Amiga 2000 - Variants

Variants

The Amiga 2000 was always designed as a system platform. Commodore's engineers knew that Commodore would be unsuccessful in matching the rate of system obsolesce and replacement practiced by many in the PC industry, new models every year or so. Thus, Commodore's approach was to build a single system architecture that could span different models.

This architecture was subject to major revisions. The "B2000-CR" motherboard was the most common, showing up as the first major revision. It was designed by Dave Haynie and Terry Fisher (whose names are printed on the board) and, while an A2000 variant, was a redesign of the Amiga 1000 motherboard incorporating some Amiga 500 technological advances to achieve the "CR": Cost Reduction.

The original Amiga 2000 shipped with just a single floppy drive for storage. This was followed up fairly early by the Amiga 2000/HD, which bundled an Amiga 2090 hard drive controller and a SCSI-based hard drive. In 1988, Commodore shipped the Amiga 2500/20, which added the Amiga 2620 CPU card to the CPU slot, a 14.3 MHz 68020, a 68881 FPU, and a 68851 MMU to the A2000, along with 2MB of 32-bit-wide memory. In 1989, this model was replaced by the Amiga 2500/30, which added an Amiga 2630 CPU card: 25 MHz 68030 and the 68882 FPU with up to 4MB of 32-bit memory. The A2630 card could also take a memory expansion daughter card, capable of supporting up to 64MB of additional memory. Commodore built an in-house prototype of this, but never released one.

Somewhat later, Commodore UK sold a variant of the A2000, the A1500, though that model designation was not officially sanctioned by Commodore International. The A1500 shipped with dual floppy drives, and 1 MB of RAM as standard, along with the ECS chipset and AmigaOS 2.04.