A new Amiga with customizable coprocessor

http://www.osnews.com/story/22693/New_Amiga_Sports_Programmable_Co-Processor_Dualcore_PPC

by ams6110 • 17 years ago

49 18 17 years ago

osnews.com

jacquesm3• 17 years ago

The persistence of the Amiga people is definitely something to learn from.

If anybody ever wants to put an end to it they'd better bring some garlic, wooden stakes and silver bullets.

mynameishere• 17 years ago

The Amiga is similar to the Mac to the extent that the users loved it. Unlike the Mac however, the parent company detested and destroyed the Amiga.

jacquesm3• 17 years ago

I remember when they first came out and literally standing glued to the floor, multiple active windows, it was the first time I ever saw that.

The only other machines at the time capable of doing that were priced way out of ordinary mortals budget.

There as the Acorn 'unicorn', probably the cheapest and then right away big $ stuff like the Apollos.

There was no way I could afford a machine like that (nor the Amiga, for that matter, at least not at that time) so I stuck to my trusty 8 bitter for a bit longer and built the Elektuur 'GDP', a hardware assist for vector graphics.

But it never looked as good as the Amiga OS.

rbanffy2• 17 years ago

It was not that Commodore detested the Amiga. They were just aiming it at the wrong market for too long. They kept the Amiga a home computer. Finding a niche in videomaking allowed it to survive for some more time. It's analogous to what happened to the Mac - it was failing until desktop publishing created a niche for it. The difference is that it didn't work for the Amiga.

The Amigas were built around TV signal timing. When it became common to run home computers with VGA screens, it took too long for Commodore to build a machine that could drive them. The Amiga 3000 was the first one with a VGA port, but, by then, it was depressingly clear the low-cost PCs had won.

jorsh• 17 years ago

Oh cool. A dead platform jumps onto another dead platform. The concept of a modern Amiga has gotten beyond ridiculous at this point.

topbanana• 17 years ago

10/10 for persistence. I'm sure it'll run BeOS too before long ;)

ashleytowers• 17 years ago

Whilst this is interesting technology wise and may open impressive possibilities... so what? Without a solid install base why would I spend my time writing impressive software that is tied to this machine? Profit? No install base = no customers. Hubris? No install base = no one to impress.

I'm fully aware this is a chicken and egg situation...

(I say all of the above as a total Amiga fanboy from back in the day!)

Retric3• 17 years ago

I think it's designed for the number crunchers out there. A GPU can crush a CPU for some applications but there is a huge middle ground between a GPU and a CPU.

jteo• 17 years ago

Then one would be better served buying a GPU from either Nvidia or ATI.

vidarh2• 17 years ago

Why do you think it's designed for the number crunchers? I want one (I'm an ex-Amiga user, and still miss it...), but I certainly don't think a dual core PowerPC + a 400 MIPS co-processor is going to be cost/performance competitive with a suitable x86-64 based server at this stage. In fact, I'd be surprised if it was much faster than my current $600 laptop.

The XCORE ("Xena") co-processor they've added is exciting, but because of the hard-realtime capabilities / low latency and IO lines, not for raw performance.

patrickgzill• 17 years ago

My take is that it is less for GPU-like number crunching and more for interfacing with real-world devices; perhaps writing relatively simple scripts in ARexx for working with serial, parallel, etc. devices.

A new Amiga with customizable coprocessor

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