PPC Amiga is just more typical Amiga crazy.

For OS/2, the new company still doesn't have the source code - it's just a packaging of the last IBM release, with their drivers and binary patches around it.

I can't tell who is crazier though: Amiga true believers, or OS/2 true believers? OS/2 still has use in ATM machines, so I'm leaning Amiga.

I'll give a damn about "modern" Amigas when they pull an Apple and go x86.

I'd be interested in a PPC amiga if it was actually affordable. The current ones are so insanely pricey it's not even funny!

As for the OS/2 update I am not sure what to think of it, I mean yeah it's cool that it will be modernized but with linux as big as it is right now then what's the point?

alexanrs wrote:

I'll give a damn about "modern" Amigas when they pull an Apple and go x86.

They should have done it 20 years ago. Pragmatism is why Apple is so big today.

Now if they could get the new Amiga to run the new OS/2, then I'd be impressed.

It runs Linux GREAT!! but will it provide any performance advantage over say a crappy P4? Probably not.
The OS/2 guys seemed to be trying to set an achievable goal. Time will tell.

Nice to see a eComStation successor.

Caluser2000 wrote:

It runs Linux GREAT!! but will it provide any performance advantage over say a crappy P4? Probably not.
The OS/2 guys seemed to be trying to set an achievable goal. Time will tell.

Yeah I tend to agree, other than the novelty of having a PPC computer in 2015 with the Amiga branding there really is no reason to want one of these computers. There is much more software available on Linux and Windows then there is on AmigaOS 4.0 and since it's all proprietary hardware developing software for it is going to still be very niche.

I wonder if this new licensing agreement means that eComstation is dead.

The source code to OS/2 is unlikely to be released - there's too much third party code in there. Part of the source code might be available - I don't know.

The question really is what useful enhancements they'll provide, at the moment OS/2 doesn't even have a properly integrated up to date web browser. I would suspect the reason eCS hasn't moved forward quickly, is because the revenue for new OS/2 licenses is practically zero.

As to Amiga, I suspect 'fast' means 'fast compared to past Amigas' instead of 'vaguely comparable to a slow Powermac'

ynari wrote:

As to Amiga, I suspect 'fast' means 'fast compared to past Amigas' instead of 'vaguely comparable to a slow Powermac'

I did a good bit of research on the new amigas myself. The hardware is not all to bad, but amigaOS holds it back. As of now amigaOS cannot use more then 2gb of ram and is non smp supportive. Unless if you want to complie a linux/unix OS for the newer PPC cpu it's not to much better. If I recall its about neck and neck with a mig/low range 775 system. With a OS that is built for the newer PPC cpu you could be more along the lines of a higher end 775 system or lower end x58 setup with the x1000 and x5000.

If they could once and for all get seamless WinUAE-quality emulation working on OS4, it'd be a keeper.

I have pretty much every desktop Amiga Commodore made and see no point whatsoever in getting an overpriced PPC board to run OS 4 with no apps and buggy drivers.

http://www.amigaos.net/applications
http://os4depot.net

Timberwolf was actually released? That's a miracle, but looks ancient (4.x) and the homepage link redirects to a blog filled with ARMA 3 mods

How well do those amiga boards run Linux? If this one is fairly cheap, I might want to get it just for the novelty of having a RISC Linux machine.

Their news release shows it running Debian, but I will remain skeptical unless told otherwise.

EDIT:

Also, why on earth doesn't it have more cores/a better CPU? For the price that they are likely to charge for it (considering older Amiga boards), I find it hard to believe that they can't do better than that. For example, Frescale is selling the QorIQ P4081, which is an octacore at 1.5GHz.

Second edit:

Actually, for that matter, they could be selling these with 64 bit quads or any number of PPC chips with significantly better specs in every way.

Third edit:

After trawling through Freescale's product catalog, it looks like they could be getting 8 core PPC parts with SMT, a more advanced microarchitecture, and a clockspeed 1/3 higher for around $300 each in bulk. Given that their previous computers (namely the X1000) retailed for $1700, that's rather insignificant.

meisterister wrote:

How well do those amiga boards run Linux? If this one is fairly cheap, I might want to get it just for the novelty of having a RISC Linux machine.

A Raspberry Pi would be far, far cheaper and more reasonable.

For a hardcore Amiga user that absolutely won't use anything else but a genuine Amiga OS, there really isn't a cheaper or overall better alternative, there just isn't. Everything else I've come across is rather poorly supported and kind of all over the place.

I myself have no real need for it, but OS4 on top of modern PPC hardware becomes a very powerful, responsive and flexible system.

/\ I hardly believe the PPC hardware they use can be considered modern. And lack of SMP is absurd. And this is the problem with modern "Amigas" - unless you REALLY want to use AmigaOS on a machine that somewhat resembles something modern no one has any need for one of those. And thus, as its user base does nothing but shrink, it will eventually die a silent death. Going x86 would greatly lower the entry barrier for new users (lower price and the hability to use their pre-existing hardware), and SMP support + the fact they would be running in faster processors would allow it to use software decoding for multimedia to somewhat compensate for the lack of support from hardware vendors. Then they could just built cheap Pentium Dual Core machine, stick to well supported hardware and sell them at a much lower price as well for those that want a branded machine.