Amiga News of first six months of 2010 - Part 1

[Raffaele the Amigan]

Hardware

In the new AmigaoNE X1000 seems it is mounted A good CPU model and that is PPC PA-SEMI (PA6T-1682M) pretty CPU being dualcore 64bit, 1,8GHz PowerISA v2.04+, that consumes electricity only from 5 to 13 Watt depending of usage peformances.





The CPU alone costs 450$.  Whole X-1000 will be priced "north of 1500$". The price is high but it bundles too  Amiga custom case with 8 bays for 3.5" HDDs, Amiga custom keyboard, ATI PCI-e R700, HD 500GB, 2GB RAM DDR2 (HD and RAM are tested to avoid lacks of compatibility with hardware and software) + licence for a copy of AmigaOS 4.1.
X-1000 has high price but it is aimed at developers, software houses that works with Amiga and power users. There is a developers purchasing project and registered Amiga coders could pick AONE X-1000 by paying a bail of 750 Euro.  

AmigaOS already booted on X1000 but it is still monocore and 32 bit. SMP and 64 bit design will came in further releases


AmigaOS on X-1000

The most interesting feature of X-1000 is coprocessor XENA from XMOS.

As a processor, Xena is an Hybrid from a transputer and a FPGA, it elaborates on the fly datastreams from various sources (lan, Web, Wi-Fi, etc), it drives hardware devices such as robots and x-tra hands, and can be programmed to emulate various CPUs (Amiga Old Chipset, PlaystationONE chipset, or even a DSP audio chip). Xena frees the main CPU PPC from trivial computing such those ones, and leaves it free for productivity software.

http://www.a-eon.com

SAM 460EX Italian Amiga Motherboard'Amiga italiana

SAM 460EX is a mobo made in Italy from A-Cube. It will be sold in september and it is priced around 500/600 euro included AmigaOS 4.1 licence.

http://www.sam4x0.com/sam460ex.html



AmigaOS 4.1 Upd. 2 and Firefox

AmigaOS 4.1 update 2 contains all the modifies to make Timberwolf (the Amiga version of Shiretoko Firefox, so called for copyrights issues) to run on Amiga too. But the best advancements for AmigaOS were in the last updates. It gained protected memory, virtual memory with swap partition system, and Desktop subsystem made upon Cairo vector libraries and introduces also Hardware acceleration system.

There is a new subsystem to handle system messages and events. It is called RinghIO (Ringhio means "growl" in italian lanaguage) and it recalls  the name of event subsystem named Growl of MacOS X. Infacts RinghIO is made by italian Amiga developers.

Timberwolf:

With Timberwolf amiga enters the vaste family of operating systems that supports Firefox.

It is just an Alpha version release, but it is already stable and has enough speed for anyday usage as stated by AmigaOS users who downloaded and installed it. It was realized by the Frieden twin brothers who ported it in just one year of work, by using their spare time.



Next news came in part 2 of the thread

[Chocofreak13]

hot damn, i didn't even know amiga was still putting out computers, but a powerhouse like this?

long live amiga. *claps* ^^