Some first pictures of the soon to be released Mini-ITX form factor AmigaOne PPC board have been released here.
A round up of recent AmigaOS4 news: Pagestream to support AmigaOS4, AOS4 Tour goes downunder and Amiga recently released another CAM article “ExecSG in detail: Memory”
written by Thomas Frieden of Hyperion.
One PCI slot… wow… I guess this is for little boxes! Thanks for the pics!
Mini ITX is (I think, didn’t investigate) about 17×17 cm, so it’s small. 🙂
A PCI riser cards which allows you to fit more cards should be available for the board.
That thing would be perfect for the little silent server, sitting under the couch. 🙂
If I got this right, Amiga OS uses some kind of RISC/PPC compatible CPU; right?
Is there any way to run of this board OSX?
If not, are there any other boards that could run OSX (even if it isn’t really meant to…)
The CPU interface on the small Amiga-mini board looks a hell of a lot like the older cpu “socket” on the Mac ‘SAWTOOTH’ G4 motherboards.
I wonder if the cpu’s will be easily upgradable. I would be awesome to purchase a Mac G4 cpu upgrade form someone like GIGADesigns or powerlogix and slap it on the new amiga mainboard.
It uses a PPC (G3, G4 or dual G4) CPU.
So does this mean I can fit OSX on it?
Using MOL, yes. You’d be braking the EULA but yes you can run
OSX on it.
Can you run OSX natively without “emulation”?
I have no idea.
> So does this mean I can fit OSX on it?
Yes, but currently only hosted on Linux, by using Mac-on-Linux:
http://www.maconlinux.com/
I really want one(ITX Version). Any word when Amiga Inc is gonna give suggest price or shipping date?
itx is a great little platform for not so fast computing. I never expected ppc to come to this, from the link though the price doesn’t come anywhere near the c3 based Via boards $100-$200 which include most common interfaces (not usb2 or fw or sata though). Myself I would like to see agp, sata usb2 and a faster cpu before taking up this form factor.
So for a server or firewall this makes no sense but if it can run MOL or Amiga OS that would be nice.
Yesterday I was talking with Transmeta at the embedded show in Boston. They were showing 3 different itx boards running a celeron, Via C3 v the latest Transmeta. Speeds were in the 800MHz ballpark, they were comparing speeds v power etc. The Transmeta used half the power of the c3 which was half that of the celeron IRC. The Transmeta seemed much faster than the celeron & the c3 was the slowest by far. Sorry no real nos, maybe on their site. What that shows is that more cpu vendors are taking this form factor seriously and the speeds may not be so pokey anymore. Transmeta is doing same as AMD giving out reference boards to anyone who will fab them. They all had the minimal fans on them, the guy cut the fans on them to see the temp go up & the speed go down, the celerons really suffered on that. Of course thats what they are pushing.
On this link you can see what crazy stuff some itx owners get up to packing mobos into old Sun, Clocks, you name it cases etc.
http://www.mini-itx.com/
It’s still a pre production board so I would not make any remarks about features (USB 2.0 & Firewire) yet. 😉 *hint*
> from the link though the price
Prices are yet to be revealed.
However this is intended to become an entry-level solution and will be produced in relative high numbers compared to the current Developer/Poweruser Amigan targeted boards.
This should allow the price of the board to come down significantly.
So for a server or firewall this makes no sense…
No, running an Amiga as a server or filewall wouldn’t make sense. 😉 Although it might make a good DVR…
Speaking of things that don’t make sense, it seems strange that the original AmigaOne’s (ironically a motherboard designed for multimedia) didn’t come with Firewire. So I would expect they will fit it into the production version of the AmigaOne Lite.
So I would expect they will fit [Firewire] into the production version of the AmigaOne Lite.
(if EZ’s hint turns out to be true)
I think there’s a market for small low-power desktop PPC boxes. I’d love to see one of these mini-itx boards in a small box with a nice low-power power supply + alternate 12/24 VDC input. A DVI video port too and I wouldn’t be able to say no.
Did you take a look at the prices on those motherboards?! You could get a complete Apple G4 for some of those prices!
I come from Denmark, and I’d like to now the pricing of those nice little motherboards. I’ve always dreamed about building my own G4-box, instead of buying an Apple computer.
Do you know if these machines are coming to Europe – and Denmark? If not, I’ll have to buy one of those in Germany…
I come from Denmark, and I’d like to now the pricing of those nice little motherboards. I’ve always dreamed about building my own G4-box, instead of buying an Apple computer.
Do you know if these machines are coming to Europe – and Denmark? If not, I’ll have to buy one of those in Germany…
“Do you know if these machines are coming to Europe – and Denmark?”
Eyetech are based in the UK and have various dealers in mainland Europe. I’m not sure about Denmark specifically.
@ Anders Østergård Jensen
> I come from Denmark, and I’d like to now the pricing of
> those nice little motherboard
I am planning to soon interview Eyetech at http://www.amigaworld.net
> Do you know if these machines are coming to Europe – and
> Denmark?
Some AmigaOne Dealers I know about in your “neighbourhood”.
DataKompaniet (Norway) http://www.datakompaniet.no/
GGS-Data (Sweden) http://www.ggsdata.se/
Artista (Germany) http://www.artista-multimedia.de/
KDH Datentechnic (Germany) http://www.kdh-datentechnik.com/
Vesalia Computer (Germany) http://www.vesalia.de/
The Dutch AmigaOne dealer Computer City is organizing a two day Amiga show in Rotterdam for the 4th and 5th of October: http://www.beneluxamigashow.com/
I am also planning to be there. People will be able to see and test AmigaOS4 and the current AmigaOne systems.
The only prices on that site are for the existing A1 boards, which as Mike said are aimed at existing Amigan power users. The A1-lite should be a lot cheaper, as it will be targeted at more people and more will be made.
Well, there’s http://www.kiwimultimedia.dk/ in Frederikssund.
I know nothing about this company, though, but it seems they sell/intend to sell AmigaOnes in some form or other. Not a lot of info on their website, unfortunately.
But if you intend to run OS X on it, that would have to be under emulation (MOL – hosted on Linux), as it’s …. not a Mac … it’s an Amiga, baby!!
The (x86) c3 mini-itx boards do have USB2 in the new epia-m line. In the near future, VIA is planning to upgrade the south-bridge of the chipset to include SATA. And the fastest c3 is at 1ghz now, and has Hardware-mpg2 decoding.
Having a ppc-mini-itx-formfactor will make it more interesting (and profitable) for case-designers to make mini-itx cases, so hopefully prices will go down on those.
“Do you know if these machines are coming to Europe – and Denmark? ”
Well, actually Justin (Juzz) will be selling AmigaOne machines in the near future. You can catch him at http://www.amiga.dk.
… but the joyport is obsolete…
“… but the joyport is obsolete…”
Not if you need MIDI.
So are they ever going to make a more full featured motherboard? One with more than two memory slots, PCi-X/64bit PCI slots, etc? The current motherboards seem very basic.
“So are they ever going to make a more full featured motherboard? One with more than two memory slots, PCi-X/64bit PCI slots, etc? The current motherboards seem very basic.”
No doubt if the currently offered boards are profitable, there will be more versions in the future. It takes time to build up a new range.
Historically, the “lite” Amigas sold far more than the full spec tower models. This MicroITX board looks like a very saleable product for a variety of uses, if the price is right.
> So are they ever going to make a more full featured
> motherboard? One with more than two memory slots,
ROTFL. You need more than 1 Gb RAM already ?