Submitted by The interview details, among many other things, the follow up to the AmigaOne X1000: “The Cyrus development is the future replacement for the Nemo motherboard when the supply of P.A. Semi CPUs finally dries up or the price becomes commercially unviable. The Cyrus board was the original Revision 1.0 prototype and was completed towards the end of last year. Cyrus Plus is the Revision 2.0 board which includes additional PCIe and PCI slots. The Cyrus design is based on the Freescale P5020 CPU which is a dual-core 64-bit PowerPC SoC. It also supports DDR3 RAM and includes an improved Xena/Xorro combination.” Crazy powerful hardware for an operating system that doesn’t even support any for of SMP. I admire the hardware they’ve been able to build and sell, but the real issue is, of course, AmigaOS itself – touch-ups, sure, but it’s still heavily outdated in almost every aspect and can’t really make much use of the powerful hardware it is given.
Via http://www.osnews.com/thread?568343
These beasts have maximum parallelization for minimum power consumption. Guess what’s the OS used ?
This new Cyrus board just deserves something similar. Provided the specs are full open.
Kochise
I was an Amiga die-hard back in the day, and even developed products for it.
But generalization eventually wins over specialization. Eventually generic hardware catches up with highly specialized hardware. Software eventually starts doing jobs we had hardware do.
The Amiga architecture was brilliant, for a NTSC/PAL world. But the hardware and software was so tied to technology it was connecting to that it constrained progress. It wasn’t long before the Amiga lost its advantage and then had to drag it around behind them.
There was a time when a lot of us thought PowerPC was the future. Intel rested on its laurels for far too long and was losing ground. But the sleeping giant woke up and got it’s house in order. Now x86 rules the waves (not sure what happened to my metaphor there
…
And PowerPC is sliding behind. It has advantages in the embedded world (though I generally pick ARM over PowerPC for that kind of high end embedded). It definitely has some plusses in the world of multi-core servers; but it is a bad platform for the desktop these days.
And it was a huge mistake not to do the extra work and make AmigaOS fully portable, instead of just typing it to the 680X0 and PowerPC platforms.
The AmigaOne X1000 is a very expensive system that doesn’t perform well at all. XMOS is an interesting technology, but I still have yet to see anyone exploit it well. Nor can they seem to make them with any kind of regularity.
x86 wouldn’t have saved the Amiga, its day really came and went. But I think it would be having a better (semi) retirement if it could run on commodity hardware.
I’m not sure I’d say PowerPC/POWER is a *bad* platform for desktop, it’s just too expensive really. POWER7 is an outstanding processor with fast single core and multicore performance, just to get one brand new, you’re looking at $6000 minimum.
PowerPC is DEAD outside of obscure, super high-end IBM stuff.
I assume you heard about AROS…
(but good points generally; sometimes I try to make similar ones, just less eloquently)
I have been reading recently that OS4 OpenLinux, http://www.os4online.com , is doing things for the Amiga community and are porting their Linux distribution to Mac and Amiga hardware. Personally, to me I think in terms of ease of use OS4 reminds me more of the AmigaOS. Since the AmigaOS is so outdated maybe its time for those guys to rally behind Linux. If the OS4 team and Aeon were to team up and develop a good integrated distribution maybe the doors will open up for this type of system. As for the Amiga. Its days are done and to keep going the AmigaOS route all they are doing is making a OS and hardware just for themselves and 20 other people to use.
you might want to disclose who you are, seth. yeah, ‘reading recently,’ huh? lol.
Actually I dont know a Seth, my name is Scott.
OS4 OpenLinux doesn’t seem to support the X1000. so – no, I won’t be rallying for that.
I have an AmigaOne 500 with a 2TB black WD drive, Esi Juli@xte sound card running AmigaOS 4.6. I love it, and being a long time Amiga user, things could not be better.
For the longest time, I never thought this day would come. We have hardware that is being made, our os is being updated and handle by people that actually like it. I thought this day would never get here considering all the obstacles Amiga faced.
I work as an IT and I repair alot of the “modern” operating systems, and you know what, I prefer AmigaOS an the control and freedom I have using it. Sometimes I don’t want to have another head banging session with the latest incarnation of Windows.
Live and let live. I don’t know why people are so hard on the AmigaOne/AmigaOS. Every comment here is so negative. Look, you don’t like it, don’t buy one, but I can say, things have never looked better.
back in the day when amiga was popular its main feature was hardware acceleration which allowed multimedia software to work on it and that was its killer use but today what amiga was able to back then today even cheapest of the pcs with intel integrated graphics chip and cheapest of ARMs SOCs are able to do so the unique feature of amiga is long gone …
relating to OS4 and Amiga One Systems basic disadvantage they have is they are too expensive why i wanna spend 1000$ to buy a system which could run outdated software if i could spend same amount of money to buy the most powerful of Windows,Mac and Linux laptops and tablets available in market.
2ndly amiga role as an alternate systems to Macs and Windows PCs is also long gone since the arrival of linux and freebsd Operating Sysyems which are totally free and which provide a large repository of software although not comparable to windows and mac but largest after them with both OS’s supporting most modern hardware
Problem is there isn’t any killer application or killer use of amiga derivatives today.
if there is any hope for this platform then that hope is AROS which could run on X86 and could run hosted under linux on ARM but it to is plagued with the very same problems other amiga derivatives are only advantage it gives is that its free and it could run on commodity hardware .
Only way for Amiga OS4 to survive today is to release the source code of OS3 and OS4 with open source license or go in the direction where RISC OS for castle technology is going by releasing it code with shared licence and porting it to platforms like Raspberry PI and BeagleBoard otherwise in years to come the dying platform will completely die
Edited 2013-07-31 08:41 UTC
Thats because the Amiga platform has been neglected and no one cares about it anymore. The AmigaOS is so old and so outdated it could never be made to run on commodity hardware. Open Sourcing the amigaOS wouldnt do anything because it was written in a time where modern features werent even invented yet so its kind of a moot point. AmigaOS is dead, and with the 10/15 people that still run it, you are spending money on hardware that you cant hope that will run the software. If they can even get it to run on said hardware.
yes that is what i meant . by open sourcing i meant that at lest then OS4 would have some future when parts of it are upgraded by the community and it is ported to other commodity processors like ARM socs and Intel ….
what Castle Technology is doing for their RISC OS is the only way for OS4 to survive . atlest by sort of open sourcing the OS and porting it to systems like beagleboard and raspberry pi although they do have the advantage of the processor but even the platform is surviving to some extent unlike other fork of RISC OS by pace micro which is almost dead.
also open sourcing OS3 will help it being ported to systems which are based on modern Motorola 68K processers
Edited 2013-07-31 10:39 UTC
AROS for x86 exists, you know. It’s missing PAE and SMP and the filesystem can’t handle more than about 256GB… but once the Raspberry Pi port is finished that shouldn’t matter.
What a load of crap. OS4 does support commodity hardware – everything except the PPC motherboard itself.
You have a choice of USB keyboards, mice and other devices.
You have a choice of Radeon graphic cards.
You have a choice of sound cards.
You have a choice of disk drives or SSD drives.
You have a choice of monitors.
You have a choice of scanners.
Yes, AROS!
The easiest way to turn your x86 super computer into a raspberry pi. Everyone wants that.
and that is the only way amiga platform could survive in my opnion via the route of AROS otherwise its other derivatives are doomed
Since 1985, everyone wanted Amiga to be DEAD!.. But guess what?.. Amiga spirit is sooo alive.. but you people just ignores this soo much it hurts.. I HATE PC users who blame AmigaOS with nonsense, who blame that AmigaOS is so outdated.. I HATE Mac users which thinks that their os is soo much better than anything else.. but the FACT is that both Windows and OSX would DIE if the companies died. Amiga is a LIVING proof, that it is dedicated users that matters.
Amiga Community create its own Hardware, its own OS and its own programs. Were just different! We love our computers and operating systems (AmigaOS4, AROS and MorphOS). We have companies STILL making hardware for Classic Amiga 1200 and Amiga 4000. We have programs that just outperforms everything else out there.
Ohh.. and while Windows and OSX users makes their OS’s slower and slower… People criticize that AmigaOS needs to be booted because lack of SMP??? I rather want to be able to boot 5 seconds, than live in pain with slowness!
Stop spreading false info about AMIGA Thom!.. You seem to ignore Amiga community out of sudden. What happened to you? MorphOS etc use of old ppc macs is what I call optimizing!…
I NEVER SEEN my iBook G4 actually be sooo fast in my whole life. People comments it as a dual core i7 3GHz PC. And my iBook G4 is friggin 1.33GHz with only 1GB of RAM.
The purpose of AmigaOS is the fact it outperforms ANYTHING out there, but the PC world is a bunch of ignorant people (except for few)!!! AmigaOS doesn’t need SMP or dual core support.. its already 30-40 times faster than any OS on the very same hardware.
I have 1x iMac i7, 1x MacBook Pro Retina, 1x MacMini G4, 1x iBook G4 and 1x PowerBook G4. I have a PC also! I also have PS3 etc+++ but to be honest. Amiga RULEZ! You can say as much you want, but what pisses of Amiga users, is the all untrue bashing about AmigaOS. That way, Amiga just gets stronger and we show what a true creative computer user is. Soon Viva Amiga documentary will be released, so the world will know. I am tired of the ignorant PC world. I am tired of trying to fight and tell people why Amiga is so great. Its hard to convice people that Dreamcast was a better console than PS2 also. I will fight until the end. Not because I want Amiga to win, but because the truth about computing history should come out somewhere, and I feel its my responsibility that you and I know this.
Thanks for reading!
And don’t forget about lack of memory protection (hence proper multitasking) and frequent Guru Meditation errors…
And that vast majority of Amiga users moved to modern platforms, Windows and OSX (out of millions only few thousand remain, who are willing to be ripped off by Amiga companies)
And how Amiga OSes are fast at not doing much.
There’s also Amithlon …if it weren’t killed by Amiga companies, it would be probably by far the fastest Amiga now, thanks to PC hardware.
Edited 2013-08-07 00:00 UTC