Amiga One X1000?

[williamk]

Not sure if this is old news or not, but I just noticed the AmigaOne X1000 which includes a XMOS chip. :ugeek:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOne_X1000

Co-processor: "Xena" 500 MHz XCore XS1-L1 128 SDS

[williamk]

Even before the 'wish list' was completed, hardware design company Varisys had been identified as an ideal partner based on their track record both with the PowerPC architecture and with parallel computing. The decision to form a partnership with Varisys had the consequence of bringing XMOS technology to the AmigaOne X1000, as it is the connection between XMOS and the Varisys team, dating back to earlier work on the Inmos Transputer, that led to the suggestion of including an XMOS XCore chip on the X1000 motherboard.[7] This XCore chip is referred to by A-Eon as the 'Xena' Coprocessor.

[williamk]

I just wonder why they didn't include the quad-core xmos chip?

Wk

[bsmithyman]

It's a neat idea. Partly I suspect they went with the XS1-L1 because of reduced part and assembly cost; the G-series chips require a large number of board layers and a complex design, and inherently cost more. There appears to be a Xilinx FPGA on board as well, and from the photos (e.g. this) it also seems to be a leaded package rather than a BGA. The L1 is still a pretty powerful programmable I/O controller.
The other advantage may be that L-series links can be daisy chained whereas the G-series links have some limitations on the types of connection topologies which are possible. If you were to design an expansion card for their "Xena" socket that added more XCores, the L-series chip would make it much easier to set up XLinks.

[williamk]

To be honest, I'm trying to understand why people still use Amiga OS. I never used it, so maybe I should try in order to actually know it? :oops: ;-) What's the fuss about Amigas?

Wk

[ale500]

That's the 64 pin version !

[bsmithyman]

That's the 64 pin version !

The images that are available appear to be blacked out in a number of the most interesting places. According to their website it's going to be the 128 pin version on the production board (and they mention 64 I/O lines. I'm not sure what context the image from williamk has; could be someone just posted the wrong one when discussing it (and it looks like a prototype PCB anyway, since it doesn't have any solder mask).
It's a fun idea... I don't see it as a big market, but I'd personally love to have a system with a programmable XCore on it. I don't really know how many people are going to roll their own PCIe8 form-factor cards for it though.

[ssolie]

It surely is a unique design that is for sure. I'm one of the beta testers and I'm also a developer on Amiga OS. A working X1000 prototype is going to be showing at AmiWest 2010 in Sacramento, California Oct. 22-24. You can find some more info about this show at http://amigaprez.wordpress.com/ if you are curious.

Once I get an X1000 myself I hope to see what kinds of wacky projects can be done with it. The Varisys guys are supposed to be providing some kind of SDK along with it. I currently work with dsPICs at my day job so I'm pretty curious to see what these XMOS chips can do. Especially when fused with to a dual core PPC system.

Yeah, we Amiga users are a funky bunch. 8-)

P.S. Some stuff is still "secret" due to NDAs for whatever reason. Heh, lawyers.