People, this is an interesting thing to follow first-hand. Hyperion, the company behind AmigaOS4, has been talking about its “Most Ambitious Project” for a while now, but on December 31, they started teasing the Amiga community like crazy. They opened a site called a-eon.com, which is most likely about the MAP.
The teaser site has the Amiga community scrambling to find answers. The site gets new clues as time goes by, and so far, it’s quite difficult to make out what, actually, Hyperion is teasing. The thread over at AmigaWorld.net about this subject is mandatory reading material if you’re interested in this, as many possible interpretations and solutions are being discussed.
If you want to take a crack at it yourself, be prepared – this is pretty good stuff. For instance, one of the clues shows an Amiga window with a question mark icon; the background of the window contained what appeared to be random letters and numbers, but when put through a base64 decoder, it contained a hidden message:
What is X, if not a letter,
Perhaps an Omen, or even better?
The main theme so far seems to be the letter X, but there are various other clues which point into the direction of new hardware, and possible SMP support for AmigaOS – which could mean new hardware with multicore processors. That’s just one possible explanation though.
A new clue is supposed to appear within a few hours, so maybe we’ll know more then. I’m posting this here, because maybe us OSNews people can lend a helping hand in decoding this mystery. In any case, I have to hand it to Hyperion – this is class A hype generation right here. We’ll keep you updated.
X, SMP, newer hardware…
I got it, they’re moving on Linux!
It had to be said. If that wasn’t the first comment, I was going to do it myself! 😀
The problem with building up hype in this way is that we’ve been let down so much, the community is going to be very annoyed if this adds up to not very much. Like it normally does. Maybe a few timely successes, and then they can start “teasing” us.
Do a view source on the HTML and you’ll notice a javascript function that would move the user to this:
http://a-eon.com/1.html
😀
I’m hoping for x86/x64.
But I guess I’m hoping for too much. The Amiga-community seems to be to stubborn to drop PowerPC.
Hyperion has all but come out and said that it won’t be x86. They have stuck to their guns over PPC as viable platform. If it is a port to a new architecture, it will be ARM.
It’s new hardware, but there is more to it than just a new motherboard design. We’ll just have to keep piecing their hints together until it becomes apparent.
I think it will be SMP support (drastic change to system).
They can use Power7.
In fact justdots.jpg move me to this conclusion.
But who knows what the costs will be. Well Power7 have gigantic performance, but it could marginalize even more this system.
As I read somewhere IBM is already producing Power7 chips. I also think that Sony can use Power7 in PlayStation4.
Edited 2010-01-02 21:50 UTC
V2hhdCBpc BzIGFuIE9
yBYLCBpZiB tZW4sIG9
ub3QgYSBs yIGV2ZW4
ZXROZXIsD gYmV0dG
QpQZXJoYX VyPw==
Ha, crypto. It looks like base64.
What is X, if not a letNer,
Perhaps an Omen, or even better?
Also guru meditation involves hex coded NEMO, anagram of OMEN. Btw. guru meditation is CPU trap.
I think Power7 theory can be true.
There is also a moment in animation which end, and shows “OM \n EN A \n EON”. A-EON, and again OM-EN.
Another anagam?
M-ONE
EMON
Edited 2010-01-02 22:22 UTC
Sony is indicating that they may switch to Intel (I’m not sure if that includes AMD) from Cell / PPC. The argument is that most coders work in x86, so there lies most of the talent. Cell is also supposed to be PPC-ish, but properly exploiting the SPE’s take some talent. (Regular PPC ported code will just run on the main CPU. The SETI @Home port I saw did this, and was rather slow.) What I don’t understand about this argument is, the PS1 and PS2 were Mips, the Game Cube and Wii were / are PPC (I think the cube Gecko was G3, and the Wii is low end G5), and the old XBox used an Intel Celeron, but XBox Pro uses three G5 cores. So, if all the game design talent for consoles is in x86, well, the XBox Pro, entire PS line, and everything Nintendo must really suck… Can’t see how they survived. Another argument is hardware cost and availability.
I doubt the PS4 will use Power7 chips. They are huge, and as I understand it, hot. They are designed for supercomputers and high end servers, where industrial cooling is expected. Now, they might re-cast a core that is scaled down using 45 or 32nm transistors, but I can’t see IBM making a specialty core that is primarily used only in a gaming console… oh… wait….
http://a-eon.com/4.html
http://a-eon.com/gfx/justadot.png
Yes, and A-eon is a Belgian company set up by, among others, people from Hyperion
(see AW thread).
I think it is pretty safe now to say that Hyperion will become a hardware company. If indeed true, this is very big news – Hyperion, the new Apple.
Very exciting.
I’m sure that whatever this ends up being will be a misguided and laughable effort, much like everything that any amiga related company or its community has done for the last ten years.
Feel free to down mod this but do expect a fat nice “told you” with a link to this post once the revelation comes.
As much as I don’t want to admit it, I have to agree with you. Hyperion stubbornly clings to the PPC architecture in spite of the fact that the PPC boat sailed a long time ago……and it sank too by the way. Now their supporters and even Hyperion hints that they’ll use ARM processors in their next “project”. For a niche OS, that’s about as short sighted as using a 6502 processor. And porting OS4 to MacMinis just prolongs the inevitable. The hardcore Amiga supporters will continue to bicker and to waste time and money to run a terribly outdated OS on dead-end hardware. And the ones with any common sense will move on.
Mac OS X sits on top of BSD.
OS4 will be made to run hosted on top of BSD and run sandboxed like OS 9 did in Classic mode for OSX.
Basically what the same as what the Q/Box was planned to do for MorphOS.
edit: AROS has been available in a hosted version for years.
Edited 2010-01-02 15:45 UTC
Have you even looked at the clues? They’ve set up a new hardware company called A-EON as is evidenced by the picture of a new circuit board http://a-eon.com/gfx/justadot.png as AmiKit pointed out just a few posts back. It says something about AmigaOne on it.
BTW, the BSD/Linux attempt at making a substitute for AmigaOS using hosted AROS as a sandbox is called AnubisOS. See http://anubis-os.org/home/ for a few scant details on that project.
AROS hosted and Anubis are two very different beasts.
AROS hosted isn’t vapourware for one thing.
Mac OS X is not based on BSD. Is based on XNU. It just expose the BSD userland. Is the same as Be-OS exposes GNU userland (like Bash, gcc), but is not based on GNU Hurd or GNU Linux.
Is similar with Cygwin that expose Linux (Unix) userland on Windows so you can program with pipes, pthreads and behaving as a complete different operating system (NT Kernel).
Edited 2010-01-02 17:26 UTC
When dealing with the OS4 community, keeping it simple is highly recommend in my experience.
It is based partly on BSD. XNU is a combination of the Mach kernel, plus parts of 4.3BSD.
Yes, BSD in which way? As userland? Or as kernel locking and memory allocation policy? If you write a program that runs on BSD, this program will not work on OS X because the binaries are different format (ELF against FatELF). The work only as API. So writing a program that will compile on FreeBSD (or any Posix BSD), will work unmodified on OS X. The calls are translated in OS X XNU kernel semantics that may be different.
When you link to cygwin DLL, and you make your programs on Windows, calling pipe function will end by calling a CreatePipe Win32 API function. The Cygwin is the best equivalent that I know that explains fairly well this.
Also, if you will look on BeOS (given in the previous post), BeOS was not an UNIX operating system, but exposed a lot of Unix functionality. (in fact BeOS do not use the concept of runlevel, but it have more servers – or kits – that run to expose functionality that run their OS).
OS X isn’t FatELF, either; it uses Mach-O. Binary compatibility (or lack thereof) has little to do with OS X being or not being BSD.
Indeed, BSD doesn’t use ELF universally. BSD certainly didn’t use ELF before ELF was created, and modern BSDs on some platforms still use a.out, it seems.
I don’t think you’ll be able to run binaries between different BSD-derived operating systems today, and not between different architectures either.
No, the UNIX/BSD/POSIX syscalls are handled directly be Xnu, it seems. See /usr/include/sys/syscall.h on an OS X system.
This is how Cygwin works, but that isn’t because it’s the only way to implement a Unix-like API on Windows. Microsoft itself offers a POSIX implementation via Services for UNIX/Subsystem for UNIX Applications. POSIX becomes a NT subsystem at the same level as Win32. Both Win32 and POSIX calls are implemented as NT kernel calls.
Why it is hard for some people to understand that Mac OS X is not an operating system. It’s a name for a distribution like “Windows 2000”, “Windows Vista” or “Fedora”, “Ubuntu”.
Actual operating system inside this “Mac OS X” distribution is called “Darwin BSD”. Like “Windows Seven” is actually “Windows NT 6.1”. Or how “Ubuntu” is “GNU/Linux”.
Why it’s called Darwin BSD then? Because it’s direct relative of 386-BSD UNIX! Of course it was outdated after Apple accuired NextStep from NeXt so they updated it with latest stuff from open source community. Namely FreeBSD and GNU blocks where used to update it. They also added lots of their own stuff.
Darwin BSD’s kernel carries the name “XNU”. Like “Gnu/Linux”‘s kernel is “Linux” or how “Windows NT”‘s kernel is “NTKRNLSRV”/”MinWin”…
Off topic, but I look at it differently. The operating system is the whole, and is composed of many parts. To take your example, Mac OS X, Ubuntu, Fedora, etc would be the operating systems. Darwin, and Linux in the case of the others, is the kernel of the os, it is the central core component. I don’t buy into the whole distribution mentality of the Linux oses, each system is an os compatible on the source level but typically not at the binary level due to different kernel/library versions and compile-time decisions, not to mention packaging. To use your other example, Windows 7 is an os while Windows NT is the kernel. Microsoft did call its os Windows NT, but they’ve since changed naming schemes. NT was still the kernel, even in those days. Microsoft just used the same name for simplicity’s sake and to differentiate it from Windows 3.1 and later 9x which were still built on top of DOS.
Hi all I just registered on OSNews. I’ve been reading it for several years now, like 5-6 years. Even longer think ._.
anyway about the clues…
http://a-eon.com/gfx/puzzle3rd.png
http://a-eon.com/gfx/puzzle4th.png
http://a-eon.com/gfx/puzzle5th.png
I guess we will know everything on 5th? Since since there is no puzzle6th.png
But I wanted to ask something someone for a long time and I do not have a friendly Amiga Guru nearby. What’s so special about Amiga? It seems to me like it’s followers are borderline fanatics that refuse to let Amiga die, And it looks quite dead to me for a long time now
Why is it that we hear stories about it from time to time yet it looks pretty clear to me that there will never be anything usable from Amiga platform. I know ppl. used to praise Amiga PCs for their superior multimedia capabilities and the reasons why is it used by 3d modelers and I think maybe D.J’s? But that was ages ago. So why is it still alive? Where do these companies find profit? Who buys this stuff… there can not be so many die hard amiga fans to yield them any profit.
*runs away from arrows and stones*
The company netflix had an open contest – the ones that presents then with the best performing algorithm (e.g “you might also like …” etc) would get $1’000’000. Anyway, one of the better algorithms noticed that people tend to vote higher on older movies.
I think this is the case here. The Amiga was fun. And as time goes by, this nostalgia effect just increases. I think it’s about the dream that computing is once again really fun. But I think it will stay a dream, regardless of what computer is presented to us.
Because software naturally rose tints as it ages.
opposed to every other piece of hardware and software you can think of, the amiga actually provided the rose tinted experience out of the box that no other piece of hardware has ever managed to get close to- it doesnt need a nostalgic hindsight, just fond memories of what it actually was. pretty much the bodily incarnation of “when computing was fun”
In the Amiga’s case, “doesn’t lose its lustre” would be more accurate.
I am not one of those fanatics… any longer… But some examples:
* Very snappy and responsive system, fast boot and no lag UI.
* Data types – Install a Data Type (file format description / driver) and all applications that support Data Types can read the new file format.
* AREXX ports in lots of applications, you could script almost any application.
I think we will have next message faster than 5/6th Jan.
Why? look at alt of this puzzle, it says “More on Jan 3rd”. So we will have some additional hints. It is already 3rd here, where it is?
Sometimes a computer/userbase are not ready to lie down and die. The Amiga line of computers created a great momentum and became a true phenomenon in the computer scene. With it’s many clever approaches both in hardware and software, the Amiga made history in so many ways, that it was unforgivingly the way the owners treated it, and ultimately sent it to certain death in 1994.
The users were NOT READY to lie down and die, and kept hoping for some other company to come along and continue the fantastic ride the Amiga had given them. But sadly hard times was ahead, and it’s first today the Amiga starts living again with AmigaOS 4.0 and new PPC hardware.
So to the people out there who thinks the Amiga history should end now…forget it! – Even the smallest companies can sometime make a difference!
LONG LIVE THE AMIGA!
May it live long and prosper…..it truely deserves it
Edited 2010-01-02 20:02 UTC
Let’s have a competition everyone. How many cheesy taglines from famous movies can you spot here?
Lord of the Rings: The fellowship of the ring and Star Trek (any of 1-6) are too obvious and out of the competition.
AROS looks promising to me. I think that’s AmigaOS future. Well, at least I hope so, since I hate to depend on companies.
AROS is a separate thing that likely will grow to be more and more usable .. Just like Haiku etc.. Haiku is in some ways superior , I read the news a couple of days earlier about Qt4 for example .. AROS target really IS AmigaOS3.1 on x86. And when that is perfect, it might even go beyond that..
It’s not true that no new features are being added to AROS until the AmigaOS 3.1 API is completely reproduced. AROS already has SDL and an (incomplete) GTK API for example.
Cool ! 😀
I guess they will introduce a STB powered by OS4, whether based on PowerPC or ARM will be seen in a few days.
STB was confirmed not to be the mysterious item..
I like today’s hint; OM ENIGMA EON and the letters A, M, I, G disappear in order.
Odd that they didn’t have another A in there.
I bought AmigaOne from Eyetech six years ago and it was POS. OS4 on it crashed every five mins and the mobo had so many bugs and flaws it was not even funny. I wrote to Amiga support forum describing my problems and I got instantly banned. Few days later I got an email from another member and he said problems I told are normal and gave me instructions how to solder needed parts myself.
After years of buggy hardware called AmigaOne and underperforming hardware called the SAM440 series, any new hardware would be a welcome site.
Im really glad in retrospect I didnt hop on that AmigaONE train 🙁 I keep hoping there always is something better on the horizon so I hold out .. Been considering a SAMiga but until there is somekind of AGA emu in the FPGA I dont want it … Classic is my main interest, day to day computing I do on PCs with XP or Linux .. What would rock is a simple ECS/AGA emu in an FPGA on a PCI card. Or wasnt there an FPGA on the Sam mobo ?? I heard such in the early days but Ive never heard any plans to exploit it for anything ! Eck! I hope CloneA from Jens Schoenfeld soon happens !
http://www.jschoenfeld.com/news/news119_e.htm
Edited 2010-01-03 05:29 UTC
You do realize that since the first and last public demonstration of CloneA was in 2006 (or was it Breakpoint 2007?), we won’t see anything of it anymore? Jens is great when it comes to hardware, but he has a serious reality problem when it comes to business marketing. He expected to get major $$$ for CloneA, but I guess that after reality hit, he just ditched it.
Oh .. Ive been hoping for CloneA for some time ..
I did hear that some AGA patents would expire in 2010 and though that was the reason for the delay .. ?
I cant imagine anyone expecting to get $$$ in the Amiga market though …….. !!
Heh, haven’t we all
.
I don’t think so, as it’s completely reverse engineered. Also, Jens hasn’t mentioned patent problems except for the software.
Indeed. Jens did though.
But why would he bury CloneA and still support MiniMig on the C-ONE if he already had something better I mean .. ?
Edited 2010-01-05 05:57 UTC
Your guess is as good as mine…
Hahaha, I didn’t see that bit.
In this day and age the smallest GPU you can find in any mobile phone would have been the stuff of science fiction in the days when AGA had any relevance. Who could possibly care about any AGA related patent short of an historian?
But Amiga OS 4.x 6 years ago was very much in beta stage!
Now Amiga OS 4.1 runs fast and smothly on my SAM 440ep flex
with compositing engine I drag/move my windows more smothly than ever with transperance on windows also.
My SAM 440ep flex 733MHZ outperformance my AMD Athlon x64 dual 2 ghz in Daily uses= Email, surfing web, listening music, radio look divx movies. My SAM is much much more responsive than any WinCrap machine out there in world. And thats TRUE!
PS: not because of SAM440 hardware but because OF GENUINE reincarnation av AMIGA OS to PPC architecture.
SIMPLE Because of AMIGA OS 4.1
Edited 2010-01-03 10:39 UTC
And if that same efficient OS was running on your 2ghz Athlon, how would it perform compared to the 733mhz G4?
For general day to day interactivity, the OS can make things far more responsive and usable, but for processor bound tasks the OS isn’t the bottleneck… How will your G4 handle decoding of 1080p video for instance?
Whatever Hyperion is up to, I very much hope they follow through. The Amiga community has been teased and jerked around going all the way back to the AAA chipset during Commodore days. They deserve something real.
Apart from appealling to the diminihing crowd of die-hards (used to be one of them once upon a time), any new HW needs to serve a wider purpose if its going to be a success. An ARM-based, mobile device might be worthwhile, but overall, I’m having a very hard time seeing any business plan, and thus sustainability. Hopefully Hyperion can prove me wrong, but I’ve seen waaaaaaaay too many “new” Amigas go the way of the Dodo…
Intel/AMD X86 processors. Please! And they start selling it like bread. At least I would buy a copy of AOS4 for X86 no matter how much the price would be.
I doubt it’s intel. Take a look at this and see what you think:
http://a-eon.com/4.html
Also, what do you think are behind the two black boxes? One of them is almost certainly a CPU but what is the other? It looks like they’re doing a survey as you can click on the question marks and take guess for yourself.
Edited 2010-01-03 11:27 UTC
From the javascript on page four (http://a-eon.com/4.js), it appears that the hardware will have:
A Power architecture CPU – any one of (titan|e600|8641D|8640D|QorIQ|P2020|p4080|pa6t|970mp|83290|pwrficient)
And a custom chip going by the name of ‘Xena’
Edited 2010-01-03 12:41 UTC
THIS IS FANTASTIC NEWS!!
After all the broken promises the Amiga/users have been going through, this is truely deserved! Not many users of a system have have shown the same loyalty, as the Amiga users have.
It’s SIXTEEN YEARS!! they waited and kept beliving.
They TRUELY deserve a new Amiga computer, with a great operating system….and it seems like they are getting it now 16 years later…..yihaa!!
Hope some of you jump onto the wagon….cause it’s gonna be insanely FUN from now on.
Yeah you can get x86 hardware/windows/linux/mac/tons of applications much cheaper…but you can’t get the feeling of being part of a NEW ADVENTURE!! where lots of things needs to be invented, and the users are humble and happy for even the tinyest piece of software.
You should try to be part of such a community…..IT’S GREAT!!! (I never have this feeling with windows because theres thousands of apps doing the same thing)
But on the amiga it’s truely appreciated when new software are released.
DAMN!! THIS IS REALLY GOOD NEWS…..PLEASE LET US HAVE THIS PARTY!!
AND YOU’RE INVITED TOO!!! (MONEY IS NOT A MATTER, IF THE PARTY IS FUN!!)
Edited 2010-01-03 12:52 UTC
I suspect that those who might not have enough money to join the party would disagree with you there. Still, it’s a bit early to bring price into it. We don’t even know what the new machine is, let alone what it’ll cost. Amiga hardware has been expensive in the past, but for all we know that might not be the case with this new development… if, that is, there is actually anything to it.
Well, isn’t that… irrational? Yes, I could buy 5 Amigas, but why would I when I could buy 5 PCs instead? I get that it’s fun having a platform that isn’t mature and every little development is welcome, but I, for one, get plenty of that from Haiku. And it’s free.
I just think Hyperion and the Amiga community should try to make Amiga a platform someone wants to buy because it’s amazing, not because it’s so incomplete that you cheer at every piece of software that is released.
*ducks*
Edited 2010-01-03 14:35 UTC
They waited sixteen years for this? Did they spend the last sixteen years in a collective coma?
I never said the 16 years was easy did I 😉
Nobody waited. We just had hard times. We’ve continued to have fun, though.
Things have been improved slowly but with few people having courage and not afraid by a huge amount of work, we have great results now : AmigaOS 4, MorphOS 2, Sam440, … and much more. I am not sure that people who criticizes here has a good idea of Amiga systems and apps.
With the level of comments like yours, as you talk about coma, it seems that your brain activity is not much greater.
Morb : You use to do that each time you post in an Amiga related thread but this is not fair to vomit on the Amiga you loved. Your scornful posts are really poor …
Or maybe they just have a different (less tinted?) view of events in those 16 years, personally I’ve been an active user for more than 20 years now.
I’m not “vomiting” on the amiga I loved. The amiga I loved existed around 15 years ago and belongs to history.
What I’m “vomiting” upon are the backward things that collectively go by the amiga name nowadays, which consist of several disparate OSes whose defining features seem to be:
– running exclusively on stupid overpriced and unobtainable hardware (well except AROS. Since they run on x86 and are open source they probably represent the less stupid amiga os reimplemetation effort of the three). The PPC lost the desktop, get over it already.
– clinging on outdated concepts and middlewares from the ancient ages, like MUI or the likes. Those things were cutting edge back in 1994. Nowadays everything else (Qt, gtk, you name it) is light-years ahead, but the amiga community suffers from such an acute “not invented here” syndrom that it’s downright scary.
What does amiga os does that’s so useful that it can justify all this except being obsolete and seldom running any modern application?
I do realize that I’m not being nice. But it’s also something I learned since the days I was in the amiga community, being so nice that you’re not willing to point out how much something actually sucks is counter-productive.
Edited 2010-01-04 10:22 UTC
MORB
I’m disappointed to read that from you…
Seems you were assimilated.
You choose really poor examples… GTK has one of the most retarded API ever, and it’s a shame it’s actually that used. MUI is way more advanced than GTK (as well as many other toolkits). QT is at least better than Gtk, but its strong C++ dependancy makes it inappropriate sometimes too (but it’s not breaindead, at least) .
But I guess you just forgot all the nice concepts from AmigaOS, that were extended in AmigaOS, MorphOS or AROS.
Many things in the original AmigaOS API are problematic for its evolution if compatibility has to be kept (peeking/poking some shared system structures, for instance), but on the other hand, this API was far from being braindead at all. Think about taglists, for example… How comes it hasn’t been used anywhere else? Instead you find stupid stuff like in gtk with a function for every single action, like gtk_create_button_with_red_colour_and_black_outline_and_do_that_when_p ressing_it_and_dont_forget_to_buy_bread_thank_you() instead (pun intended).
Anyway, have fun with boring OS if you want.
Edited 2010-01-05 04:21 UTC
Interesting statement. By whom would that be? Note that I never mentioned any specific OS in what I wrote. That’s because it applies equally to all modern desktop OSes (Linux, windows, MacOS).
Please expand on this, it ought to be good.
Being C++ based makes it a far better choice than anything based on a C api. Doing object oriented code in C is like digging a tunnel with a fork. It can be done, but it makes no sense. And no, I’m not fond of gtk for this reason but MUI doesn’t even compare to it nonetheless.
Anyway, what would being C++ make Qt inappropriate for? C++ works wherever C does.
Which ones? There’s absolutely no nice concept from amigaos or any of its successors that haven’t been done equally well or better in modern OSes.
Perhaps because there are better ways to solve the same problems? Taglists are unwieldy, they require parsing, they require a messy numbering scheme for tag ids and it’s more elegant to use overloaded functions and/or objects properties to solve whatever problems taglists were used to solve.
Taglists were essentially a way to get around the limitations of C. But doing object-oriented programming in C in the first place is the problem.
Sure, back in the stone age when C++ compilers were hard to come by perhaps doing OO in C was necessary, but there’s no use clinging to that practice or any of the ancillary techniques such as taglists used to make the whole thing less unbearable.
Yeah, that’s what happens when you do object oriented programming in a procedural language like C. As I said, it’s like digging a tunnel with a fork, but taglists aren’t better. They are like digging a tunnel with a spoon.
How cute. You still believe that the fun comes from the OS rather than what you do with it, or develop on top of it.
Edited 2010-01-05 10:34 UTC
Who’s to say this latest news is not just the start of another “broken promise” ?
From the AW thread, a new find:
http://a-eon.com/gfx/hidden.png
Most-certainly dual-core. Rogue/TrevorD confirmed it WILL be PowerPC. This inevitably means they’ve added SMP to AOS4.
That is most likely from Linux, but perhaps they are planning to add some form of SMP…
From Linux?
Are you familiar with AmigaOS?
Eh… Yes?
*looks at the AmigaOS 4.1 machine in his living room*
Edited 2010-01-03 15:53 UTC
Well that screenshot is obviously from Linux running on the board, not AmigaOS. I’m not very familiar with AmigaOS 4.x but as far as I know you don’t have top on it (well, if you installed executive you have it, but I don’t think it’s available for 4.x). And even if you had it – it would probably have been run in a standard shell with the default Amiga gray background, not black.
But if SMP-support for OS4 is not ready yet, I’m sure it’s something they are working on to have ready by the time the board is shipping…
There is an Amiga port of top.
From http://a-eon.com/5.html page source:
> Did you spot the xorro slot?
http://a-eon.com/4.html
I will admit that this is really interesting news; but right now it’s not for me. When I was a kid my A1200 was a revolution for me.
I remember my Dad forbidding any games until I could understand a simple Hello World assembly application. I have yet to thank him for that
But this is no revolution on that scale, this is no mind awakening experience, this is not my childhood therefore it is not Amiga.
—
Okay so I may not really believe this (I am pretty excited by this news and was recently considering a Sam440ep-flex.) But isn’t this the underlying problem with any new Amiga product? It will never live up to our childhood experiences … but wouldn’t it be great if it was?
Have a look at http://www.a-eon.com/5.html and you’ll read…
Maybe it’s an new reconfigurable system like the C-One (http://www.c64upgra.de/c-one/) but in more modern way?
First post here!
The CPU / RAM configuration looked familiar, and I think I’ve seen it twice. I can’t find pictures to back this up, so some may protest this post but…
The first was a Godson / Loongson 2F motherboard, which is that new super-secret-mystery Chinese CPU. (OK, not too secret, just difficult to acquire.) It could be Godson 2F or 3, but that would mean porting all of the Amiga work from PPC to MIPS. That would be a lot of work, but, it would position Hyperion to become China’s new Apple.
The second was a next generation Beagle Board. And, coincidentally, about a month or two ago the Summer Follies Beagle Board web site went down. I think this was an Italian company.
Now, looking at the logistics between the two, the first is that Hyperion has either ported the post-modern Amiga code to a completely different processor architecture for a processor that China has promised will be really good “any time now”. The second is that one small-ish European company bought a second smaller company which distributed the first (and poised for second) generation of the hardware they already use. The second is far more likely.
Also, the motherboard does not seem to have much set up for a heat sync. This is similar to the Beagle Board, though I think the Godsons use passive cooling as well.
Someone mentioned Power 7 chips. If that was the case, the motherboard would be huge. Right now, PPC7 chips are sold for supercomputers, and are made in four-chip, well, “bricks”. They look like a huge ceramic brick, and the heat sync sits on top. IBM would have to make a smaller single-chip processor, and they abandoned the desktop market shortly after Apple dropped the PPC G5.
Personally, I’d love to see a Cell CPU on it. The Cell PS3 has done an amazing amount of data crunching for Folding@Home. (Yes, I’m a Folder / BOINC’er.) I think a next gen Beagle is it, though.
I has been confirmed already that a ppc will be used as main processor. Only teh actual model is not resolved, best bet still is PA 1682 so far (however they managed to get hold of them).
Amiga was cool, Amiga were special PC and could do many things IBM PC – Apple Mac could not do. Those were the good days of the Amiga and Commodore did nothing with it.
Even if you are a hard core Amiga Fan, every single computer sold today is able to do everything and much much more than any Amiga could do. And it’s cheap.
We have Ghz and multiple core at hand and GPU that are becoming more powerful than CPU. We have Windows 7, countless flavors of Linux and Mac OS.
What could Hyperion bring to the table that would be so eXtraordinary to the aging Amiga? And at what price? It’s a nice market and the price tag reflect that in a huge way. Only Fan are ready to open their wallet and buy new Amiga stuff, they are not getting any new customers at those price.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s always exciting to see new stuff, but the Amiga is not getting any younger. It somewhat live in the past.
It looks like one of the puzzles hidden in the comments of the 5.html and 6.html files is the transputer chips from XMOS (formerly InMOS).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer
The CPU is confirmed as a dual-core PowerPC CPU also even though it never appeared in the picture of the motherboard. The clue for that was supposed to be tomorrow’s clue but somebody found it early.
Well we now know that the next Amiga is a full computer (not just a mobo) and that it has taken the concept of “Heterogeneous Computing” at heart (far more than other platforms).
Thanks to the XCORE and XORRO up to 102000 mips can be generated with parallelism inherited from Transputers but without their limitations.
Add to this the possibility to a add a latest generation video card (RadeonHD drivers are in the works and progressing steadily) over PCI-E 16X and all the power you can get from it through OpenCL, and you have great overall potential there.
Certainly good to see some new developments (or is someone here ultra happy with monopoly instead? May the good golden days of the 80s return I say 😉 )
Don’t forget nVidia and a few CUDA cards. I noticed the three PCIEx16 slots also, and that was my first thought. I wonder if nVidia or ATI/AMD will ever release a “short” PCI card that’s a “supplemental” video co-processor.