The Amiga is back, but hardly with a bang. The new hardware specs where announced a couple of days ago, but with so little noise being made about it that we completely missed it.

Although we'd already reported about the fact that there was new Amiga hardware on the way here, we didn't have any confirmed details.

The SRP of the new Amiga is set at US$489.00 excluding display, which sounds like a pretty good deal until you realise what you get for your money.

The new Amiga is using a Flex-ATX motherboard and contrary to what has been reported it will be using a Freescale MPC8349E SoC processor rather than a PowerPC marchitecture.

The processor will be clocked at between 400 to 667MHz, although it doesn't state what speed the $489.00 will get you.

There's only a single DDR2 DIMM slot for memory expansion and the new Amiga won't accept anything larger than 1GB modules.

It will also have a single 66MHz PCI slot, which Amiga Inc claims is "for use with readily available graphics cards", but we can't think of a single 66MHz PCI graphics card that is "readily available".

Further expansion can be done by using one of the two 33MHz PCI slots, or one of its four USB ports, although it's not clear from the press release if these are USB 2.0 or not.

It also has four SATA connectors, although these are SATA 150 as the host controller is a SiliconImage Sil3114 which is a rather outdated controller by now.

Oddly enough the new Amiga features dual Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, although it's highly unlikely that you'll get full Gigabit speeds out of these due to the rather slow CPU.

5.1 sound is also part of the package and comes courtesy of a C-Media CMI8738, which again is a rather old chip.

The new Amiga doesn't exactly live up to its heritage and it's unlikely that it will appeal to hardcore Amiga fans, although it's not all about the hardware, as if it has a solid OS as the original machines, then it might just find its niche in the market.

You can find the press release from Amiga Inc here