Amiga, Amiga… why does that name sound familiar?

Ah yes, that Amiga. A strong early competitor in the PC wars, Commodore’s influential and graphics-heavy OS was unfortunately more or less made extinct by Windows by the early 90s. Yet a core group of enthusiasts has kept a candle burning, and here and there you can still find a functioning machine, zealously maintained by someone who insists that the file system or multitasking kernel are still worth admiring. But would you expect a brand new PC with modern accoutrements and a price tag over $2000?

That’s just what’s being put out by Amigakit, which has secured the distribution rights to the long-awaited (by some) X1000 desktop system. It’s actually quite a powerhouse. Check out the specs:

• Dual-core 2GHz PowerISA CPU (PowerPC architecture)
• Xena 500MHz XMOS companion processor with Xorro connector
• AMD Radeon 4650 GPU
• 1GB DDR2 RAM
• 500GB HDD
• 2 PCIe x16 slots, 4 DIMM slots, 4x SATA 2, 10x USB 2.0<

The rest of the specs are here at OS News, with some supplementary info as well. Okay, so when I say powerhouse, I mean compared to the other Amiga machines out there. But it is, as A-EON (the system designer) says, “powerful, modern desktop hardware,” though spec-wise it can’t stand up to Windows boxes a quarter its price. There’s supposedly going to be an Amiga-based netbook arriving in mid-2012 as well if that’s more your style.

Should you buy one and take Amiga lessons? Probably not. But I think it’s great that this community is still dedicated enough to produce something like this. It’s hardware-software experiments and devices like this that act as a spice in the soup of consumer electronics. There are original ideas here in practice, outdated ones as well, and perhaps they will form a permutation that creates the next Photoshop, or a revolution in multithreading, or who knows what.

Unfortunately this quirk of the computing world comes in at £1699 in the UK before VAT. There’s no US pricing, and I doubt it’s any more lenient. But godspeed, Amiga-lovers.