Happy New Year to everyone - I hope you all had a great Xmas and New Year!

For my first blog post in 2016 I bring you a special treat - a look at the new AmigaOne A1222 system announced at AmiWest 2015 by A-EON Technology, and recently delivered to me as a newly appointed Betatester in early January 2016.

Let's take a closer look at the A1222 board. The specifications of the AmigaOne A1222 (Tabor) are:

PowerPC CPU: Freescale QorIQ P1022, 1.2GHz, 32-bit, e500V2, dual-core
• 1x CPU fan + heatsink
• 2x fan ports

DDR3 SODIMM
• 64 bit interface
• 400Mhz
• Support up to 8GB RAM

RS232 Serial
• 1x RS232 including flow control
• Level shifting from TTL UART serial levels to RS232 levels
• Maximum baud rate of 230,400

SATA
• 2x SATA 2.6 compliant controllers

USB
• 2x External & 2x Internal USB port

Ethernet
• 2x RGMII ethernet PHYs each providing Gbit ethernet

PCIe
• x4 PCIe gen 1 link allows data rates of 2.5Gb/s per lane
• x16 PCIe connector to support RadeonHD graphics cards

Audio
• Audio CODEC generating stereo audio out from I2S digital audio

HDMI LCD Interface
• 24 bit colour depth
• Support for resolution up to 1280x1024
• HDMI 1.3 support

GPIO
• Support for user GPIOs
• GPIO JTAG

Micro SD
• Micro SD card for ROM - later possibility of running the whole system from the microSD card

WCU Prog

LED ports for Power, CPU, HDD

Enough specs, let's take a closer look at the board with some close up photos:

Here you can see the onboard Serial port, DVI connector, sound input/output ports, two network port and 2 USB ports.

Close up of the CPU with included cooling fan:

Unlike the X1000, the A1222 uses a U-Boot firmware, which is loaded onto a micro-sd card on the board. This makes upgrades considerably easier:

Flipping the board over you can see the signatures on the back:

I love the Space invaders thing on the back - very cool:

The A1222 board is small - very small. MiniITX in fact. To give you an idea of size, here is a comparison of the Sam460CR board and A1222 side by side:

Another look at the ports on the A1222:

In these next shots you can see the 2 onboard SATA ports, two GPIO ports an additional header for connecting two additional USB ports on the front of your case:

This is Revision 1.1 of the board, labelled as Topaz to fit the B-52 song name tradition for Amiga system boards:

I then got to work installing the A1222 into my Sam460CR case:

View of the ports from the back of the case:

I also connected the Radeon HD card from my Sam460CR to use higher screen resolutions.

After powering on I get the animated boot screen for the A1222:

The early boot menu uses the traditional Classic Amiga fonts and colour scheme, which feels very familiar indeed:

Under System Info... option I can see the details about my A1222 system:

The command line option brings a A1222> prompt:

The help command explains the functions within the U-Boot firmware:

It is exciting to see another new NG Amiga system being made and released, and one which will hopefully be at a price point that will appeal to people who want to run AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition but are unable to afford purchasing an AmigaOne X5000 or second hand AmigaOne X1000.

AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition is to be the operating system for this A1222 system, which I will be helping with beta testing in due course. Due to an NDA, I won't be able to discuss/show anything about the AmigaOS 4.1 betatesting work I will be doing on this blog or elsewhere.

At the moment it is possible to run a couple of different Linux distributions on the A1222, with Classic Amiga running under E-UAE emulation, which is fine to talk about.

I will start work on setting up Linux on the system when I have some more free time and share some more details of it on this blog.  I saw some teaser shots of it running previously and I am keen to get it up and running on my A1222. More to come!

For now I wanted to show the AmigaOne A1222 system as it is very exciting!