@-Sam-

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-Sam- wrote: I am not actually disagreeing with you. I took him as saying that the X1000 isn't interesting to him but the NatAmi is. I understand why he would say that. But if you want to progress then the X1000 way (or the Sam 440/460 way) is the only game in town. For instance to me - both the NatAmi and X1000 are interesting. But the X1000 (SAM included) is the best way forward if you want to grow a market. I'll ignore his comments about the NatAmi found romanticising about getting a custom chipset again - but if we temper it with reality this just isn't feasible.

The X1000 is "progress" and "the only game in town? Well, it's 7 year old technology and is using a CPU that's been discontinued. That's not what anyone will call progressive.....and what town would that be? The world has only seen 1 or 2 running prototypes in the past 3 years and release dates keep shifting to later dates. I doubt if it'll ever reach the market.

But I agree that the SAM440/460 is the only game in town IF you're an OS4 fan. The Natami isn't targeted at PPC/OS4 fanboys. It's targeted at classic OS fans who wanted Amiga to stay in business and produce an Amiga 5000+.

As for "growing a market", that will never happen. The market for Amigas has long since ceased to be. It's now just a hobbyist scene and will remain so.

@-Sam-

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I agree with you entirely except for your point abut DH's comments. I didn't take Dave's comments as saying that the X1000 isn't the best strategy - I don't think he's interested in any of that. I think he just simply meant that the NatAmi was more interesting to him - not taking business strategy or anything else into account as we both are.

The best strategy for an actual resurrection of the AmigaOS was AmigaOS on commodity hardware. With a team that could actually keep evolving the AmigaOS in a modern direction. I'd be happy to be wrong, but this doesn't seem to have happened.

With that gone, what's left. Ok, you have AmigaOS 3.x for 68K and AmigaOS 4.x for PPC. Neither has a great deal of continuing developer support. Sure, some 68K Amiga programs were ported to PPC, some not. There's the same freeware everyone has on every other platform, too, at least if someone's up the challenge of porting Linux code to AmigaOS (and they have been, historically). But aside from FOSS, you need units in users hands to have any real commerical market.

The big problems with PPC "Amigas" has been that they're too expensive for "fun hobby toy", and either too slow or two software limited for real work. Now, sure, if you have a different demand for real work and your PPC Amiga does the job, more power to you. But aside from that computer, think: would you invest money in the company that made that system? Do you expect they're going to really re-ignite the Amiga market?

And as I said before, it the X1000 were a magical gift from Jay himself (and I'm confident its not), it is not a viable business, for the simple reason that there is an absolutely finite number of these that can ever exist -- the CPU is out of production. AEON presumably bought something like min(, ). That's the end, and there's really nothing in PPC land to replace that PA Semi dual-core.

And for some kinds of work, that wouldn't be suitable anyway. I mean, look at traditional Amiga work: video and 3D. I'd be surprised if the X1000 did this stuff at 1/10th the speed of my AMD 1090T x6 desktop. I did a 6 hour video render the other day... I'd hate to have that take 60 hours. Sure, there are plenty of things that don't need that kind of performance, but then again, 80% of what I do works just dandy on a $200 netbook or Android tablet. When you're talking working PC, not just something as a cool hobby... I could by TWO 1090T machines for $1500, if work is the issue.

The Natami I understand, because, once it's ready anyway, it's a real Amiga in every critical way. It may well be too expensive to justify as a general purpose computing device, but for that hobby, it's for fun. I'm not going to do the same kind of things with this than I would a for-work computer... that for work system is a tool, like a hammer or a belt sander. X1000 doesn't seem Amiga-enough to have that hobby interest, or PC enough to be competitive for real work.

I didn't always understand the hobby aspect -- Amigas was both my profession and one of many hobbies, back in the day. But in particular, hanging out with the C64 folks and others committed to retrocomputing... I do understand. The C64, for example: you could learn just about everything there was to learn about it. That's very difficult on the Amiga, and impossible on Windows or Linux... just too much stuff, and too little interest.

And no one here is under any obligation to listen to anything I have to say... and of course, you know it. This all started because I answered a direct question. And I have looked over the X1000, the stuff they've announced anyway. I read the specs on the XMOS chip, and that's one of the problems. It's not a terribly interesting chip. I can see some potential use in some embedded applications, but only if it actually saved power over using, say, one far more powerful $10 ARM chip. It's not programmable silicon, it's a CPU array with a bunch of pretty uninteresting little tiny processors. If you really want to make things go fast on these machines, you need OpenCL ported, so you can use that Radeon GPU.