The Amigas secret love affair with the Alpha
The Amiga has a long history with the DEC Alpha chip that could be
set to return again with the latest plans by Amiga and Tao. Over
the years the Amiga has courted many new systems- PowerPC, MMC,
x86, and possibly Crusoe. They have all been willing suitors, but
over the years the Amiga has returned to the Alpha for a brief
fling and then to walk away as if nothing happened. Join Amiga
History Guide in exploring the Amigas secret love affair with the
Alpha chip.
1991: Alpha and Omega: the beginning and the
end
It all began during 1991, Dec were rumoured to be looking for a
pre-emptive multitasking operating system to run on their recently
created Alpha CPU. As the only mainstream operating system to
support pre-emptive multitasking at the time, the AmigaOS was
the natural choice. Here it becomes rather hazy, rumour has it that
they approached Commodore with the offer to port the OS but were
refused a license. Commodore seemed unwilling to allow others to
develop the technology into areas they had no interest (similar to
the Apple decision to end Mac-cloning). However, rumour has it that
Dec managed to reverse engineer the AmigaOS and port part of Exec
to the Alpha. It is highly questionable if this happened in reality
or if it is the delusions on an Amiga user who took the idea too
seriously.
1996: Quikpak Come to Call
Developments surrounding the Amiga and the Alpha chip went quiet
again, Commodore decided to go for the HP-RISC processor for their
next generation systems, and then went into liquidation. Escom
bought Commodore and the Amiga, decided to go for the PowerPC
processor for their next generation systems, and followed in the
path of the Big C. The Amiga world was at its lowest ebb; users
were abandoning it in their droves. After three 'careful' owners it
seemed the Amiga was on its last legs. From the day of Escoms'
liquidation two companies made their intentions to buy the Amiga
clear. The first, Viscorp was a former licensee promised to allow
anyone to make Amiga clones. This was followed by a bid by Quikpak,
a US manufacturer that had produced the A4000T for Escom. To win
favour with the Amiga community they promised to move the AmigaOS
away from the slow 68k processor, beyond PowerPC, and onto the
ultra-fast (and ultra-expensive) Alpha processor. For a time it
even seemed that they would succeed in the purchase, VISCorp
dropped out of the race and it seemed a clear victory. Unfortunate
for them, Gateway swooped down and outbid Quikpak at the last
hurdle. While Gateway openly invited the operating system to be
licensed, the lawyer in charge of the Escom liquidation took them
to court over their sale of A4000T equipment, soaking up any
finances that would have aided with the port of the OS.
1997: Project Alpha
The revitalized Amiga, under the control of Gateway choose a dual
processor approach of 68k and PowerPC. Using the PowerUP boards
from Phase 5, this was a short term measure to bolster the existing
Amiga market while a decision was made over a next generation
system. During this period the third party developer, HiQ announced
their plans to port the existing AmigaOS to the Alpha processor.
This process was divided into five time frames:
| Timeframe |
Action |
| 1997 |
Ship Siamese RTG hardware, allowing users to retarget their
Amiga display to the alien PC hardware. |
| 1st and 2nd quarter, 1998 |
Build a market presence through the sale of Alpha-based
workstations and Siamese v3 solution. Amiga software is retargeted
over to the Alpha display. An Alpha-specific version of the UAE
software emulator is also included to gain support from Alpha
users. |
| Late 1998 |
Purchase a source license and begin portation of the AmigaOS to
the Alpha. The Amiga Inc. decision to abandon the AmigaOS in favour
of the QNX kernel indicated the "Classic" AmigaOS was at the end of
the road. At the time it seemed much easier to license the Amiga OE
once it was finished. |
| 1999 |
Develop and sell the Siamese PCI. For a time it seemed that
Amiga Inc. would support its development and use it with the
AmigaOE Developer System. When the company switched to Linux they
lost all interest in its development. At the time of writing (early
2000), Siamese require additional funding to finalize the
card. |
| 2000 |
The final stage of the project saw the AmigaOS running entirely
on the Alpha processor, only using the Siamese PCI card for legacy
software that directly accessed the custom chips. |
The events of the World of Amiga 1998 show split the market even
further resulting in the death of Project Alpha. In retrospect it
is doubtful Project Alpha would have been released for the Y2000
deadline that had been set even if the MMC announcement had not
been made. The delays relating to the BoXeR have made it clear that
new development in the Amiga market is a risky business, requiring
a great deal of funding and total support from the Amiga market.
Rather than fragmenting the market into even smaller pieces, it was
wise that Siamese choose to quietly cancel the project when they
did.
This seems to be the end of the Classic Amigas relationship with
the Alpha. Despite the performance boost it would have bought the
AmigaOS, tying it to another expensive system would have been the
end of the Amiga and it most likely would have lost all support
from its enthusiast user base who simply would not be able to
afford such an expensive machine. However all is not lost, the
Amiga may finally make it onto the Alpha thanks to the portable
Taos. Tao have suggested it only 12 man weeks to port the OS to a
new platform. Although the Alpha is rather power hungry for Amiga
Corp's Convergence market, it would be a simple task to host it on
top of Windows NT or Linux. Perhaps this story will have a happy
ending after all!
Related Links
Project Alpha
Siamese PCI
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Last Update: 1/11/2001
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