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. It is powered by a custom PowerPC motherboard, supporting a dual-core Freescale CPU at various clock speeds up to 2.5GHz. The X5000 was developed by A-EON, a company formed by Trevor Dickinson in 2009 to develop new PowerPC-based Amiga computers. 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. Yet this is a fully current machine capable of taking on modern workloads. In some respects, it's more closely related to its predecessors than either modern PCs or Macintoshes. Accordingly, the Amiga X5000 is a curious beast. So when a brand new Amiga computer arrived at my doorstep in 2017, you can imagine it was quite a surprise.

The platform, like many others before it, seemed to be at an end. But the Amiga’s parent company, Commodore, suffered from terminal mismanagement and folded in 1994, just as PCs and Macintoshes were catching up technologically. 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. The Amiga computer was a legend in its time. People still use the Amiga today, and new Viva Amiga documentary shows why.A history of the Amiga, part 10: The downfall of Commodore.The A-EON Amiga X5000: An alternate universe where the Amiga platform never died.A history of the Amiga, part 11: Between an Escom and a Gateway.A history of the Amiga, part 12: Red vs.

Amiga emulator desktop