Amiga lives: AmigaOne X1000 PC hits beta

Good news from OSNews, which reports that the Rev 2.1 versions of the A-eon AmigaOne X1000 motherboard will be shipped to beta testers next week.

I saw an early version of the AmigaOne X1000 at Bletchley Park's Vintage Computer Festival in June 2010, and in a world where one's design options are "Big Box? x86. Small Box? Arm." the thought of a new computer stuffed full of silicon exotica tingles my binaries. In this case, the unusual chippery includes a 1.8 GHz PA Semi PA6T-1682M main processor (yes, made by Apple) and a Xena 500MHz Xmos chip. Xmos is a UK company with Inmos lineage, that makes some of the funkiest software-programmable hardware you could hope for.

Software? OSNews says AmigaOS 4.2 and Debian Squeeze. And stuff you'll write. No, it won't run Microsoft Office.

Price? Wait and see.

And what's the point? If you have to ask... Put it this way, Xmos chips do hardware tasks so quickly it's like having custom hardware, but are programmed like ordinary processors. What you'll get with this most peculiar box of sand is the ability to create enormously powerful electronics as if they were just an app: it'll be a bit like having an Arduino from the year 2025. Only it'll also be an Amiga from 2011.

And if you still can't see the point of that, sir or madam, you're probably reading the wrong chap.