American Megatrends Incorporated (AMI) is an American hardware and software company, specializing in PC hardware and firmware. The company was founded in 1985 by Pat Sarma and Subramonian Shankar, who was chairman and president as of 2011. It is headquartered in Building 200 at 5555 Oakbrook Parkway in Gwinnett County, Georgia, United States, near the city of Norcross.
The company started as a manufacturer of complete motherboards, positioning itself in the high-end segment. Its first customer was PCs Ltd, later known as Dell Computers, making one of the first Intel 80386 designs.
As hardware activity moved progressively to Taiwan-based original design manufacturers, AMI continued to develop BIOS firmware for major motherboard manufacturers. The company produced BIOS software for motherboards (1986), server motherboards (1992), storage controllers (1995) and remote-management cards (1998).
In 1993 AMI produced MegaRAID, a storage controller card which major OEMs (including HP and Dell) adopted. AMI sold its RAID-division assets to LSI Logic in 2001.
As of 2011 AMI continued to focus on OEM business and technology. Its product line includes AMIBIOS (a BIOS), Aptio (a successor to AMIBIOS8 based on the UEFI standard), diagnostic software, remote-access firmware, motherboards, SGPIO backplane controllers, driver/firmware development, service processors, iNAS and SAN storage systems for SMBs, and "solutions" for the Android operating system.
Video American Megatrends
Products
AMIBIOS
AMIBIOS (also written as AMI BIOS) is the IBM PC-compatible BIOS developed and sold by American Megatrends since 1986. As of 1994, the company claimed that 75% of PC clones used the AMIBIOS. It is used on motherboards made by AMI and by other companies.
American Megatrends has a strict OEM business model for AMIBIOS: it sells source code to motherboard manufacturers or customizes AMIBIOS for each OEM individually, whichever business model they require. AMI does not sell to end users, and itself produces no end-user documentation or technical support for its BIOS firmware, leaving that to licensees. However, the company published two books on its BIOS in 1993 and 1994, (listed in further reading), written by its engineers.
During powerup, the BIOS firmware displays an ID string in the lower-left-hand corner of the screen. This ID string comprises various pieces of information about the firmware, including when it was compiled, what configuration options were selected, the OEM license code, and the targeted chipset and motherboard. There are 3 ID string formats, the first for older AMIBIOS, and the second and third for the newer AMI Hi-Flex ("high flexibility") BIOS. These latter are displayed when the Insert key is pressed during power-on self-test.
The original AMI BIOS did not encrypt the machine startup password, which it stored in non-volatile RAM. Therefore, any utility capable of reading a PC's NVRAM was able to read and to alter the password. The AMI WinBIOS encrypts the stored password, using a simple substitution cipher.
By pressing the Delete key during power-on self-test when a prompt is displayed, the BIOS setup utility program is invoked. Some earlier AMIBIOS versions also included a cut-down version of the AMIDIAG utility that AMI also sold separately, but most later AMI BIOSes do not include this program as the BIOS DMI already incorporates detailed diagnostics.
AMIBIOS is only sold through distributors, not directly to end users. Firmware upgrades and replacements are only available from AMI for its own motherboards. Upgrades and replacements for AMIBIOS customized for a motherboard are only available from the manufacturer or from eSupport.
AMI supplies both DOS and Win32 firmware upgrade utilities for its own motherboards. eSupport only supplies a Win32 upgrade utility.
AMIDiag
AMIDiag is a family of PC diagnostic utilities sold to OEMs only. The AMIDiag Suite was introduced in 1991 and made available for MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows and Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) platforms. It includes both the Windows and DOS PC diagnostics programs. Later versions of AMIDiag support UEFI, which allows diagnostics to be performed directly on the hardware components, without having to use operating system drivers or facilities.
StorTrends/ManageTrends
The StorTrends family of network-based backup and storage management software and hardware includes several NAS and iSCSI-based SAN servers with 4, 12, or 16 drive bays.
AMI couples off-the-shelf hardware with the StorTrends iTX storage management firmware platform. StorTrends offers synchronous, asynchronous and snap-assisted replication, thin provisioning, high-availability grouping and advanced caching.
Reliability and performance is the key for any storage server. StorTrends iTX 2.8 is designed to support Storage Bridge Bay specification that provide Auto-Failover capability to ensure that any interruption is handled without affecting data. It supports High-availability cluster, redundancy, scalability, replication, disaster recovery and multiple site backups.
DuOS-M
DuOS-M is commercial software developed by American Megatrends for Intel x86-based computers using the Microsoft Windows operating system to provide a "dual operating system" environment in which the user can simultaneously deploy the Android operating system in tandem with Microsoft Windows.
Because DuOS-M has capability to run both Windows and Android operating systems at the same time, the user can switch between the two operating systems without having to dual boot or suspend operation of one operating system in order to utilize the other.
DuOS-M supports key hardware peripherals in Windows including cameras, audio, microphone and sensors such as ambient light sensor, accelerometer, gyrometer, compass and orientation sensors. It also supports various screen sizes, resolutions, and screen orientation (portrait and landscape) along with 3D acceleration and HD video playback.
The first version of DuOS-M was released in June 2014. The software is available for download for a free 30-day trial, and is available for purchase for a complete license.
As of March, 7th, 2018, DuOS-M was discontinued. The following notice was posted on this site:
Farewell, AMIDuOS
Mar 07, 2018
A wise person once said that "all good things must come to an end," and such is the case for AMIDuOS®, our Android(TM) Environment for Microsoft(TM) Windows(TM) platforms.
As such, online sales of AMIDuOS will come to an end, effective immediately. Additionally, new email ticket support will gradually be suspended over the next several months. However, our Knowledgebase of archived technical support articles and user comments will still be available on our website indefinitely. No further product updates or bug fixes will be forthcoming for this product.
A Brief History of AMIDuOS, Where We Are Now
AMIDuOS was launched in May of 2014 and enjoyed robust interest both from the press and a lively group of enthusiasts and users.
However, Android has become more complex with each evolution, while newer apps have come into the Android marketplace along with updates and patches for Windows. All these factors have come together to present challenges in supporting this product across a wide range of platforms and different versions of Windows OS (7, 8, and 10), something that has always been at the core of AMIDuOS.
Because we could not provide the same, consistent and excellent user experience that our users have come to expect with this product, we made the difficult decision to end sales of this product.
We greatly enjoyed launching the product and receiving the support of the enthusiastic user community. We were able to develop one of, if not the best, Android emulator on the market. We would never have enjoyed the success we did with this product were it not for the support of our users.
In closing, we would once again like to thank the entire community of AMIDuOS users for helping make this software what it is; it has been a rewarding journey for the AMIDuOS team at American Megatrends.
Windows® is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation. Android(TM) is a trademark of Google LLC.
Maps American Megatrends
Technical problems
On November 13, 1993, a number of PCs that used the AMIBIOS firmware started at boot-up to play the tune to Happy Birthday repeatedly while halting the computer until a key was pressed. The problem was resolved with a Trojan-free firmware upgrade from most manufacturers.
The AMI WinBIOS was a 1994 update to AMIBIOS, with a graphical user interface setup screen that mimicked the appearance of Windows 3.1 and supported mouse navigation, unusual at the time. WinBIOS was viewed favourably by Anand Lal Shimpi at AnandTech, but described by Thomas Pabst at Tom's Hardware as a "big disappointment", in part because of problems with distributing IRQ signals to every PCI and ISA expansion slot.
In July 2008 Linux developers discovered issues with ACPI tables on certain AMIBIOS BIOSes supplied by Foxconn, ASUS, and MSI. The problem is related to the ACPI _OSI method, which is used by ACPI to determine the OS version (in case an ACPI patch only applies to one specific OS). In some cases, the OSI method caused problems on Linux systems, skipping code that was only executed on Windows systems. Foxconn and AMI worked together to develop a solution, which was included in later revisions of AMIBIOS. The issue affected motherboards with Intel Socket 775. Actual system behavior differed based on BIOS version, system hardware and Linux distribution.
Founding
American Megatrends Inc. (AMI) was founded in 1985 by Subramonian Shankar and Pat Sarma with funds from a previous consulting venture, Access Methods Inc. (also AMI). Access Methods was a company run by Pat Sarma and his partner. After Access Methods successfully launched the AMIBIOS, there were legal issues among the owners of the company, resulting in Sarma buying out his partners. Access Methods still owned the rights to the AMIBIOS. Sarma had already started a company called Quintessential Consultants Inc. (QCI), and later set up an equal partnership with Shankar.
By this time the AMIBIOS had become established and there was a need to keep the initials AMI. The partners renamed QCI as American Megatrends Inc., with the same initials as Access Methods Inc.; the renamed company then purchased AMIBIOS from Access Methods. Shankar became the president and Sarma the executive vice-president of this company. This partnership continued until 2001, when LSI Logic purchased the RAID Division of American Megatrends; American Megatrends then purchased all shares of the company owned by Sarma, making Shankar the majority owner.
Worldwide offices
- United States
- Headquarters: Gwinnett County, Georgia
- Field offices: San Jose, California; Austin, Texas
- Beijing, People's Republic of China
- Kunshan, Jiangsu, People's Republic of China
- Shenzhen, Guangdong, People's Republic of China
- Taipei, Taiwan
- Munich, Germany
- Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India
- Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan
- Seoul, South Korea
- Formerly had an office in Dupont, Washington, United States
See also
- BIOS features comparison
- Phoenix Technologies
- List of companies of Taiwan
References
Further reading
- American Megatrends, Inc. (1993). Programmer's Guide to the AMIBIOS. Windcrest/McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-07-001562-7.
- American Megatrends Inc. (1994). Programming Amibios. McGraw-Hill Ryerson, Limited. ISBN 0-07-001561-9.
External links
- American Megatrends Inc.(USA)
- Company Profile
- Introduction to AMIBIOS8: Overview of key features in the latest AMIBIOS
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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