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No it isn't. The Teron is made by MAI Logic
and not TerraSoft. /ironfist

Pegasos.

Terons

Can you even buy bare PPC CPUs and mobos?

Not 970-based yet, but anyway:
Pegasos.
Terons (which are also marketed, by raping the corpse of the Amiga, to a bunch of clueless zealots as "AmigaOnes". The CX and PX models are discontinued due to hardware flaws, the jury is still out on the newer Mini model).

Amiga is still manufacturing computers.

No, they aren't, and the Amiga computer died a decade ago.

OTOH, what is happening is that Hyperion Entertainment are porting and updating AmigaOS to version 4 on licence from Amiga, Inc., a company formed in 2000 by a marketing exec from the previous Amiga-owners Gateway. AInc in turn has allegedly switched owners twice since then, during litigation.

AmigaOS 4, and beyond, are meant to run on third party PowerPC hardware. Nobody is designing or even specifying standards for any hardware specifically for AmigaOS.

One controversial decision that bothers many current and prospective AmigaOS users is that the hardware market will have to be separated from "the rest of the world". Despite the inexistence of any Amiga hardware and AInc's irrelevance to the hardware market, AmigaOS must only be sold bundled with hardware, and only from vendors who have acquired a licence from AInc. These hardware bundles must also provide some form of hardware/vendor-licence verification mechanism ("anti-piracy measures"), which currently is supposed to consist of added code to the firmware.

The only licenced hardware today is sold by the single existing licensee, Eyetech, which is the same company that was "consulted" when these AmigaOS distribution policies were formed. Currently they sell Mai Logic Teron series motherboards, with their exclusively licensed (owned?) stickers saying "AmigaOne", plus a 60% heftier price tag.

For more on this, please see my homepage.

I'm rather looking forward to the new Amiga [...]

There is no "new Amiga". That's one of the points with AmigaOS4 and beyond. The "Micro Amigaone" mentioned in the article is another name for the Teron Mini from MAI.

It's just that we're forced to pretend that there will be "Amiga hardware". Of course this will kill AmigaOS and makes the whole project a waste of time, but at least the proud tradition of utter incompetence and mismanagement throughout Amiga history has survived.

There is no "800MHz Amiga". There will be no more Amiga hardware. You're probably referring to the $500 Mai Logic Teron PX motherboard, which is also sold for $800 using the licensed trademark "AmigaOne".

Neither is there a beta version of AmigaOS 4. To most people in the industry, "beta" means software in it's final (or "release candidate") stage, when everything is implemented and only needs this "beta" testing before going gold. Not everything on the current AmigaOS 4.0 "feature list" (roadmap) has been implemented, not even fundamental stuff like JIT 68k emulation or the "let's-call-it-partial-memory-protection", and the list is constantly being changed and updated. Remember when all of a sudden the graphics driver subsystem was thrown out the window to be replaced by SNAP? This was, what, almost 2 years ago? Still it was being referred to as "beta" (alternatively "90% done", 3 years ago) by the more insidious marketroids and clueless fanbois already back then.

Everything in the GUI (except file listings in load/save requesters) of the latest "developer pre-release" (heh) version of AmigaOS 4 on a Teron PX (aka "AmigaOne XE") 800MHz PPC750FX is not only noticably but considerably more sluggish than AmigaOS 3.9 on a 25MHz MC68040 Amiga 4000 from 1993. It's nothing but embarrassing.

I know you don't like the "exclusive hardware" concept and that is fair enough, but you've told a few lies in this post that counts as going so far as trolling.

1. Only Eyetech have been granted such a license
Eyetech is the only one who applied for a license. It's a support and anti-piracy measure; if you don't like that, then fine. Hyperion/Amiga, Inc. have stated repeatedly that there is no reason why a 3rd party PPC mfg. cannot apply for an OEM AmigaOS4 license. Some have said that piracy killed the Amiga (I at least think it contributed significantly), do you not think a small developer like Hyperion can justly ask for some restrictions on the use of their software which they can only hope in their wildest dreams to at least break even on non-labour costs?

2. and are now (well, since two(?) years) selling the Teron boards mentioned above with an extra 60% on the price as "AmigaOne SE",
The AmigaOne SE is no longer available from eyetech.

3. "AmigaOne PX"
There is no such thing, perhaps you mean the AmigaOne XE, a G4 PPC based motherboard that sells for $829 USD at the American store I just linked?

This is a lot cheaper than the $3,900 quoted on mai's Teron CX page, isn't it? How do you get "60% more" out of that! An AmigaOne is 80% cheaper than a Teron CX evaluation board!!!

4. "Micro AmigaOne", respectively.
Show me where these are available to the public... these are targeted at embedded markets? and are not available to the public

5. Thereby suitable Macs (otherwise a pretty damn obvious target for a PPC "consumer" OS), Terons sold by anybody else regardless of trademarks, Pegasoses, and whatever you could possibly think of in the future, are all out of the question by default. No licence/licencee, no new hardware base for AmigaOS.

Yeah, right. You know very well the complicated politics behind the Pegasos support. You know very well that Bill Buck (Genesi/Thendic "relations") is not the easiest person in the world to do business with, especially when he doesn't like the idea of going to effort to license an OS on his own platform that competes with his own baby?

And about the macs, that IS debatable, but I think you have over-simplified the situation there too.

Nope. Amiga, Inc. sells trademark licences. Well, they were trying at least, until it was announced during a lawsuit that they had transferrred the AmigaOS + "Amiga"(TM) rights to something they call "KMOS, Inc."

Since there won't be any more Amigas, AmigaOS will run on old Amigas (with old PPC expansion boards) and third party hardware. The first hardware to be supported are the Teron CX (discontinued), Teron PX and Teron Mini motherboards designed by Mai Logic.

Amiga, Inc. got "consultation" from the UK computer shop Eyetech to decide that we should still have to pretend that there is "Amiga hardware". I.e. in order for AmigaOS to run on (be ported to) a piece of hardware, that hardware must be sold on a separated "Amiga market" by a distributor with a licence from Amiga, Inc. AmigaOS will not be available for sale, except as in a bundle with licensed hardware (and later on for those ancient PPC-equipped Amigas).

Only Eyetech have been granted such a license, and are now (well, since two(?) years) selling the Teron boards mentioned above with an extra 60% on the price as "AmigaOne SE", "AmigaOne PX", and "Micro AmigaOne", respectively.

Thereby suitable Macs (otherwise a pretty damn obvious target for a PPC "consumer" OS), Terons sold by anybody else regardless of trademarks, Pegasoses, and whatever you could possibly think of in the future, are all out of the question by default. No licence/licencee, no new hardware base for AmigaOS.

> Eyetech is building the hardware ...

Eyetech designs, decides and builds nothing.

Eyetech is a distributor, and has chosen to market this upcoming (maybe) board, which looks like it's Mai Logic's successor to their Teron CX and PX boards, under the "AmigaOne" trademark which is licensed from Amiga, Inc. With regards to AmigaOS and the hardware it'll run on, AInc does nothing but license IP.

> ... and Hyperion the software (PPCBoot ...

PPCBoot is dead, long live U-Boot. And it's not made by Hyperion. Hyperion is a rather new contributor to this open source project by making it support the Teron boards.

> Certain Amiga clone vendors ...

There are no more Amigas, and thus there are no Amiga clones. The Amiga is dead, thank $DEITY, and if it weren't for artificially added market restrictions AmigaOS could finally take advantage of a third party hardware market. Well, it can, but it's not allowed to.

OTOH, there are AmigaOS "clones", or rather new OSes providing AmigaOS API compatibility.
MorphOS and the open source AROS. Maybe that's what you were thinking about.

About time someone brought that up. From MoL's FAQ:

Does MOL run on non-Apple hardware?
It does. MOL runs for instance on the Pegasos board, the Teron board and on AmigaOne hardware. In short, MOL should run on any PowerPC hardware (with the except of 601-based systems). However, the EULA of MacOS prohibits its usage on non-Apple hardware (it is of course perfectly legal to use MOL to boot a second Linux though).

Apple could take a leaf out of Amiga, Inc's book. There won't be any new Amiga hardware, instead future versions of AmigaOS are meant to run on "off the shelf" hardware. The Mai Logic Teron PX PPC mobo to begin with. But AmigaOS will only be sold bundled together with Teron boards that have gotten some dongle code added to it's firmware, so users can only buy their hardware via a "licensed" distributor, so there's a cosy little artificially created monopoly on other people's products, with having to make any hardware of your own.

Of course, this could only ever attract braindead zealots with too much money for their own good, who would buy anything with the Apple logo anyway, but the geniuses at Amiga, Inc seem to think that this is a commercially viable market segment! :-D

There are other PowerPC motherboard suppliers our there still, notably Genesi Sarl which ships a Micro-ATX board of its own design, as opposed to the OEMed Mai Teron board that both TerraSoft and Eyetech have been licensing. There are a limited number of Pegasos 1 motherboards available from Genesi and a Pegasos 2 motherboard is in development for release later this year. Additionally Eyetech has been pre-selling their "AmigaONE" boards, which as I mentioned are based on the old Mai Teron design.

Please note that the current Peagsos 1 boards use the same chipset as the Teron boards, except for the addition of a chip dubbed the April which fixes some bugs in the chipset. The new Pegasos 2 boards will use a completely different chipset from Marvell.

Well, it was originally intended as a developer's evaluation board for Mai Logic's Articia S chip set. As a bonus for us users it turned out to be quite a usable end-customer board, although its developer/evaluation roots are still clearly visible in the PCB design, choice of components and specs.

Look at this photo of a "Pegasos" PPC mobo. It's a mobo similar to the Teron CX (it's the same Articia S northbridge for example), but on a much smaller Micro-ATX board, including a slot for CPU modules (including not-yet-available dual G4). Just looking at a thing as the PCB trace routing, or the choice of common components like resistors, caps et c. says this is a more well thought out design, originally aimed at the consumer market. It's cheaper too, and runs Yellow Dog Linux... ;)

I can totally see it running as a firewall/external webserver/DNS server box.

Yup. And check out another product based on Mai's Articia northbridge, the "Micro Server-S". Almost the same mobo as this Teron, but on a PCI card! I haven't seen any pricing for this, but it's also sold by Inguard (who also sell Terons, called Phoenix and Dragon.

It's not mentioned in the story, but this board is the Teron CX, which is also distributed under the licensed trademark "AmigaOne G3-SE".

There's also a model with the CPU on an exchangeable module, called Teron PX (or "AmigaOne XE" when it's marketed to AmigaOS users). Hopefully we'll see Terrasoft and others selling Teron PX as well, which offers G4 and 750FX (a newer, faster G3 design) CPUs.

Due to a seriously fscked up compulsory licensing policy for AmigaOS, that OS will however not be sold separate from licensed hardware and be allowed to be installed on Teron boards from vendors who are not licensed by Amiga, Inc., like Terrasoft.

P.S. Why is this story under "Apple"? MOL runs fine on these, but come on!

It's not mentioned in the story, but this board is the Teron CX, which is also distributed under the licensed trademark "AmigaOne G3-SE".

There's also a model with the CPU on an exchangeable module, called Teron PX (or "AmigaOne XE" when it's marketed to AmigaOS users). Hopefully we'll see Terrasoft and others selling Teron PX as well, which offers G4 and 750FX (a newer, faster G3 design) CPUs.

Due to a seriously fscked up compulsory licensing policy for AmigaOS, that OS will however not be sold separate from licensed hardware and be allowed to be installed on Teron boards from vendors who are not licensed by Amiga, Inc., like Terrasoft.

P.S. Why is this story under "Apple"? MOL runs fine on these, but come on!

Amiga finally releases new hardware.

Heh. You'll still have to wait for that miracle to happen. Amiga Inc. has nothing to do with hardware (and not much to do with AmigaOS besides the trademark).

What this story is reporting is that yet another distributor has started distributing Mai Logic's Teron series motherboards (but using an "AmigaOne" trademark this time, instead of for example Phoenix, like another distributor uses to sell the same mobo). The story submitter probably got carried away when reading the marketing and seeing "Amiga" in the blurb.

• Get a license from Amiga Inc., both for himself and his hardware.
  
• Become an AmigaOS vendor, distribute AmigaOS together with his hardware and provide software support.
  
• Apply some form of hardware-license verification mechanism, a dongle, to his hardware.
  

• Get a license from Amiga Inc., both for himself and his hardware.
  
• Become an AmigaOS vendor, distribute AmigaOS together with his hardware and provide software support.
  
• Apply some form of hardware-license verification mechanism, a dongle, to his hardware.
  

"New Amiga One"? Is there a NEW Amiga?

No, there isn't. There will be no more Amigas, instead future versions of AmigaOS will run on third party hardware (and on Amigas with PPC accelerators). Mai Logic's Teron CX POP motherboard is one such piece of hardware, although AmigaOS will only be allowed to run on this board when it's renamed "AmigaOne G3SE" and distributed by Eyetech Ltd.. Hardware must be licensed, provide a hardware-license verification mechanism (known as "anti-piracy measures" in the marketing waffle) and be sold by a licensed distributor in order to be allowed to run AmigaOS, and AmigaOS will only be available bundled with such hardware.

This hardware licensing scheme was designed by Amiga Inc. with "consultation" from Eyetech, and it's hardly surprising that Eyetech is the only hardware distributor that has acquired such a license.

There was once upon a time going to be newly designed, proprietary Amiga hardware, back when Eyetech was a "hardware partner" of Amiga Inc. These "AmigaOne 1200/4000" boards never appeared, and instead third party hardware is to be used (although the advantages of getting rid of "Amiga" hardware are negated with this compulsory licensing madness).

Read more about it here.

MorphOS is intended for the POP-compliant Pegasos PowerPC board from bPlan. Note that while a Realtek PHYceiver is listed, that's just the PHY; the ethernet controller itself is a Via Rhine derivative embedded in the southbridge. Pictures here. It can also run on classic Amigas with appropriate PowerPC accellerators; NetBSD is also being readied for the bPlan hardware.

AmigaOS 4 is the 'name-brand' product, being produced under contract by Germany's Hyperion Software. It's intended for Eyetech's AmigaOne G3SE and XE products, and Elbox's SharkPPC accellerator in classic hardware with suitable PCI busboards. Hardware dongling of the AmigaOne (with respect to AmigaOS; Linux and *BSD will run unhindered), and continuing intellectual-property disputes may or may not effect the chances of OS4 support for the Pegasos.

All three new PowerPC boards use MAI's PowerPC chipsets, also seen on the Linux-friendly Barbie.

Nor should we forget 'AmigaDE' or 'Amiga-Anywhere,' a crossplatform system based on Tao's Intent runtime + media libs, which is really quite cool even if they've just redesigned their site opaquely. the CEO of Gentoo provides a good writeup here.

Fuck off Mike Bouma. Just buy that "Amiga One" (HAH!) directly from Mai Logic instead, and skip that fucking "Amiga tax". It feels good to screw those Amiga, Inc. and Eyetech clowns, they were trying to screw us first after all. Or get a Pegasos instead.

"Amiga" (the hardware platform) is NOT coming back, contrary to what this very badly researched article says.

Amiga Inc. is a software-only company these days and AmigaOS4 will run on PPC hardware by third parties, like this TeronCX-based POP board, a.k.a. "AmigaOne G3SE". The "AmigaOne" name is merely a trademark which one distributor, Eyetech, has licensed from Amiga Inc.

Read more here.

No, "The Amiga" is not coming back. There will not be any more Amiga hardware, nobody is designing, making, selling or planning any Amiga hardware. Amiga-the-hardware-platform is dead. I don't blame you cbr372 though, this article is really whacked out.

This is not "New Amiga hardware", it's a "generic" POP board cloned from the Mai TeronCX, only its new distributor Eyetech has licensed the "AmigaOne" trademark from Amiga Inc.

Forthcoming versions of AmigaOS running on hardware from third parties like this would be fantastic news if only Amiga Inc. hadn't decided to f*ck things up as usual with some seriously demented distribution policies for new versions of AmigaOS: Any hardware, in order to be allowed to run AmigaOS, must be licensed by Amiga Inc. The hardware vendor must also get a license for himself and his support/financial organisation, he must equip his hardware with a hardware license verification mechanism (although Amiga Inc. affectionally calls it "anti-piracy measures") and he must sell AmigaOS bundled with his hardware. AmigaOS will not be available for sale separated from hardware to us users who wish to choose our hardware and hardware vendors ourselves.

Of course this is unacceptable for independent hardware vendors, especially those who design Open Hardware like POP which is what AmigaOS will run on, and thus Amiga Inc. are killing AmigaOS in a very effective way. If it's intentional it's probably to redirect resources to their "AmigaDE" project. Unfortunately they're at the same time splitting the "potentially AmigaOS compatible" hardware market into "hardware for AmigaOS" and "the exact same hardware but for everyone else".

Please consider signing this petition to Amiga Inc. if you wouldn't like this to happen. There's more info about all this available here.

WOW! This is one seriously misleading article! It must be pointed out that this is NOT any "New Amiga Hardware". It's a clone of the Mai TeronCX POP motherboard. Nobody is designing, making or selling any "new Amigas", least of all the software company Amiga Inc. The forthcoming AmigaOS4 will run on generic POP/PPC hardware from third party distributors and on old Amigas with PPC accelerators. Eyetech, the distributor of this motherboard has simply licensed the "Amiga" trademark.

Unfortunately AmigaOS4 is being killed by Amiga Inc. themselves before it has a chance to take off. They have come up with an insane distribution policy for all future versions of AmigaOS. In order to be allowed to run AmigaOS, any third party hardware vendor is supposed to buy a license from Amiga Inc for both himself and his hardware, he must modify his hardware with license verification measures (Amiga Inc. uses a nonsensical "anti-piracy" argument for this), and he must sell AmigaOS bundled with his hardware. AmigaOS will not be available for sale separately to users who wish to choose their own hardware and hardware vendors.

Please consider signing this petition to Amiga Inc. to make them at least give AmigaOS a fair chance and to wake them upo from their megalomanic dilusions of trying to control an independent hardware market! There's more info about this dirty business here.

And of course it runs MOL/MacOS - it's a POP board with OpenFirmware and it's running Linux. Is this news?

The G3/G4, Power4 etc. belong to the PowerPC (PPC) family of CPUs. Of course, we all know this.

However, few participating in the discussion seem to acknowledge, that there is more systems running PPC than Apple's Macs.

PPC is important in the embedded market. It has a high performance, stays relatively cool There are 'computers on a card' (a PCI card with a G3/G4 on it plus memory). They communicate over TCP/IP (or proprietary protocols) over the PCI bus with the host system. Nice if you want to have a mini cluster, a physical firewall, or whatever...

• CPCI-680 Sentinel PCI G4 card
• The CPCI 6750
• CompactPCI SBC: CPCI 3750
• Then there is the Micro Server-S from Mai Logic Mai Logic also offers evaluation boards for PowerPC but at prices, that make them interesting only for developers/companies.
• This one has been announced (German text)a year ago or so but not yet been sold. It is based on the Pegasos below.
• A search on Google for embedded PPCresults in approx. 27.000 hits one being this

Then we have several (Micro)ATX mobos, some even for dual G4 (SMP). They get used mostly in the industry, however, this year will see two new home/office-desktop G3/G4 systems that have nothing in common with Apple. See here:

• AmigaONE
• and
• Pegasos G3/G4 MicroATX mobo (SMP option)
• Another project, that at least is in planning is here (RioRed, SMP option)
• Then there is (was?) the OpenPPC project.

So it is obvious that RedHat, being focussed more on industry/server markets than on hte Desktop (that is their current goal as far as I am informed) has some interest in supporting PPC development. Altivec is a very good instruction set and having optimizations for it will be a great benefit. Altivec is not only for MultiMedia, btw. !

Theoretically, all these systems could run LinuxPPC !

Personally I am happy to see some major resource supporting the PowerPC since I would prefer a PPC machine far more than the archaical, outlived, patched & hacked i86 platform (can you use all your PCI slots without clashes...? I can't and my MoBo is from April last year...) Also the PPCs keep quite cool, meaning one could live without an active fan, unlike the Athlon hair-driers...;-)

For the enhusiasts: There are at least two other desktop (!) OS in the works, which are PPC native and come with SMP support: MorphOS (in the works since three years or more) and AmigaOS4.x

if you check the articia s, the chipset they use for the teron cx you'll see that the chipset itself only costs $30.00 (in quantities of 10,000. that sounds like a reasonable price for a chipset. my guess is that they don't want to give away their r & d for the mobo design.

also noticed that this chipset supports MIPS and x86 in addition to power pc.

if you check the articia s, the chipset they use for the teron cx you'll see that the chipset itself only costs $30.00 (in quantities of 10,000. that sounds like a reasonable price for a chipset. my guess is that they don't want to give away their r & d for the mobo design.

also noticed that this chipset supports MIPS and x86 in addition to power pc.

I think it would be great to have one motherboard that supported processors from multiple vendors. Mai's web site says that the Teron PX board will support PPC, MIPS, and X86 processors.

Brings a whole new meaning to "Dual Boot".

You could develop in X86 Linux, shutdown swap processors, reboot in PPC Linux recompile and test.