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An Amiga Earthquake
by Paul Sadlik

This May will easily go down as the busiest month in the Amiga world this decade. During the middle of month, the London World of Amiga was the epicenter of an Amiga Incorporated earthquake. Jeff Schindler, the Amiga Inc. General Manager, announced plans for an all new super Amiga to be delivered at the end of next year. By month's end in Toronto, Jeff, Joe Torre and the new AI Head of Development, Allan Havemose, were at the International Amiga show filling in many of the gaps left by the London news.

How high does the Richter scale go?

Friday, May 15th, AI sponsored a couple of conferences - for developers and the public - where they revealed plans for a super Amiga intended to restore the our computer to the stature the original held in 1985. The new, yet to be announced hyper-powerful, multimedia Amiga features the following specs:

• Five to ten times the processing power of a 300 mHz peecee.
  
• Integral 3D multimedia engine capable of outputting 1.2GB of data per second, supporting:
  
  • Throughput of 400million 24 bit pixels per second.
    
  • Decoding up to three or four MPEG video streams simultaneously.
    
  • Live video remapping into a 3D environment.
    
  • 6 channel 16 bit surround sound thru-put.
    
• Below $500 convergence system price.
  
• Amiga OS Version 5 with:
  
  • Memory protected, scalable symmetric-multi-processing using a new third-party kernel.
    
  • New GUI system with use dependent "personalities" and hardware retargetability.
    
  • Unified rendering system (including outline fonts) for screen and printer output.
    
  • Integral Internet and Java support.

Of course, this all means a bit of work and a few changes for us. Jeff Schindler has reported that their development effort has been approved for the next four or so years. AI is in the process of completing negotiations to determine the kernel to be used. In stages over the next three to six months, AI will be announcing the components for the new Amiga platform.

While silicon for the new chips is finalized; a controversial, interim "OS 4" platform for cross-development was also announced: based on the peecee. This raised some of the loudest complaints from the Amiga community. Later, it was explained that the tight time schedule for this hardware demanded sticking close to existing development tools that ran on either peecee boxes, macs or SGI workstations. Using peecee hardware made for the cheapest, most expedient solution.

Spin Control

Needless to say, London's announcements were a shock to everyone. On one hand, developers were aghast at the thought of starting on a whole new platform - needing new hardware and software. On the other, the specifications for the new platform sound impressive. Wrapped in a tight, new Amiga operating system, we may look forward to many more years of honest computing.

Before the end of the show, meetings were being held by some of the forces behind current Amiga-PowerPC development to consider their future. Out of that came the news that the formerly feuding German developers - Haage & Partner and Phase5 - were going to bury the hatchet between themselves and negotiate with AI over a PowerPC version of the new Amiga. AI responded that they would be glad to assist the companies working on a parallel PowerPC-based Amiga solution. More talks are to be held during the next couple of weeks to determine what they will do.
In Toronto, discussions with Allan Havemose revealed a few more details regarding the AI plans. Initially, the OS4 or "Bridge" systems were only to be released to developers. Recognizing the lack of distinction between the Amiga's technically literate users and its developers, AI decided to make the development systems publicly available. While based on x86 (not Intel, apparently) hardware, the machines would not be hobbled any Microsoft software. The machines will rely on "Amiga Classic" cards for "Classic Amiga" compatibility and run a beta Amiga OS4 operating system as it is developed. In other words, these are certainly not machines for your kids to play Lemmings on. Finally, the OS4 API is intended to be as close as possible to the OS5 for the super Amiga hardware.

While presented with the increased hardware power, AI is looking at whole new user interface paradigms for these operating systems. Thought provoking mock ups were shown of an animated 3D interface, as well as other interchangable "personalities" suited more towards set top box, video or "convergence" usage, etc.

Which finally points to some of the markets that AI is hoping to target with their revolutionary Amiga hardware and OS: the "digital convergence" market. This crossroads was described as someplace between existing televisions and computers. That could include the set top boxes the CDTV and VisCorp were aiming at, game consoles that the CD32 looked towards, or even more integrated, "intelligent" appliances where the computer is just a ghost inside the machine. In all of those cases, the presence of a tight, fast and flexible operating system, such as that of the Amiga, would be required to best take advantage of inexpensive hardware needed.

From there out, AI spoke of desktop systems and video work stations that would use the scalability and flexibility of the new chips and Amiga OS to maintain the qualities that define our machines today. Dr Allan Havemose's history as Commodore's Director of Systems Software (responsible for every OS since 2.0) would lead one to believe he has a good idea of what under the hood makes our machines special. Indeed, he was responsible for bringing us nifty things like datatypes, the classes system and Multiview. By starting the new operating system on one hardware platform and transferring it to the destination platform, Allan also stated that he also expected to reap additional gains in hardware portability.

Aftershocks

Throughout the Toronto show, I talked with users and developers to read their impressions of these new systems. The presence of an X86 platform anywhere in the mix worried many Amigans. The thought of starting over on a new platform bears a remarkable resemblance to the jump many made from the Commodore C64 to the Amiga 1000. After years of hardship with no new Amiga development, few new machine sales and ongoing expenses, some developers expressed doubts that they could support a costly switch to the new Amiga platform. Such a jump would require a year of work before any returns were generated. This news will undoubtedly lead to a whole new thinning of the weaker Amiga developers.

On the other hand, other developers were much more optimistic. They had already made a decision to stay with the Amiga platform with its pros and cons. They knew that the new platform was going to require a huge investment on their parts, but a jump to any platform would require such an effort. Still, staying meant avoiding the HUGE development, marketing and distribution costs of the peecee world (try starting at $500,000 to get an app seen by anyone), missing the opportunity to get trampled by MicroSloth and being in an actual community with bonds between users and developers. Getting through the next year, developers were looking forward to again having world beating hardware to really make their products shine.

Certainly, it seemed clear to everyone that this next year was going to be much different than the last four have been. In St. Louis, Jeff Schindler said that we still had a way to go through the valley to the other side. At least now we have begun to see some cool, alpine peaks ahead of us.