AmigaOne X5000 – first impression

Where's a VC when you need one?! Someone get this plan in motion.

They seemed to stay technologically ahead of their time in various ways. They did NUMA systems with great performance. Did them in desktops, too. Tried stripped OS's for the compute nodes that redirected things like I/O to others. Eliminated most bottlenecks that were in graphics buses. Supported open standards for graphics. The Bill Gates and SGI demo of modifying live video. Dual mobos in the desktops. Threw in RAS, Trusted extensions to Irix, and other things competitors were doing. Let you run Quake, though. FPGA's as a compute node later on with NUMA latency and bandwith. Took forever for competition to do that.

All that said, the cases for the desktops and Origin especially looked cool as hell. There was definitely a wow factor showing off SGI hardware even to laypeople. Then there was one seeing what it could do.

Me, I'd rather emulate a few classic games. But it had me wondering for a while if I'd get any value from this, before deciding "no".

I find it interesting that so many of the people making YT videos and in the current Amiga community don't seem old enough to have been there first time around! So it can't be just nostalgia.

What I really want is someone to reimagine a 3000+ prototype[0] for this decade and a modern Intuition. Then I'd probably impulse spend a lot of $. Of course that would cost someone a lot of R&D spend! It's almost inconceivable anything could recapture the magic though. :)

There's an interview from a couple of years ago with the guy who made the X5000 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mb6nbQSOAA0 and his Amiga addiction.

I started out doing real programming on an Amiga and I took a LONG time to retire it. Wasn't for lack of trying...

For years after if I needed to do something useful I used the Amiga over Win, on my first couple of very expensive PCs, because it was an order of magnitude more productive. It felt faster, with endless virtual screens, despite the ludicrous MHz/graphics gap. It was actually faster at most real world tasks except those needing raw CPU loads. It was far more reliable ripping or writing CDs etc. You generally plugged any Zorro card in and it just worked - none of the faffing with interrupt jumpers and Plug n Pray/BSOD. I used it over Linux/BSD as the sw wasn't there.

It took until the XP era, and much expense, before the Amiga became pointless. I was delighted when the Macbook Pro arrived... I'd sold the 4000 well before then.

I still miss many aspects of it. Not because I am somehow stuck in nostalgia for the 90s, MHz over GHz or scanlines and flicker fixers, but because I feel it was, in many ways a far better starting point for modern computing - mostly Intuition, but also the approach to everything in the hardware design (pre 4000 anyway). If only they had developed over the years since...

I suspect, had Commodore lasted, that they'd have gone an OSX-like route - new processor (this was already planned as there was no future in 68k series) and reimagining of Intuition on top of nix, maybe BSD. It already had a rather nix flavour, ARexx and so on. Hopefully on something more interesting than just PC clone hardware, though I doubt it these days.

[0] Dave Haynie designed a machine that was another leap forward in 90/91 whilst AA was still being worked on (I think): early spec PDF: http://www.thule.no/haynie/research/a3000p/docs/a3000p.pdf

Medhi Ali wanted to cut cost above all, and make some crap PCs, so the world got the piece of junk A4000 and AGA instead. Oh, and a cost-cutting A600 that cost more to produce than the A500.

It's a pretty old chip, and there's a newer generation of Freescale stuff -- the e6500 -- with more cores, smt, pcie 3, etc. Plus, it's kinda expensive compared to other PPC boards. Even the Qoriq reference board is cheaper [1], and reference boards tend to be rather high priced themselves. If you're gonna run Linux, your best bet is elsewhere.

[1] http://www.nxp.com/products/microcontrollers-and-processors/...

When we were kids the Amiga was for quite some time the center of our life.

When it was launched there were PC clones with EGA graphics (16 colours), the Atari ST just launched which was a good computer and we were also outgrowing our 8-bit computers (C64, Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum). Then, the Amiga was gem-like compared to the alternatives and I remember I was so in love reading colorful Amiga ads over and over: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/ce/8a/49/ce8a...

But to be honest, I don't get why people still stick to it nowadays.