This design would without a doubt be a truly impressive piece of
hardware if it was shipping today. The main concepts are impressive although not
overly new, but for a main stream machine at the price point they are talking,
under £1500, it will be truly remarkable. I hope they finish this product
and if it comes out and nothing better is around then I will purchase one
immediately
Now The Problems
1. We are coming to a conclusion on the Amiga buyout and the new owner
will need to sell machines which will be souped up versions of existing machines
for a few months while new one are developed. If everybody falls for the hype of
the ABox which I have seen with the Opal Vision before then the Amiga as a
platform could fail through lack of sales.
2. The ABox is selling itself as a PC killer siting Bus speeds of
100mhz being much faster than the PCI at 33mhz. Has everybody been on another
planet and missed that the PCI bus speed is approaching 88mhz on new
motherboards.
3. Unified memory is a great concept and I for one will applaud the
graphics if it lives up to the hype, but Phase5 do not have the development
budgets of the PCI graphics card designers and in a year and a half the PCI
cards may well catch up or exceed the performance of the ABox graphics. Already
unified memory is being discussed for PCI system, and wider bus architectures
for mainstream machines.
4. PowerPC at 200mhz now and promising upto 500mhz. Well I am a big fan
of the Alpha chip which is at present available at 500+ Mhz already and expect
it to double before the ABox arrives. With the price reductions of the Alphas
just starting to come through and the support hardware coming on in leaps and
bounds there are alternatives to the PowerPC.
Finally, you may think that I trying to put down this system before it
gets off the ground but I am not. I just hope that people don't hold off any
Amiga upgrades before the ABox comes out, because if it does not appear the rest
of the Amiga market may be dead.
P.S. Watch the Siamese page over the next
few months for our answer to the future of the Amiga.
All the best
Stephen Jones |