Hi,
Heres a little reason I am looking at the Coldfire V4,
It uses SDram or 72Pin ram as standard (either or both), 1 chip PCI interface, 2 chip Firewire interface and the 162Mhz is A: equal to a 160Mhz PPC (233MIPs) B: is twice as fast as any 68060 available.
The 16Bit Amiga`s have been left out in the cold with the new PPC range and this expansion will at least give them the needed PCI interface to add a 500Mhz G4 but can do so much more, The Amiga was designed around the 68000 CPU and any PPC upgrade will be a patch with a new OS needed, New Kickstart needed and more, Now Amiga are doing the OS and scrapping the kickstart and infact stripping the Amiga range from all of its custom chips. The Coldfire V4 is a new 68000 CPU (Like a 68080 if you like) and is under constant development (a 233 and 333Mhz version has been prototyped and will be available soon.
So if you have a A1000, A500, A600, CDTV or CD32 then this will be the fastest upgrade available, The A1200, A3000 & A4000 upgrades will still be good, including upgrades that simply arnt available yet.
And best of all the Coldfire V4 CPU is very cheap, The CPU costs £25-£30, A 68030 costs £130 from Arrow UK (Motorola`s main UK resaler), This upgrade will be a cheap way to upgrade every Amiga and in a way that simply wasnt open to Commodore when they were around, Otherwise I am sure they would have used it.
Now we are looking at doing a CPU upgrade first but would love to do an Amiga laptop, desktop and more, all based around the Coldfire (Which is designed for use in anything from a palmtop to an internet server).
Anyway any questions? :-P
Oliver Hannaford-Day
Web master of the Commodore CDTV Information Center @
www.cdtv.org.uk