At AmiWest, the annual Amiga convention in October, keynote speaker Trevor Dickinson, who is a founding shareholder of A-EON Technology, presented a new line of Amiga motherboards. The Cyrus Plus motherboard, a successor to the AmigaONE X1000, will be built around the dual core QorIQ processors, and will range from 32 bit .5 GHz to 64 bit 2.4 GHz. Those will be the P3 and P5, respectively; the naming left up to a straw poll of enthusiasts on naming options for the new machines. In addition, through a partnership with Ultra Electronics Varisys, Amiga is planning to invest $1.2 million (USD) in Amiga hardware in a plan to develop future computers for the company.
Other announcements at the gathering included that Libre Office will continue to be ported to AmigaOS, and support for the NTFS file system used by most Windows platforms is in the works. A project to produce an Amiga laptop, announced two years ago, has been affirmed as dead due to difficulties with cost efficiency.
The release date for AmigaOS 4.2 is yet to be determined, and Amiga has not ruled out updates to the current version 4.1. According to Amigaworld, Steven Solie, AmigaOS4 Team Lead, said that one of their biggest hurdles “is getting the AmigaOS Exec-kernel to support multiple CPU cores. As part of the process, a new so called ‘scheduler’ is being implemented. The new scheduler is apparently already running in the current, internal builds of AmigaOS although Steven suggested there will be room for improvement and optimizations prior to an official release.” There also are plans to put forth the “Gallium3D WinSys API for hardware accelerated 3D graphics.”
The Amiga system is commonly known as a niche product for enthusiasts. The original Amiga, the Amiga 1000, was a personal computer first released in 1985. Since its inception, it has attracted and maintained a following of loyal users.
