Amiga goes POWER PC (TM)

Bensheim 07/11/95

During his key note address held in Los Angeles at the Video Toaster Expo, Petro Tyschtschenko, CEO and President of Amiga Technologies officially announced the Power PC to be the processor used in the future generation of Amiga computers.

The first POWER AMIGA will be available 1st quarter 1997 and will feature the Power PC 604 RISC CPU. Further models will be available later in the entry-level, as well as in the mid-range.

The Power Amigas will be backwards compatible with current models and will also feature a new and more powerful chipset.

"Our pre-emptive multitasking Operating System AmigaOS will be ported to the Power PC platform first. Our goal is to make our OS hardware independent to allow further ports on other platforms", said Petro Tyschtschenko.

He also added: "We have a clear business plan: We do things consequently, step by step. First, we ramped up the production and set up an organisation to handle the Amiga market and satisfy the demand. Now that we have achieved this successfully, we focus on research & development to bring new and better products on the market. One of the mistakes the former Commodore made, was to do too many things at a time, too many promises and therefore losing focus on important aspects of its business. We have learned from these mistakes and won't repeat them. Commitments and promises are nice but facts are better."

The developments will also focus on including more features in the AmigaOS, especially regarding network abilities and memory management.

The development of the native RISC AmigaOS will be made internally at Amiga Technologies. An R&D department is currently being set up in Bensheim with sufficient engineers to meet the announced schedules. Former well known Commodore engineers as well as new competencies will join the team in Bensheim this year.

This development project will also be involving a dozen companies in close partnership with Amiga Technologies GmbH.

More good news for all Amiga users: The Power PC technology will not only be available for new Power Amigas. Thanks to a close co-operation between Amiga Technologies and Phase V, a German turbo board manufacturer, a full range of Power PC boards will also be available for the A1200, A3000 and A4000 series.

This will allow a general migration of the Amiga platform towards Power PC in a short time, also for current models.

First Power PC boards for current Amigas will be available before end of 1996.

Amiga Technologies will be flexible in licensing the RISC Operating System as before so that a global solution will be available for all above mentioned Amiga computers. This is especially important for the foreseeable partnerships.

The 68060 board for the Amiga 4000 T will be available during the first quarter of 1996 and will provide the power needed by applications like 3D rendering software, compilers and high-end graphics software.

During 1996, new 68K based entry-level models will be available. These Amigas will be based on the A1200 platform, with faster processors, more memory expansion capacity and CD ROM expansion.

Amiga Technologies is a 100% subsidiary of the ESCOM AG and is based in Bensheim, Germany.

You are welcome on our WEB page for more information at http://www.amiga.de.

CONTACT:

Gilles Bourdin
AMIGA Technologies
Berliner Ring 89
D-64625 Bensheim
Germany

Tel +49 6252 709 195
Fax +49 6252 709 520

eMail: gbo@amiga.de
Amiga is a registered trademark of ESCOM AG
POWER PC is a registered trademark of IBM corporation