News about AmigaNG
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News about AmigaNG
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»Technical Update Part 1 - 12 April 2001
On the 31st of March, 2001 at the Amiga show held in St Louis, the Chairman and CEO of Amiga, Mr Bill McEwen, unveiled the full Amiga strategy. While only pieces of it had come out in the previous year, this was the first time that it was explained in detail and in full.
That presentation was an intimate affair, given to the few hundred attendees at the show banquet. This update now takes the information presented at the banquet and makes it wholly available for the world.
The future is a content future. Information and activity is slowly migrating from the physical and analog to the digital. Entertainment, research, work, shopping, conversation, education; all are crossing over to take advantage of the digital universe.
Access to this digital universe is via any device that has a microprocessor, understands the digital language, and can connect to that digital universe. In the past this was limited to million dollar mainframes. As technology advanced, the universe became accessible to two thousand dollar desktops. Today, technology has developed to such an extent that this digital universe can be accessed from three hundred dollar games consoles and one hundred dollar cellphones.
The user now has a huge choice when it comes to accessing the one constant; the digital universe. They have the workstation, the desktop, the set top box, the games console, the PDA, the cell phone. Which one they choose depends on many things - where they are, what they want to do, what time it is. For Amiga, this is the new challenge, the new frontier, the new WWW. Whatever, Whenever, Wherever.
All of these devices can access the digital universe, but each of them comes with a set of capabilities decided by price, market and form factor. Each plays a part and fits into a role that in the past defined the activity but which now describes only a profile. For instance 'Desktop' used to be synonymous with word processing, image manipulation and web browsing. Now those activities have escaped mere hardware to become activities in their own right on many other devices.
These activities have a set of requirements; services that they require in order to take place. Similarly, devices have a set of capabilities; services that they can offer to allow activities to take place. Future digital environments will simply match activities to devices based upon requirements and capabilities, scaling the activity up or down to match the capabilities of the host device. Activities will be free of a particular type or piece of hardware, and this will free users from the restrictions imposed on them by the restriction inherent in that hardware.
Increasingly it will be the digital content and the digital activity itself that becomes the only concern. This is a traditional sign that a technology is maturing, as the underlying technology becomes invisible to the user. Digital Living will finally deliver on its promise of Whatever, Whenever, Wherever.
Amiga intends to energize this transition through the creation of a revolutionary product, the Amiga Digital Environment or AmigaDE. The AmigaDE will provide a universal content layer that can sit on any digital device, irrespective of its hardware form or component set, and give both users and developers (content consumers and content producers) a common place in which to conduct digital activity.
AmigaDE offers the unique capability of being able to deploy itself either directly on hardware, co-operatively on a software host (running just like another application on an existing Operating System) or, uniquely, on a software host where the user only sees the AmigaDE but takes advantage of the feature set of the software host.
For the user, the AmigaDE provides a brand new source of rich, compelling content; everything from games through Internet adventures to productivity, content creation and serious work. All of this available on any device that supports the AmigaDE thus not tied to a specific device or computer type. The user gets freedom of choice handed back to them. If they want to add the AmigaDE to their existing computer set up, they can. If they want to use only the AmigaDE, they can.
The user chooses the activity they want to perform and the device on which they want to perform that activity. The AmigaDE works to match activity requirements to device capabilities and provides them with the optimum experience.
For the content producer, the AmigaDE offers a truly universal solution: Content can be created only once and then distributed to any AmigaDE user, irrespective of the device that they are using. As long as the device has the capabilities to support the content, it will work. No more having to create different versions of the same content for Windows, Macintosh and Linux. No more having a great product excluded from the new Set Top Box and PDA markets. The AmigaDE provides a level playing field and brings a multitude of smaller, separate markets into one common market with all the business advantages and opportunities that this entails.
The AmigaDE is a true content environment, allowing users everywhere on every platform and every device to enjoy great content. In the home, families can start to build collections of content (everything from games and productivity applications to digital movies, pictures, music and documentation) and access this content from any any of the devices in their home, and ultimately from any device on the planet.
This content will be downloaded from the Internet or across satellite and cable channels, or by good old fashioned CDs and DVDs and stored on the individual devices. However, as the family collects more and more of this digital content, they may want to collect it all together in a local digital repository, where it can be cataloged, protected and shared amongst all their digital devices without the hassle of having to carry CDs or DVDs between rooms or getting into a fight because eldest son is on the family computer and mother only has the game console.
Amiga intends to solve this problem and thus provide a complete solution for Digital Living, by offering yet another new product: the AmigaOS. This is a completely separate product from the AmigaDE and is not needed in order to enjoy the wonderful benefits of the AmigaDE.
The AmigaOS, together with compliant hardware, will provide a product that will sit at the heart of the digital home. As a repository, it will allow the family to store any type of digital content that they chose, securely and easily accessed. As a server, it will allow the family to move that content to any device within the digital home, and beyond if they so desire, guaranteeing optimum delivery quality at all times. As a gateway, it will provide a single source of entry for all digital content into the home, providing protection from attacks and incursions, allowing parents to control access to external content and consolidating all digital paths.
For the majority of digital families, the AmigaOS device will sit out of the way, requiring minimum maintenance whilst quietly and efficiently enhancing their digital experience. For those interested in a new level of multimedia experience however, the AmigaOS device can also be used as a powerful computer in its own right, and it comes with the additional advantage of the AmigaDE running co-operatively on it, providing direct access to the content that it is also busy serving to other AmigaDE enabled devices in the home.
The world is changing. The way people work, the way they play, the way they communicate, the way they shop and the way they produce and consume. The very act of living itself is moving forwards to a new age. Amiga understands this change; indeed, it has been at the forefront of it since 1984 when it introduced the world to multimedia for the very first time.
With its two new products, the AmigaDE and the AmigaOS, people no longer have to stumble over incompatible products and disappointing content. On their own, these two products offer outstanding performance and value for money. Together, they mark the beginning of Digital Life.
For those interested in using an AmigaOS device as a computer, or for a more technical explanation of the Amiga strategy, please check out Part 2 of the Technical Update.«
»Technical Update Part 2 - 12 April 2001
The AmigaDE® and the AmigaOS® are the two products offered by Amiga to allow for the realization of the dream of Digital Living. Both can happily exist independently of each other, but together they provide an unbeatable combination of power, performance and elegance.
AmigaDE & AmigaOS
The AmigaDE is a universal content environment that can sit native on low-to-medium resource devices or sit hosted, in software, on medium to high end devices. Its purpose is to provide a consistent, interactive environment for users across many different devices and to provide a consistent development model for developers across those same devices.
The AmigaDE uses the Tao-Group's intent® product set to provide a clean service abstraction that allows it to sit on both hardware and software hosts. In this context, one should consider the full device itself as a set of layers with hardware at one end and, a user experience at the other. Separating them is a set of layers which take the capabilities of the hardware, abstracts and packages them and then makes them available to system and third party applications, which in turn are experienced and manipulated by the user via a content environment.
From the user's point of view, such static terms as 'desktop' and 'workstation' no longer need to define the digital experience. The AmigaDE is a digital environment in which any content can be executed subject to both its requirements and the capabilities of the host on which it is sitting. If the AmigaDE is hosted on a physical device which has a Geforce 2 graphics card, a 1 gigahertz Athlon and 256 megabytes of SDRAM, then it will be able to offer those services to any content that runs on it. If it is running on a PDA with a 100 megahertz processor, 8 megabytes of SDRAM and no hardware accelerated features, then it will only run content that is able to execute within those resource constraints.
From the developer's point of view, such dynamic brokerage requires that they either create content for a specific level, in the knowledge that it will run on anything above that level, or they can take special advantage of the tailoring system, allowing the AmigaDE to dynamically modify the performance and presentation of content to the device profile. They can thus choose to target smaller markets as a subset or go for the broader market for increased sales.
If one considers the device as a whole, then the AmigaDE starts at the user end and grows down towards the hardware end. Since every device has its own particular physical nuances, the AmigaDE uses its clean service abstraction wherever possible to take advantage of other operating systems that have already done all the hard work of abstracting the hardware. This allows the AmigaDE to spread rapidly to the maximum number of devices with the minimum amount of effort whilst offering the device builder (and through them the user) the choice of how they want to present and experience the AmigaDE.
Some users can chose to run it co-operatively on top of an existing and well understood Operating System, such as Windows or Linux, whilst others can use it on its own, choosing a software host that best suits their needs to sit underneath it, perhaps a small realtime operating system. In this master mode, the software host remains hidden beneath it, and the user chooses only to interact with and work within the AmigaDE environment. The emphasis in this approach is on the word 'choice', something that no other operating system provides in such a complete way as the AmigaDE.
Amiga is hard at work on the next version of the Software Development Kit (SDK) which allows developers a glimpse of more capabilities of the AmigaDE and introduces the multimedia services for the first time. This will ensure an abundance of content when the AmigaDE makes its first appearances in the consumer market.
The AmigaOS, Amiga's other new product is intended to become the server core for Digital Living. This will be built up from the existing base provided by AmigaOS 3.9, the latest version of the venerable but neglected AmigaOS that started its life in 1984.
The current AmigaOS, version 3.9 runs on the old AA hardware which, while advanced for its time, is now showing its age. After much discussion with the existing Amiga community, Amiga released the zico specification. Zico is an open description of hardware that Amiga encourages IHVs to use, and which provides a requirement for the first version of AmigaOS4, OS4.0 to run on. This provides such features as a PPC processor, PCI, AGP, USB, Firewire and other features standard in other computers but are new to the AmigaOS.
PPC was chosen both because it continues the relationship of Amiga with the Motorola processor family, and because with the Book E specifications, the PPC family now offers a very easy migration path from 32 bit to 64 bit processors.
All of these hardware facilities are required to provide a first step towards the physical requirements that the new AmigaOS will have in its role of a next generation digital server. A clean implementation, with no performance losses due to being tied to the older AA systems, means full access to what the user pays for and a far better performance all around.
Amiga is also aware that during the past five years, third party companies contributed to the extension of the Amiga AA platform by providing PPC accelerator cards in ingenious implementations to increase processor power past the discontinued 68k series. In considering the design of OS4, much thought was given as to whether it should also run on those cards. While Amiga had a great willingness to reward the owners of those cards for the loyalty they have shown to the Amiga, it was also painfully aware that many of the implementations were done in such a way that, while adding performance to the AA Amigas, the details of the implementations would be antagonistic to the performance of a new version of the OS, slowing it down and, in some cases, crippling it.
Given that AmigaOS4 is the first step on the road to a product in which performance will be of paramount importance, it was decided that there would have to be a clean break. This was done with the zico specification and, because of the clean nature of that specification, the first zico compliant device, the Eyetech AmigaOne - the first, new Amiga certified hardware in over five years - has been designed in record time and will soon be available for shipping.
However, Amiga is still mindful of the thousands of loyal users and developers who have invested significantly in the PPC accelerators. Amiga is looking to offer an opportunity for third parties to create a software compatibility layer that can map the clean OS4 to these PPC accelerators.
AmigaOS4 itself will move the existing 68K-based OS3.9 to a PPC implementation. By order of impact upon user experience, each library and module is being examined and re-implemented in such a way as to take maximum advantage of the new zico standard motherboards and their sub system cards. This is a gradual process and will be spread out over a few releases of the operating system. Consequently, the first release (OS4.0) will contain a mixture of native PPC and 68K code which will run through a high speed PPC 68K emulator. As further releases come out, the proportion of PPC code to 68K code will increase until the OS no longer needs to run any emulated code within itself.
In addition AmigaOS4 will also open up the capabilities of the zico standard, providing USB, Firewire and full access to the PCI and AGP world of plug in system cards. Amiga users will be able to take full advantage of the very latest in graphics,audio and networking technologies
Most importantly, AmigaOS4 will see the first introduction of the AmigaDE for existing Amigans, with it running co-operatively on top of the Operating System, and then slowly being integrated until, with the release of AmigaOS5, both will effectively merge to become one.
AmigaOS4 will not only be able to run existing AmigaOS applications (this requires an Eyetech AmigaOne with a AA system attached to it to provide the AA chipset), but also new AmigaOS4 applications. In addition, the presence of the AmigaDE means that AmigaOS users will also have access to the growing volume of AmigaDE applications, able to take full advantage of its host (one of the advantages of Amiga owning its own host) and as a side benefit, they also have access to the large volume of Java applications, since the AmigaDE also provides a high efficiency Java solution.
In one go, Amigans, both users and developers will go from a small, isolated platform to one that reaches across the AmigaOS, AmigaDE and Java worlds, providing an abundance of content and a huge increase in market potential for developers. They can either develop for the AmigaDE, in which case they have a large market opportunity that spreads far beyond the number of AmigaOS users or they can concentrate on the AmigaOS and take maximum advantage of the advanced features of both the new hardware and the new OS. Again, the emphasis is on choice.
The ultimate purpose of the AmigaOS product is to reach AmigaOS5, where all the services required by the digital core product set will be finally implemented. This includes brand new and, in some cases, revolutionary new services that will put the AmigaOS firmly out in front once again. These are being developed internally by Amiga in parallel with the AmigaOS4 product set and will be available later in 2002. More details will be released as the work progresses.
For those requiring a small taster, there follows a preliminary feature list and version schedule. All things are subject to change. The first release of AmigaOS4 is targeted for Summer (in the Northern Hemisphere), with further releases every six months.
AmigaOS 4
AmigaOS4 represents Amiga taking control of the AmigaOS and reinvigorating it as it drives it forwards as an integral part of the Amiga Digital Environment.
The purpose of the AmigaOS4 family of releases is to;
This project will be accomplished via a staged set of releases which allow Amiga Inc to build from the bottom up. This gives developers the maximum increase in performance across the releases and ensures that the users can look forwards to regular and better products rather than having to wait over a long and frustrating period of time until something is in their hands.
AmigaOS 4.0
AmigaOS4.0 is the first release of AmigaOS4. It provides the first stage on the road to a PPC AmigaOS designed to take full advantage of the potential of the zico based computers being developed.
It is designed to take the key elements of the current AmigaOS and reimplement them as PPC native systems, providing for the biggest increase in performance. The remaining elements will be left as 68k code for this release and be executed via a PPC 68k emulator, which will also be used for the execution of 68k based application code. In addition, it will add new features that have never before been available in the AmigaOS.
The feature set for OS4.0 will include;
All other AmigaOS libraries will remain as 68k executables and be executed by ExecPPC via the 68K emulator
AmigaOS 4.2
AmigaOS4.2 will build upon the foundation of AmigaOS4. It is designed to;
The feature set for AmigaOS4.2 includes;
AmigaOS 4.5
AmigaOS4.5 represents the final stage in the creation of a native PPC OS. Its tasks include;
AmigaOS 5
AmigaOS5 represents a revolution in the development of 'other' operating systems and the evolution of the AmigaOS as it seeks to provide the best way forwards for users and developers. Its feature set includes;
