Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup/Recovery

Jim Collas, Amiga's president, has just released his briefing about the future of the platform. Products under development include the Amiga Operating Environment and the Amiga Multimedia Convergence Computer (Amiga MCC). The former is a distributed software architecture which will provide support for pervasive networking, and a framework for portable applications to access Internet content and services. The Amiga MCC, on the other hand, will be distributed as an integrated multimedia convergence computer as well as a standard ATX motherboard. Both will include the Amiga operating environment, an underlying OS and support for DVD, 3D graphics, and broadband and home networking features. Collas said Amiga has chosen Java as its primary programming language for portable apps based on AmigaObjects -- a component system for building applications. AmigaObject technology can be embedded in machines from handhelds up to big servers, Collas claimed. He said that Amiga has evaluated a range of operating systems including QNX, BeOS, JavaOS and Linux. After comparing QNX and Linux, Amiga concluded that it would be hard for the former to attract broad industry support, because it is proprietary. Collas said: "Linux is probably the most stable OS in the market." Despite size and scaleability concerns, he said that Amiga was "subsetting" Linux to meet its needs. He pointed to a Linux version for the Palm Pilot as an example of what could be done. Amiga will adopt OpenGL and it will use the latest Linux X Window windowing system. It will support Prixim's 2.4GHz digital wireless networking and will also adopt Sun's Jini technology. Pentagram will do the industrial design for the Amiga MCC, said Collas. Collas said that Amiga has adopted "a very exciting CPU" for the MCC platform, highly tuned for a Linux/Java software base. But he won't tell us what it is. In the past, he's said it won't be an x86 CPU. So is it a Transmeta chip? ®

Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup/Recovery