@-Sam-

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@hazydave Quote: there is an absolutely finite number of these that can ever exist -- the CPU is out of production. This is true but A-Eon have stated that it won't be a problem as they can move to the new multi-core CPUs being developed by Freescale, in particular the 64-bit dual core, 2.2 GHz P5020 and the 8-core, 1.5GHz P4080.

I guess you can say "can" interchangeably with "have to" here. That's certainly a new motherboard design. And the e5500 core isn't all that fast.. about 3MIPS/MHz. Ok, slightly better than an ARM Cortex A9 (which is 2.5MIPS/MHz), not desktop class (Intel Atoms are about the same basic performance class, the slower desktop processors offer at least twice that performance per MHz these days). And no vector math unit, so many ARM implementations will actually be faster.

On the other hand, a P5020 or other P5 series chip would kick some butt on networking performance. This guy can do 10GbE, and 5 separate GbE channels. It also has AES/DES encryption acceleration in hardware. And the RapioI/O bus. And it's a 64-bit core. In short -- a great chip for a network processing device. But you're paying for all kinds of stuff that AmigaOS 4.x can't use right now. Do they have SMP up and running? A 64-bit port? I mean, sure, these are decent enough to say you have modern application processing performance -- AmigaOS on one of these will definitely outperform your iPad 2. Unless, of course, you're decoding or encoding video (no SIMD instructions, separate processor for video decode... maybe on the graphics card) or other "heavy lifting".

In fact, they could have used the older versions, Freescale's P3 or P4, and been upward compatible with the P5 series from the get-go. It's expensive to develop a new motherboard. If I spend $100,000 on a new system, and only sell 1000, that's an extra $100 per board just to break even, not to mention amortizing Engineering cost (usually estimated about $150,000 per engineering man-year, counting salaries and overhead). When you're buying an "Amiga" with the performance of a $300 PC, you're paying a premium anyway. This kind of stuff seems pretty shortsighted, with respect to the potential customer anyway.

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I'm not saying this will happen but just for your own info - and no - I don't think these things will be cheap either which lends to your argument about it all getting too expensive and still not quick enough to compete against a common x86.

I mean, yeah, what do these QorIQ chips cost? I don't know. But just single channel 10GbE cards for PCI cost $700+. I mean, it's good for the AEON people that they have a place to go of some kind, but this might even make the price go up.