The A-EON Amiga X5000: An alternate universe where the Amiga platform never died

The Amiga computer was a legend in its time. Back when the Macintosh had only a monochrome 9-inch screen, and the PC managed just four colors and monotone beeps, the Amiga boasted a 32-bit graphical operating system in full color with stereo-sampled sound and preemptive multitasking. It was like a machine from the future. But the Amiga's parent company, Commodore, suffered from terminal mismanagement and folded in 1994, just as PCs and Macintoshes were catching up technologically. The platform, like many others before it, seemed to be at an end.

So when a brand new Amiga computer arrived at my doorstep in 2017, you can imagine it was quite a surprise. Accordingly, the Amiga X5000 is a curious beast. In some respects, it's more closely related to its predecessors than either modern PCs or Macintoshes. Yet this is a fully current machine capable of taking on modern workloads. How such a device came to be is a fascinating story, but that's not our goal today-let's dive into what the experience of using the X5000 is like.

The X5000 was developed by A-EON, a company formed by Trevor Dickinson in 2009 to develop new PowerPC-based Amiga computers. It is powered by a custom PowerPC motherboard, supporting a dual-core Freescale CPU at various clock speeds up to 2.5GHz. The Amiga has a long history of PowerPC support, starting with add-on accelerator cards released in 1997 using the old Motorola 603 and 604 chips. And since the release of Amiga OS 4.0 in 2007, the operating system itself was recompiled to be PowerPC-native, and many Amiga applications have been rewritten to support this architecture.

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