So Just Who Are Varisys? (Article)

Some more personal information , provided by A-EON Technology CVBA

Following today's announcement of the hardware partners who have been working with us to develop the Nemo motherboard for the forthcoming AmigaONE X1000 computer, A-EON Technology would like to take this opportunity to help you to get to know our partners better.

Varisys Ltd is a UK based company with considerable experience developing computer hardware using PowerPC processors. Initial contact between A-EON Technology and Varisys was suggested by the CPU suppliers, who recommended them as a potential partner for developing the motherboard. The excellent track record Varisys have, and the strong sense of curiosity and enthusiasm that A-EON
got from the early meetings, convinced A-EON that Varisys would be the right partners; a solid engineering team, in easy reach rather than half way around the world, and distinctly compatible values and corporate culture. Varisys are great engineers, genuine enthusiasts, and fun guys ? and, it turns out, quite capable of drinking Belgians under the table!

Varisys itself was founded in 2000, but the co-founders, Adam Barnes and Paul Gentle, have been working together much longer. The partnership developed at Transtech Parallel Systems, where they worked for a decade or more before that on the company's Inmos T800 based Transputer products.

Since forming Varisys, Paul has concentrated on successfully expanding the company's worldwide business while using his mechanical engineering skills to oversee mechanical designs of enclosures and heatsinks as well as thermal modelling of many high performance embedded computer solutions. While at Transtech, Adam designed embedded processors boards based on Inmos Transputer, Intel i860, and both TI and Analog DSP Devices. During the mid to late 1990s he led the development of a series of PowerPC products based on G2 (603), G3 (750) and G4 (7400) CPUs. Since co-founding Varisys he has combined a business development role with design work on many cutting edge Power-PC and FPGA based products for industrial and military clients.

We in the Amiga Community like to know about the engineers and designers behind the platform, so we would be remiss in not letting you know a little more about the team at Varisys who worked on Nemo, and whose names you'll find signed on the underside of the motherboard. Leading the team is Varisys founder and Technical Director Adam Barnes, who was the chief architect of the motherboard and designer of the CPU and memory subsystems. The three other signatories are Andrew Armitage, the software engineer responsible for writing the board's firmware, Peter Oakley, the hardware engineer responsible for implementing Adam's architecture and schematic capture, and Chris Avent, the
board layout engineer.

Amongst the benefits Varisys has brought to the project, perhaps the most surprising to A-EON was their close relationship with XMOS. Having known Transputer inventor and XMOS head David May (then head of Inmos) since their Transtech days, Varisys was eager to work with him on his latest project, and helped XMOS get up and running with validation boards and development systems. Varisys have completed a number of designs based on the XMOS processors, and shipped thousands of boards.

When A-EON approached Varisys to design the AmigaOne X1000 board, it occurred to Varisys that there was a unique opportunity here. The XMOS technology is enormously promising but still early in its life, and through their work on XMOS development systems, Varisys were well aware of the 'early
adopter' geek-appeal of the system. What better match than the Amiga community? ?The idea of using the XMOS processor on the X1000 was to appeal the 'bonnet up' Amiga user,? explains Paul Gentle. ?The XMOS processor can be programmed, and interfaced, via links, to parallel arrays of other
XMOS processors ? very much like the Transputer. XMOS have a very strong developer community with lots of published applications and reference designs ? it adds another dimension to the X1000.?

Designing the AmigaOne X1000 has been a challenging task for the team, but many of the challenges are familiar from their work in designing embedded systems hardware. Paul is particularly reminded of the work they did in designing the motherboard for the market-leading WholeHog 3 lighting control console: ?One of the first projects that we completed was a processor board for a lighting control desk. This was PowerPC based and very much like a workstation motherboard with, Ethernet, USB, MIDI, graphics, floppy and HDD interfaces. The final system was required to operate without fan cooling and be able to withstand the rigours of life on the road with a rock band. Ten years later we are still manufacturing this board and you can see it at a Kylie Minogue concert near you.
?The customer chose a PC motherboard South Bridge to handle the peripherals, and presented us with the challenge of getting it working within a PowerPC architecture CPU. It appears that sometimes we never learn!?

Neither Paul nor Adam were die-hard Amigans, (although Adam was the author of a game on the BBC Micro, while Paul interestingly foreshadowed Varisys' most successful product by persuading his Sinclair Spectrum to control the lights in his house), but they know the system of old, and are excited to become a part of the history of the platform. In fact there's a curious historical connection from the Transtech days, when they worked with the HeliOS transputing platform from Perihelion Software. ?We had a close relationship at one time, but Transtech bought into a systems company that had its own OS and Perihelion started to develop their own hardware products. At this point we were competitors, ?Paul recalls. ?Dr King (founder of Perihelion software and formerly the architect of AmigaDOS at MetaComCo) had worked on the AmigaOS - it is a small world and at that time the West Country was its epicentre.? Today it is Paul and Adam who are at the heart of the latest developments for the Amiga platform, and it has been quite a surprise for them discovering just how lively and enthusiastic the Amiga faithful still are.

Twenty five years on from the launch of the Amiga A1000, with the inestimable help of Varisys Ltd., A-EON Technology will be launching a new generation of AmigaOne hardware, and for Varisys it is an opportunity to become part of the history. They stand amongst giants, but remain humble; the last word goes to Paul - ?We are very proud to be involved in the project and I hope that when the hard ware reaches the users, that they feel it justifies its place in the Amiga history books.?

Extracted from: Source

@orgin
well this text is quite a scoop the PDF is dated tomorrow ^__^
Very nice read

@DAX

There might be so many things out there we still don't know well about, which i find very interesting

@orgin

Very nice read. Thanks. If nothing the immediate future is interesting and a little compelling. Lets hope things develop well, all signs are we are the healthiest we have been in a decade or so. Good luck to all participating partners and developers. I for one will support where I can.

Bring on the weekend.

ace

bump

@orgin

Double nod from me,

Nice read indeed

thank you kindly!