for 1985-1990 but it lives on in the form of every platform it influenced (Windows, OS X and Linux all owe a lot to Amiga.) Perhaps someday the owners of the original Amiga patents (I believe Acer got them when they bought Gateway) could go trolling and make a fortune.
The best way to honor the pioneering Amiga computer is not by coming up with new PPC platforms (which are still interesting in their own right) but to emulate the old software (particularly the timeless games)on modern OS’es. I’d rather stick an Amiga skin and an emulator on top of a Linux distro running on cheap x86 hardware than shell out around $4000 for a rare PPC system running an OS with few native apps.
I think you overestimate Amiga X1000 as successor of Amiga classic machines.
It is just a concept machine built around a very expensive military processor and aimed at high-end developers in order to make it easier to them to transform 32 bit Operating System single-core-only to 64bit SMP based new one.
And no… Emulating old Amiga is not a solution for us who are very fond of this superb Operating System and evolved to new PPC machines.
Edited 2013-11-18 15:34 UTC
I’ve taken the leap and signed up for the beta
/Uni