PowerUP boards were dual-processor accelerator boards designed by Phase5 Digital Products for Amiga computers. They had two different processors, a Motorola 68000 series (68k) and a PowerPC , working in parallel, sharing the complete address space of the Amiga computer system.
111-621: In 1995, Amiga Technologies GmbH announced they were going to port AmigaOS to PowerPC. As part of their Power Amiga plan, Amiga Technologies was going to launch new Power Amiga models using the PowerPC 604e reduced instruction set computer (RISC) CPU and in cooperation with Amiga Technologies Phase5 would release AmigaOS 4-compatible PowerPC accelerator boards for old Amiga 1200 , Amiga 3000 and Amiga 4000 models. However, in 1996 Amiga Technologies' parent company ESCOM entered into deep financial problems and could not support Amiga development. Due to
222-547: A magic number . The native Amiga windowing system is called Intuition , which handles input from the keyboard and mouse and rendering of screens, windows and widgets . Prior to AmigaOS 2.0, there was no standardized look and feel , application developers had to write their own non-standard widgets. Commodore added the GadTools library and BOOPSI in AmigaOS 2.0, both of which provided standardized widgets. Commodore also published
333-492: A random-access memory (RAM) digital-to-analog converter (DAC, RAMDAC ) with a bandwidth of 230 MHz able to display resolutions with 80 Hz vertical refresh rate up to 1152×900 pixels at 24 bits, or 1600×1200 pixels at 16 bits. AmigaOS AmigaOS is a family of proprietary native operating systems of the Amiga and AmigaOne personal computers. It was developed first by Commodore International and introduced with
444-503: A "snapshot" of icons and windows so the icons will remain on the desktop at coordinates chosen by user and windows will open at the desired size. PowerPC 600#PowerPC 604e The PowerPC 600 family was the first family of PowerPC processors built. They were designed at the Somerset facility in Austin, Texas , jointly funded and staffed by engineers from IBM and Motorola as a part of
555-463: A 0.5 μm CMOS process with four levels of interconnect. The die was 85 mm large drawing 2.2 W at 80 MHz. The 603 architecture is the direct ancestor to the PowerPC 750 architecture, marketed by Apple as the PowerPC "G3". The 603 was intended to be used for portable Apple Macintosh computers but could not run 68K emulation software with performance Apple considered adequate, due to
666-540: A L2 cache that may have a capacity of 128 MB , and more powerful branch and load/store units that had more buffers, the 620 was very powerful. The branch history table was also larger and could dispatch more instructions so that the processor can handle out-of-order execution more efficiently than the 604. The floating-point unit was also enhanced compared to the 604. With a faster fetch cycle and support for several key instructions in hardware (like sqrt) made it, combined with faster and wider data buses, more efficient than
777-478: A big contribution it makes to the elegant design of system software. The Amiga has an excellent multitasking system, and I think it will have twice the product life of the Macintosh because of it. Exec is the multi-tasking kernel of AmigaOS. Exec provides functionality for multi-tasking, memory allocation, interrupt handling and handling of dynamic shared libraries . It acts as a scheduler for tasks running on
888-452: A blank disk by use of the install command. Some games and demos on floppy disk used custom bootblocks, which allowed them to take over the boot sequence and manage the Amiga's hardware without AmigaOS. The bootblock became an obvious target for virus writers. Some games or demos that used a custom bootblock would not work if infected with a bootblock virus, as the code of the virus replaced
999-666: A bridge chip). The bus later evolved into the GX bus of the POWER4 , and later GX+ and GX++ in POWER5 and POWER6 respectively. The GX bus is also used in IBM's z10 and z196 System z mainframes. The PowerPC 602 was a stripped-down version of PowerPC 603, specially made for game consoles by Motorola and IBM, introduced in February 1995. It has smaller L1 caches (4 KB instruction and 4 KB data),
1110-499: A die measuring 74 mm . The 601+ design was remapped from CMOS-4s to CMOS-5x by an IBM-only team. To avoid time-to-market delays from design tool changes and commonizing fab groundrules, both the 601 and 601+ were designed with IBM EDA tools on IBM systems and were fabricated in IBM-only facilities. The PowerPC 603 was the first processor implementing the complete 32-bit PowerPC Architecture as specified. Introduced in 1994, it
1221-490: A floppy, the system reads the first two sectors of the disk (the bootblock ), and executes any boot instructions stored there. Normally this code passes control back to the OS (invoking AmigaDOS and the GUI) and using the disk as the system boot volume. Any such disk, regardless of the other contents of the disk, was referred to as a "boot disk" or "bootable disk". A bootblock could be added to
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#17328550041841332-427: A four-stage pipeline and five execution units: integer unit, floating-point unit, branch prediction unit , load/store unit and a system registry unit. It has separate 8 KB L1 caches for instructions and data and a 32/64 bit 60x memory bus, reaching up to 120 MHz at 3.8 V. The 603 core did not have hardware support for SMP . The PowerPC 603 had 1.6 million transistors and was fabricated by IBM and Motorola in
1443-478: A handler has been written, a possibility that has been exploited by programs like CrossDOS and by a few "alternative" file systems to the standard OFS and FFS . These file systems allow one to add new features like journaling or file privileges , which are not found in the standard operating system. Handlers typically expose a device name to the DOS , which can be used to access the peripheral (if any) associated with
1554-457: A lack of resources, the PowerPC project at Amiga Technologies stalled and Phase5 had to launch accelerators without a PowerPC-native AmigaOS. As a stopgap solution, a new PowerUP kernel was created allowing new PPC-native software run parallel with 68k Amiga OS. To complicate things even further, former Commodore International chief engineer Dave Haynie questioned Phase5's plans to develop PowerPC boards without Amiga Technologies: "Their approach on
1665-445: A lower energy consumption. The die was 47 mm small manufactured on a 0.25 μm CMOS process with five levels of interconnect, and drew 6 W at 250 MHz. It operated at speeds between 250 and 400 MHz and supported a memory bus up to 100 MHz. While Apple dropped the 604ev in 1998 in favor for the PowerPC 750 , IBM kept using it in entry-level models of its RS/6000 computers for several years. The PowerPC 620
1776-552: A new Amiga OS-compatible operating system. Wolf Dietrich (managing director of phase5) earlier commented that "we found that Amiga Technologies offers us no sort of outlook or basis for developing into the future". There is no detailed information about how many PowerPC accelerator boards Phase5 (and later DCE ) sold. According to Ralph Schmidt in an AmigActive article featuring MorphOS , there were about 10,000 people using Phase5 PowerPC accelerator boards. The unofficial PowerUP support page estimates similar figures. PowerUP kernel
1887-420: A separate physical organization. Standard assigns that are generally present in an AmigaOS system include: AmigaOS 4 introduced new system for allocating RAM and defragmenting it "on the fly" during system inactivities. It is based on slab allocation method and there is also present a memory pager that arbitrates paging memory and allows the swapping of large portions of physical RAM on mass storage devices as
1998-483: A single-precision floating-point unit and a scaled back branch prediction unit. It was offered at speeds ranging from 50 to 80 MHz, and drew 1.2 W at 66 MHz. It consisted of 1 million transistors and it was 50 mm large manufactured in a 0.5 μm, CMOS process with four levels of interconnect. 3DO developed the M2 game console that used two PowerPC 602, but it was never marketed. On October 21, 1996,
2109-466: A sort of virtual memory . Co-operative paging was finally implemented in AmigaOS 4.1 . Since the introduction of AmigaOS in 1985 there have been four major versions and several minor revisions. Up until release 3.1 of the Amiga's operating system, Commodore used Workbench to refer to the entire Amiga operating system. As a consequence Workbench was commonly used to refer to both the operating system and
2220-708: A standard RAM disk but can maintain its contents on soft restart. It is commonly called the RAD disk after its default device name, and it can be used as a boot disk (with boot sector). Previously, a recoverable RAM disk, commonly called the ASDG RRD or VD0 , was introduced in 1987; at first, it was locked to ASDG expansion memory products. Later, the ASDG RRD was added to the Fred Fish series of freeware, shareware, and public domain software (disks 58 and 241 ). The AmigaOS has support for
2331-406: A user-selected audio device, standardized functionality for audio recording and efficient software mixing routines for combining multiple sound channels, thus overcoming the four-channel hardware limit of the original Amiga chipset. AHI can be installed separately on AmigaOS v2.0 and later. AmigaOS itself did not support MIDI until version 3.1, when Roger Dannenberg's camd.library was adapted as
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#17328550041842442-632: A variety of RS/6000 workstations and SMP servers from IBM and Groupe Bull . IBM was the sole manufacturer of the 601 and 601+ microprocessors in its Burlington, Vermont and East Fishkill, New York production facilities. The 601 used the IBM CMOS-4s process and the 601+ used the IBM CMOS-5x process. An extremely small number of these 601 and 601+ processors were relabeled with Motorola logos and part numbers and distributed through Motorola. These facts are somewhat obscured given there are various pictures of
2553-476: A variety of design flaws, some of them severe, related to other aspects of the computers' design, including networking performance and stability, bus problems (width, speed, contention, and complexity), ROM bugs, and hard disk performance. None of the problems of the 5200 line, aside from 68K emulation performance, were inherently due to the 603. Rather, the processor was retrofitted to be used with 68K motherboards and other obsolete parts. The site Low End Mac rates
2664-808: Is a single-user operating system based on a preemptive multitasking kernel , called Exec . It includes an abstraction of the Amiga's hardware, a disk operating system called AmigaDOS , a windowing system API called Intuition , and a desktop environment and file manager called Workbench . The Amiga intellectual property is fragmented between Amiga Inc. , Cloanto, and Hyperion Entertainment . The copyrights for works created up to 1993 are owned by Cloanto. In 2001, Amiga Inc. contracted AmigaOS 4 development to Hyperion Entertainment, and in 2009 they granted Hyperion an exclusive, perpetual, worldwide license to AmigaOS 3.1 in order to develop and market AmigaOS 4 and subsequent versions. MorphOS and AROS Research Operating System are modern implementations of
2775-405: Is a 32- or 64-bit 60x bus that operates at clock rates up to 50 MHz. The PowerPC 604 contains 3.6 million transistors and was fabricated by IBM and Motorola with a 0.5 μm CMOS process with four levels of interconnect. The die measured 12.4 mm by 15.8 mm (196 mm ) and drew 14-17 W at 133 MHz. It operated at speeds between 100 and 180 MHz. The PowerPC 604e
2886-427: Is a multitasking kernel developed by Ralph Schmidt for Phase5 PowerPC accelerator boards. The kernel ran alongside the AmigaOS where PPC and 68k native software could run parallel. The PowerUP kernel used Executable and Linkable Format (ELF) as the executable format and supported runtime linking, relocations and custom sections; it used GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) as its default compiler. This caused controversy in
2997-495: Is a negative offset to the library base pointer. That way, every library function can be patched or hooked at run-time, even if the library is stored in ROM. The core library of AmigaOS is the exec.library ( Exec ), which provides an interface to functions of the Amiga's microkernel . Device drivers are also libraries, but they implement a standardized interface. Applications do not usually call devices directly as libraries, but use
3108-467: Is also integrated into the system, though it also is entirely window-based. The CLI and Workbench components share the same privileges. Notably, AmigaOS lacks any built-in memory protection . AmigaOS is formed from two parts, namely, a firmware component called Kickstart and a software portion usually referred to as Workbench . Up until AmigaOS 3.1, matching versions of Kickstart and Workbench were typically released together. However, since AmigaOS 3.5,
3219-547: Is sometimes called PowerPC 603ev . The 603e and 603ev have 2.6 million transistors each and are 98 mm and 78 mm large respectively. The 603ev draws a maximum of 6 W at 300 MHz. The PowerPC 603e was the first mainstream desktop processor to reach 300 MHz, as used in the Power Macintosh 6500 . The 603e was also used in accelerator cards from Phase5 for the Amiga line of computers, with CPUs ranging in speeds from 160 to 240 MHz. The PowerPC 603e
3330-526: Is still sold today by IBM and Freescale, and others like Atmel and Honeywell who makes the radiation hardened variant RHPPC . The PowerPC 603e was also the heart of the BeBox from Be Inc. The BeBox is notable since it is a multiprocessing system, something the 603 wasn't designed for. IBM also used PowerPC 603e processors in the IBM ThinkPad 800 series . In certain digital oscilloscope series, LeCroy used
3441-539: Is the native graphical file manager and desktop environment of AmigaOS. Though the term Workbench was originally used to refer to the entire operating system, with the release of AmigaOS 3.1 the operating system was renamed AmigaOS and subsequently Workbench refers to the desktop manager only. As the name suggests, the metaphor of a workbench is used, rather than that of a desktop; directories are depicted as drawers , executable files are tools , data files are projects and GUI widgets are gadgets . In many other aspects
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3552-592: Is the use of multiple screens shown on the same display. Each screen may have a different video resolution or color depth. AmigaOS 2.0 added support for public screens , allowing applications to open windows on other applications' screens. Prior to AmigaOS 2.0, only the Workbench screen was shared. A widget in the top-right corner of every screen allows screens to be cycled through. Screens can be overlaid by dragging each up or down by their title bars. AmigaOS 4 introduced screens that are draggable in any direction. Workbench
3663-461: The AIM alliance . Somerset was opened in 1992 and its goal was to make the first PowerPC processor and then keep designing general purpose PowerPC processors for personal computers . The first incarnation became the PowerPC 601 in 1993, and the second generation soon followed with the PowerPC 603, PowerPC 604 and the 64-bit PowerPC 620. The PowerPC 601 was the first generation of microprocessors to support
3774-429: The Amiga 2000 line of computers. The card never got past the prototype stage and hence never released to the public. Also known as Blizzard 603e, this accelerator board was designed for the Amiga 1200 and plugged into the trapdoor slot. It used a low cost, low end PowerPC 603e processor designed for portable and embedded use. This accelerator board was designed for the Amiga 3000 and Amiga 4000. The accelerator board
3885-493: The Amiga User Interface Style Guide , which explained how applications should be laid out for consistency. Stefan Stuntz created a popular third-party widget library, based on BOOPSI, called Magic User Interface , or MUI. MorphOS uses MUI as its official toolkit, while AROS uses a MUI clone called Zune . AmigaOS 3.5 added another widget set, ReAction , also based on BOOPSI. An unusual feature of AmigaOS
3996-447: The Crusoe processor. With progress having been demonstrated in the development of dynamic translation software, such as Digital's FX!32 technology, skepticism was expressed about dedicating hardware resources to running foreign binaries when such resources could be used to improve native performance instead, this also benefiting the performance of translated binaries. "PowerPC 625" was
4107-551: The Python language is included with the operating system. John C. Dvorak stated in 1996: The AmigaOS "remains one of the great operating systems of the past 20 years, incorporating a small kernel and tremendous multitasking capabilities the likes of which have only recently been developed in OS/2 and Windows NT . The biggest difference is that the AmigaOS could operate fully and multitask in as little as 250 K of address space. Even today,
4218-630: The Rexx language, called ARexx (short for "Amiga Rexx"), and is a script language which allows for full OS scripting, similar to AppleScript ; intra-application scripting, similar to VBA in Microsoft Office ; as well as inter-program communication. Having a single scripting language for any application on the operating system is beneficial to users, instead of having to learn a new language for each application. Programs can listen on an "ARexx port" for string messages. These messages can then be interpreted by
4329-453: The disk operating system portion of the AmigaOS. This includes file systems , file and directory manipulation, the command-line interface , file redirection, console windows, and so on. Its interfaces offer facilities such as command redirection , piping , scripting with structured programming primitives, and a system of global and local variables . In AmigaOS 1.x, the AmigaDOS portion
4440-494: The exec.library I/O functions to indirectly access them. Like libraries, devices are either files on disk (with the " .device " extension), or stored in the Kickstart ROM. The higher-level part of device and resource management is controlled by handlers , which are not libraries, but tasks , and communicate by passing messages. One type of handler is a filesystem handler. The AmigaOS can make use of any filesystem for which
4551-517: The fabless semiconductor company Quantum Effect Devices (QED) announced a PowerPC 603-compatible processor named " PowerPC 603q " at the Microprocessor Forum . Despite its name, it did not have anything in common with any other 603. It was a from the ground up implementation of the 32-bit PowerPC architecture targeted at the high-end embedded market developed over two years. As such, it was small, simple, energy efficient, but powerful; equaling
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4662-479: The narrator.device' s phonemes, Francesco Devitt developed an unofficial version with multilingual speech synthesis. This made use of an enhanced version of the translator.library which could translate a number of languages into phonemes, given a set of rules for each language. The AmigaOS has a dynamically sized RAM disk , which resizes itself automatically to accommodate its contents. Starting with AmigaOS 2.x, operating system configuration files were loaded into
4773-493: The native Amiga graphics chipset , via graphics.library , which provides an API for geometric primitives , raster graphic operations and handling of sprites. As this API could be bypassed, some developers chose to avoid OS functionality for rendering and directly program the underlying hardware for gains in efficiency. Third-party graphics cards were initially supported via proprietary unofficial solutions. A later solution where AmigaOS could directly support any graphics system,
4884-525: The phonemes used in American English , translator.library , which translates English text to American English phonemes using a set of rules, and a high-level SPEAK: handler, which allows command-line users to redirect text output to speech. A utility called Say was included with the OS, which allowed text-to-speech synthesis with some control of voice and speech parameters. A demo was also included with AmigaBASIC programming examples. Speech synthesis
4995-459: The "Motorola MPC601", particularly one specific case of masterful Motorola marketing where the 601 was named one of Time Magazine ' s 1994 "Products of the Year" with a Motorola marking. An updated version, the PowerPC 601v or PowerPC 601+ , operating at 90 to 120 MHz was introduced in 1994. It was fabricated in a newer 0.5 μm CMOS process with four levels of interconnect, resulting in
5106-471: The 88110 bus as the basis for the 60x bus helped schedules in a number of ways. It helped the Apple Power Macintosh team by reducing the amount of redesign of their support ASICs and it reduced the amount of time required for the processor designers and architects to propose, document, negotiate, and close a new bus interface (successfully avoiding the "Bus Wars" expected by the 601 management team if
5217-445: The 88110 bus or the previous RSC buses hadn't been adopted). Worthy to note is that accepting the 88110 bus for the benefit of Apple's efforts and the alliance was at the expense of the first IBM RS/6000 system design team's efforts who had their support ASICs already implemented around the RSC's totally different bus structure. This 60x bus later became a fairly long lived basic interface for
5328-401: The Amiga chipset and some core OS components. It will then examine connected boot devices and attempt to boot from the one with the highest boot priority. If no boot device is present a screen will be displayed asking the user to insert a boot disk, typically a floppy disk. At start-up Kickstart attempts to boot from a bootable device (typically, a floppy disk or hard disk drive). In the case of
5439-473: The Amiga clone Draco from the German firm Macrosystem. Modern PCI bus TV expansion cards and their capture interfaces are supported through tv.library by Elbox Computer and tvcard.library by Guido Mersmann. Following modern trends in evolution of graphical interfaces, AmigaOS 4.1 uses the 3D hardware-accelerated Porter-Duff image composition engine. Prior to version 3.5, AmigaOS only officially supported
5550-415: The Amiga community when developers thought that phase5 was bringing "too Unixish stuff" to Amiga. It was feared that PowerUP kernel introducing shared objects and dynamic linking would replace the original shared library model and shared objects were indeed adapted into AmigaOS. Another controversy was caused by different designs and purposes of Blizzard PPC and Cyberstorm PPC boards. The Blizzard PPC
5661-459: The Amiga is well known for its ability to easily genlock with video, it has no built-in video capture interface. The Amiga supported a vast number of third-party interfaces for video capture from American and European manufacturers. There were internal and external hardware solutions, called frame-grabbers, for capturing individual or sequences of video frames, including: Newtronic Videon, Newtek DigiView, Graffiti external 24-bit framebuffer ,
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#17328550041845772-427: The Amiga's native sound chip , via audio.device . This facilitates playback of sound samples on four DMA -driven 8-bit PCM sound channels. The only supported hardware sample format is signed linear 8-bit two's complement . Support for third-party audio cards was vendor-dependent, until the creation and adoption of AHI as a de facto standard. AHI offers improved functionality, such as seamless audio playback from
5883-451: The Amiga's operating system, such as Exec , Intuition , the core of AmigaDOS and functionality to initialize Autoconfig -compliant expansion hardware. Later versions of the Kickstart contained drivers for IDE and SCSI controllers, PC card ports and other built-in hardware. Upon start-up or reset the Kickstart performs a number of diagnostic and system checks and then initializes
5994-495: The Apple system design team was familiar with the I/O bus structure from Motorola's 88110 and this I/O bus implementation was well defined and documented, the 601 team adopted the bus technology to improve time to market. The bus was renamed the 60x bus once implemented on the 601. These Motorola (and a small number of Apple) designers joined over 120 IBM designers in creating the 601. Using
6105-492: The BCPL utilities and interfaces. ARP also provided one of the first standardized file requesters for the Amiga, and introduced the use of more friendly UNIX-style wildcard ( globbing ) functions in command-line parameters. Other innovations were an improvement in the range of date formats accepted by commands and the facility to make a command resident, so that it only needs to be loaded into memory once and remains in memory to reduce
6216-625: The Digilab, the Videocruncher, Firecracker 24, Vidi Amiga 12, Vidi Amiga 24-bit and 24RT (Real Time), Newtek Video Toaster , GVP Impact Vision IV24, MacroSystem VLab Motion and VLab PAR, DPS PAR (Personal Animation Recorder), VHI (Video Hardware Interface) by IOSPIRIT GmbH, DVE-10, etc. Some solutions were hardware plug-ins for Amiga graphics cards like the Merlin XCalibur module, or the DV module built for
6327-560: The FPU in the 604. The system bus was a wider and faster 128-bit memory bus called the 6XX bus . It was designed to be a system bus for multiprocessor systems where processors, caches, memory and I/O was to be connected, assisted by a system control chip. It supports both 32- and 64-bit PowerPC processors, memory addresses larger than 32 bits, and NUMA environments. It was also used in POWER3, RS64 and 601, as well as 604-based RS/6000 systems (with
6438-401: The OS is only about 1 MB in size. And to this day, there is very little a memory-hogging CD-ROM-loading OS can do the Amiga can't. Tight code — there's nothing like it. I've had an Amiga for maybe a decade. It's the single most reliable piece of equipment I've ever owned. It's amazing! You can easily understand why so many fanatics are out there wondering why they are alone in their love of
6549-519: The Performa 5200 as the worst Mac of all-time. The 603 found widespread use in different embedded appliances. The performance issues of the 603 were addressed in the PowerPC 603e . The L1 cache was enlarged and enhanced to 16 KB four-way set-associative data and instruction caches. The clock speed of the processors was doubled too, reaching 200 MHz. Shrinking the fabrication process to 350 nm allowed for speeds of up to 300 MHz. This part
6660-621: The PowerPC 603e as the main processor. The 603e processors also power all 66 satellites in the Iridium satellite phone fleet. The satellites each contain seven Motorola/Freescale PowerPC 603e processors running at roughly 200 MHz each. A custom 603e processor is also used in the Mark 54 Lightweight Torpedo . The PowerPC 603e core, renamed G2 by Freescale , is the basis for many embedded PowerQUICC II processors, and, as such, it keeps on being developed. Freescale's PowerQUICC II SoC processors bear
6771-465: The RAM disk on boot, greatly speeding operating system usage. Other files could be copied to the RAM disk like any standard device for quick modification and retrieval. Also beginning in AmigaOS 2.x, the RAM disk supported file-change notification, which was mostly used to monitor configuration files for changes. Starting with AmigaOS 1.3, there is also a fixed-capacity recoverable RAM disk, which functions as
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#17328550041846882-503: The basic 32-bit PowerPC instruction set . The design effort started in earnest in mid-1991 and the first prototype chips were available in October 1992. The first 601 processors were introduced in an IBM RS/6000 workstation in October 1993 (alongside its more powerful multichip cousin IBM POWER2 line of processors) and the first Apple Power Macintoshes on March 14, 1994. The 601 was
6993-499: The code needed to boot standard Amiga hardware and many of the core components of AmigaOS. The function of Kickstart is comparable to the BIOS plus the main operating system kernel in IBM PC compatibles . However, Kickstart provides more functionality available at boot time than would typically be expected on PC, for example, the full windowing environment. Kickstart contains many core parts of
7104-581: The completely different unified I/O bus structure and SMP/ memory coherency support. New PowerPC changes, leveraging the basic RSC structure was very beneficial to reducing the uncertainty in chip area/floorplanning and timing analysis/tuning. Worth noting is that the 601 not only implemented substantial new key functions such as SMP, but it also acted as a bridge between the POWER and the future PowerPC processors to assist IBM and software developers in their transitions to PowerPC. From start of design to tape-out of
7215-454: The cost of loading in subsequent uses. In AmigaOS 4.0 , the DOS abandoned the BCPL legacy completely and, starting from AmigaOS 4.1 , it has been rewritten with full 64-bit support. File extensions are often used in AmigaOS, but they are not mandatory and they are not handled specially by the DOS, being instead just a conventional part of the file names. Executable programs are recognized using
7326-563: The design leveraged a number of key technologies and project management strategies. The 601 team leveraged much of the basic structure and portions of the IBM RISC Single Chip (RSC) processor, but also included support for the vast majority of the new PowerPC instructions not in the POWER instruction set . While nearly every portion of the RSC design was modified, and many design blocks were substantially modified or completely redesigned given
7437-588: The designation MPC82xx, and come in a variety of configurations reaching 450 MHz. The G2 name is also used as a retronym for the 603e and 604 processors to align with the G3, G4, and the G5. Freescale has enhanced the 603e core, calling it e300 , in the PowerQUICC II Pro embedded processors. Larger 32/32 KB L1 caches and other performance enhancing measures were added. Freescale's PowerQUICC II Pro SoC processors bear
7548-541: The designation MPC83xx, and come in a variety of configurations reaching speeds up to 667 MHz. The e300 is also the core of the MPC5200B SoC processor that is used in the small EFIKA computer. The PowerPC 604 was introduced in December 1994 alongside the 603 and was designed as a high-performance chip for workstations and entry-level servers and as such had support for symmetric multiprocessing in hardware. The 604
7659-497: The die had an area of 311 mm . It operated at clock rates between 120 and 150 MHz, and drew 30 W at 133 MHz. A later model was built using a 0.35 μm process, enabling it to reach 200 MHz. The 620 was similar to the 604. It has a five-stage pipeline, same support for symmetric multiprocessing and the same number of execution units; a load/store unit, a branch unit, an FPU, and three integer units. With larger 32 KB instruction and data caches, support for
7770-453: The disk with name "Work" in drive DF0: , one could write " DF0:Foo/Bar " or " Work:Foo/Bar ". However, these are not completely equivalent, since when the latter form is used, the system knows that the wanted volume is "Work" and not just any volume in DF0: . Therefore, whenever a requested file on "Work" is being accessed without volume "Work" being present in any drive, it will say something to
7881-497: The early name for the Apache series 64-bit PowerPC processors, designed by IBM based on the "Amazon" PowerPC-AS instruction set. They were later renamed " RS64 ". The designation "PowerPC 625" was never used for the final processors. "PowerPC 630" was the early name for the high end 64-bit PowerPC processor, designed by IBM to unify the POWER and PowerPC instruction sets. It was later renamed " POWER3 ", probably to distinguish it from
7992-406: The effect of: Please insert volume Work in any drive . Programs often need to access files without knowing their physical location (either the drive or the volume): they only know the "logical path" of the file, i.e. whether the file is a library, a documentation file, a translation of the program's messages, and so on. This is solved in AmigaOS by the use of assigns . An assign follows, again,
8103-512: The file manager component. For end users Workbench was often synonymous with AmigaOS. From version 3.5 the OS was renamed "AmigaOS" and pre-3.5 versions were also retroactively referred to as "AmigaOS" (rather than Workbench). Subsequently, "Workbench" refers to the native graphical file manager only. From its inception, Workbench offered a highly customizable interface. The user could change the aspect of program icons replacing it with newer ones with different color combinations. Users could also take
8214-452: The first 601 prototype was just 12 months in order to push hard to establish PowerPC on the market early. In order to help the effort to rapidly incorporate the 88110 bus architecture to the 601 for the benefit of the alliance and its customers, Motorola management provided not only the 88110 bus architecture specifications, but also a handful of 88110 bus-literate designers to help with the 60x bus logic implementation and verification. Given
8325-532: The first advanced single-chip implementation of the POWER/PowerPC architecture designed on a crash schedule to establish PowerPC in the marketplace and cement the AIM alliance. In order to achieve an extremely aggressive schedule while including substantially new functionality (such as substantial performance enhancements, new instructions and importantly POWER/PowerPC's first symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) implementation)
8436-493: The first release after Commodore's demise, only the software component has been updated and the role of Kickstart has been diminished somewhat. Firmware updates may still be applied by patching at system boot. That was until 2018 when Hyperion Entertainment (license holder to AmigaOS 3.1) released AmigaOS 3.1.4 with an updated Kickstart ROM to go with it. Kickstart is the bootstrap firmware, usually stored in ROM . Kickstart contains
8547-433: The fourth generation PowerPC even though the architectural differences between "G3" and "G4" was small. There are hardly any sources confirming any of this though and it might be pure speculation, or a reference to a completely different processor. The " PowerPC 615 " is a PowerPC processor announced by IBM in 1994, but which never reached mass production . Its main feature was to incorporate an x86 core on die, thus making
8658-458: The handler. As an example of these concepts is the SPEAK: handler which could have text redirected to spoken speech, through the speech synthesis system. Device names are case insensitive (uppercase by convention) strings followed by a colon . After the colon a specifier can be added, which gives the handler additional information about what is being accessed and how . In the case of filesystem,
8769-414: The interface resembles Mac OS , with the main desktop showing icons of inserted disks and hard drive partitions, and a single menu bar at the top of every screen. Unlike the Macintosh mouse available at the time, the standard Amiga mouse has two buttons – the right mouse button operates the pull-down menus, with a "release to select" mechanism. Until the release of version 3, AmigaOS only natively supported
8880-461: The launch of the first Amiga, the Amiga 1000 , in 1985. Early versions of AmigaOS required the Motorola 68000 series of 16-bit and 32-bit microprocessors. Later versions, after Commodore's demise, were developed by Haage & Partner (AmigaOS 3.5 and 3.9) and then Hyperion Entertainment (AmigaOS 4.0-4.1). A PowerPC microprocessor is required for the most recent release, AmigaOS 4 . AmigaOS
8991-432: The many variants of the 601, 603, 604, G3 , G4 and Motorola/Freescale PowerQUICC processors. The chip was designed to suit a wide variety of applications and had support for external L2 cache and symmetric multiprocessing . It had four functional units, including a floating-point unit , an integer unit , a branch unit and a sequencer unit. The processor also included a memory management unit . The integer pipeline
9102-492: The more expensive 603e while drawing less power. It had an in-order, five-stage pipeline with a single integer unit, a double-precision floating-point unit (FPU) and separate 16 KB instruction and 8 KB data caches. While the integer unit was a brand new design, the FPU was derived from the R4600 to save time. It was 69 mm small using a 0.5 μm fabrication process and drew just 1.2 W at 120 MHz. The 603q
9213-407: The original AmigaOS that are compatible with it. AmigaOS is a single-user operating system based on a preemptive multitasking kernel , called Exec . AmigaOS provides an abstraction of the Amiga's hardware, a disk operating system called AmigaDOS, a windowing system API called Intuition and a desktop file manager called Workbench . A command-line interface (CLI), called AmigaShell,
9324-659: The original. The first such virus was the SCA virus . Anti-virus attempts included custom bootblocks. These amended bootblock advertised the presence of the virus checker while checking the system for tell-tale signs of memory-resident viruses and then passed control back to the system. Unfortunately these could not be used on disks that already relied on a custom bootblock, but did alert users to potential trouble. Several of them also replicated themselves across other disks, becoming little more than viruses in their own right. The Macintosh should have had multitasking. I can't stress enough what
9435-475: The processor able to natively process both PowerPC and x86 instructions. An operating system running on PowerPC 615 could either choose to execute 32-bit or 64-bit PowerPC instructions, 32-bit x86 instructions or a mix of three. Mixing instructions would involve a context switch in the CPU with a small overhead. The only operating systems that supported the 615 were Minix and a special development version of OS/2 . It
9546-453: The program in a similar fashion to a user pushing buttons. For example, an ARexx script run in an e-mail program could save the currently displayed email, invoke an external program which could extract and process information, and then invoke a viewer program. This allows applications to control other applications by sending data back and forth directly with memory handles, instead of saving files to disk and then reloading them. Since AmigaOS 4,
9657-542: The same syntax as a device name; however, it already points to a directory inside the filesystem. The place an assign points to can be changed at any time by the user (this behavior is similar to, but nevertheless distinct from, the subst command in MS-DOS , for example). Assigns were also convenient because one logical assign could point to more than one different physical location at the same time, thereby allowing an assign ′s contents to expand logically, while still maintaining
9768-535: The smaller processor caches. As a result, Apple chose to only use the 603 in its low-cost desktop Performa line. This caused the delay of the Apple PowerBook 5300 and PowerBook Duo 2300 , as Apple chose to wait for a processor revision. Apple's use of the 603 in the Performa 5200 line led to the processor getting a poor reputation. Aside from the issue of 68K emulation performance, the Performa machines shipped with
9879-420: The software front is kind of a hack, and on the hardware front it's just too much like the old Commodore; at best, they'll wind up with interesting, non-standard, and overpriced machines that can't keep up with the rapid changes in the industry." Nevertheless Phase5 had decided to go their own way and develop a PowerPC-based AmigaOS-compatible computer without Amiga Technologies. They also announced plans to write
9990-452: The specifier usually consists of a path to a file in the filesystem; for other handlers, specifiers usually set characteristics of the desired input/output channel (for the SER: serial port driver, for example, the specifier will contain bit rate , start and stop bits , etc.). Filesystems expose drive names as their device names. For example, DF0: by default refers to the first floppy drive in
10101-528: The standard MIDI API. Commodore's version of camd.library also included a built-in driver for the serial port. The later open source version of camd.library by Kjetil Matheussen did not provide a built-in driver for the serial port, but provided an external driver instead. AmigaOS was one of the first operating systems to feature speech synthesis with software developed by SoftVoice, Inc., which allowed text-to-speech conversion of American English . This had three main components: narrator.device , which modulates
10212-433: The system, providing pre-emptive multitasking with prioritized round-robin scheduling . Exec also provides access to other libraries and high-level inter-process communication via message passing . Other comparable microkernels have had performance problems because of the need to copy messages between address spaces. Since the Amiga has only one address space, Exec message passing is quite efficient. AmigaDOS provides
10323-430: The system. On many systems DH0: is used to refer to the first hard drive. Filesystems also expose volume names , following the same syntax as device names: these identify the specific medium in the file system-managed drive. If DF0: contains a disk named "Workbench", then Workbench: will be a volume name that can be used to access files in DF0: . If one wanted to access a file named "Bar" located in directory "Foo" of
10434-473: The thing. The Amiga continues to inspire a vibrant — albeit cultlike — community, not unlike that which you have with Linux, the Unix clone." AmigaOS provides a modular set of system functions through dynamically loaded shared libraries , either stored as a file on disk with a " .library " filename extension, or stored in the Kickstart firmware. All library functions are accessed via an indirect jump table , which
10545-407: Was 121 mm large and contained 2.8 million transistors. The 601 has a 32 KB unified L1 cache , a capacity that was considered large at the time for an on-chip cache. Thanks partly to the large cache it was considered a high performance processor in its segment, outperforming the competing Intel Pentium . The PowerPC 601 was used in the first Power Macintosh computers from Apple , and in
10656-453: Was 148 mm or 96 mm large, manufactured by Motorola and IBM respectively, drawing 16–18 W at 233 MHz. It operated at speeds between 166 and 233 MHz and supported a memory bus up to 66 MHz. The PowerPC 604ev , 604r or "Mach 5" was introduced in August 1997 and was essentially a 604e fabricated by IBM and Motorola with a newer process, reaching higher speeds with
10767-401: Was 330 mm large and manufactured by IBM on a 0.35 μm process. It was pin compatible with Intel 's Pentium processors and comparable in speed. The processor was introduced only as a prototype and the program was killed in part by the fact that Microsoft never supported the processor. Engineers working on the PowerPC 615 would later find their way to Transmeta , where they worked on
10878-492: Was an advanced design for its day, being one of the first microprocessors to offer dual issue (up to three with branch folding) and out-of-order execution combined with low power consumption of 2.2 W and a small die of 85 mm . It was designed to be a low cost, low power processor for portable applications. One of the main features was power saving functions (doze, nap and sleep mode) that could dramatically reduce power requirements, drawing only 2 mW in sleep mode. The 603 has
10989-468: Was based on TRIPOS , which is written in BCPL . Interfacing with it from other languages proved a difficult and error-prone task, and the port of TRIPOS was not very efficient. From AmigaOS 2.x onwards, AmigaDOS was rewritten in C and Assembler , retaining 1.x BCPL program compatibility, and it incorporated parts of the third-party AmigaDOS Resource Project , which had already written replacements for many of
11100-434: Was designed for Motorola, but they withdrew from the contract before the 603q went into full production. As a result, the 603q was canceled as QED could not continue to market the processor since they lacked a PowerPC license of their own. "PowerPC 613" seems to be a name Motorola had given a third generation PowerPC. It supposedly was renamed " PowerPC 750 " in response to Exponential Technology 's x704 processor that
11211-714: Was designed to fit Amiga 1200 as a standalone device which would not need installing additional software but utilised Amiga's unique Autoconfig feature. This caused problems to some 3rd party developers who developed their own PPC kernels for PowerUP cards since they could not work on Amiga 1200 without removing the PowerUP kernel first. A few hundred titles were released for PowerUP including TurboPrint PPC, Amiga datatypes , MP3 and MPEG players, games ( Quake and Doom video games to mention few) and various plugins including Flash Video plugin for Voyager web browser. On May 12, 1997, Phase5 announced PowerUP accelerator board for
11322-453: Was designed to outgun the 604 by a wide margin. There are hardly any sources confirming any of this though and it might be pure speculation, or a reference to a completely different processor. Similar to PowerPC 613, the "PowerPC 614" might have been a name given by Motorola to a third generation PowerPC, and later renamed by the same reason as 613. It's been suggested that the part was renamed " PowerPC 7400 ", and Motorola even bumped it to
11433-497: Was famous for its high performance due to its 64 bit wide memory bus and PowerPC 604e processor. According to Phase 5 it could sustain memory transfers up to 68 MB/s on the 68060 and up to 160 MB/s on the 604e. CyberVision PPC and BlizzardVision PPC (BVision PPC) were graphics board add-ons for the CyberStorm PPC and Blizzard PPC accelerator boards. The BlizzardVision PPC could be installed into an Amiga 1200 desktop case. They had
11544-525: Was four stages long, the branch pipeline two stages long, the memory pipeline five stages long, and the floating-point pipeline six stages long. First launched in IBM systems in the fall of 1993, it was marketed by IBM as the PPC601 and by Motorola as the MPC601. It operated at speeds ranging from 50 to 80 MHz. It was fabricated using a 0.6 μm CMOS process with four levels of aluminum interconnect . The die
11655-451: Was introduced in July 1996 and added a condition register unit and separate 32 KB data and instruction L1 caches among other changes to its memory subsystem and branch prediction unit, resulting in a 25% performance increase compared to its predecessor. It had 5.1 million transistors and was manufactured by IBM and Motorola on a 0.35 μm CMOS process with five levels of interconnect. The die
11766-619: Was launched at a time when there was little support for 3D graphics libraries to enhance desktop GUIs and computer rendering capabilities. However, the Amiga became one of the first widespread 3D development platforms. VideoScape 3D was one of the earliest 3D rendering and animation systems, and Silver/ TurboSilver was one of the first ray-tracing 3D programs. Then Amiga boasted many influential applications in 3D software, such as Imagine , maxon's Cinema 4D , Realsoft 3D , VistaPro , Aladdin 4D and NewTek's Lightwave (used to render movies and television shows like Babylon 5 ). Likewise, while
11877-491: Was occasionally used in third-party programs, particularly educational software. For example, the word processors Prowrite and Excellence! could read out documents using the synthesizer. These speech synthesis components remained largely unchanged in later OS releases and Commodore eventually removed speech synthesis support from AmigaOS 2.1 onward because of licensing restrictions. Despite the American English limitation of
11988-841: Was termed retargetable graphics (RTG). With AmigaOS 3.5, some RTG systems were bundled with the OS, allowing the use of common hardware cards other than the native Amiga chipsets. The main RTG systems are CyberGraphX , Picasso 96 and EGS . Some vector graphic libraries, like Cairo and Anti-Grain Geometry , are also available. Modern systems can use cross-platform SDL (simple DirectMedia Layer) engine for games and other multimedia programs. The Amiga did not have any inbuilt 3D graphics capability, and so had no standard 3D graphics API . Later, graphics card manufacturers and third-party developers provided their own standards, which included MiniGL , Warp3D , Storm Mesa ( agl.library ) and CyberGL. The Amiga
12099-432: Was the first implementation of the entire 64-bit PowerPC architecture. It was a second generation PowerPC alongside the 603 and 604, but geared towards the high-end workstation and server market. It was powerful on paper and was initially supposed to be launched alongside its brethren but it was delayed until 1997. When it did arrive, the performance was comparably poor and the considerably cheaper 604e surpassed it. The 620
12210-441: Was therefore never produced in large quantities and found very little use. The sole user of PowerPC 620 was Groupe Bull in its Escala UNIX machines, but they didn't deliver any large numbers. IBM, which intended to use it in workstations and servers, decided to wait for the even more powerful RS64 and POWER3 64-bit processors instead. The 620 was produced by Motorola in a 0.5 μm process. It had 6.9 million transistors and
12321-777: Was used extensively in Apple 's high-end systems and was also used in Macintosh clones , IBM's low-end RS/6000 servers and workstations, Amiga accelerator boards, and as an embedded CPU for telecom applications. The 604 is a superscalar processor capable of issuing four instructions simultaneously. The 604 has a six-stage pipeline and six execution units that can work in parallel, finishing up to six instructions every cycle. Two simple and one complex integer units , one floating-point unit , one branch-processing unit managing out-of-order execution and one load/store unit. It has separate 16 KB data and instruction L1 caches. The external interface
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