Have you seen this?? (Coldfire accelerator from elbox!)

[PMC]

This is a very interesting development.  I noted that registered Mediator owners will receive notice of a special offer in January 2005.  I'll reserve judgement until then.

Ostensibly, it resembles the specs for the SharkPPC with the exception of the IDE interface.  

We shouldn't dismiss this based solely on the experience of the SharkPPC as they've produced some breakthrough hardware in the past like the Mediator, Power Tower and FastATA expansions.  

In raw speed terms, at 410Mips it's 10x the performance of a 40Mhz 68040 CPU, however it's going to lose some performance due to patched / emulated routines.  Elbox also state that " are ready to run most of the 68k Amiga programs/applications several times faster ", with the unspoken emphasis on "most".

[PMC]

It might not necessarily return the speed increases we are anticipating, the only way to tell is to see it working on our own systems.

For example, there must be a patch / emulation layer there to execute the instructions absent from the Coldfire.  IIRC Coldfire CPUs aren't fitted with an FPU (someone might want to clarify), so floating point maths will need to be emulated somehow.

Either the system will be held together with patches, retargetting commands and glue logic (the flash ROM is 2Mb in size, four times larger than an A1200's ROM) or it may well require a coldfire specific compile of software to run at it's full potential.

[PMC]

the_leander wrote:
Reading the press release it sounds almost like the original A1 prototype - basically a computer in its own right with a connector for an A1200... Very interesting way of doing things :-)

Is it real? Don't know, given the Shark I am somewhat dubious about it, but for the moment I'm prepaired to give them the benefit of doubt.

If it is produced, I can see the interest in it reaching far outside the Amiga community - because there is a lot of interest in the Coldfire archatecture, and dev boards are hidously expensive.

It seems to be missing an IDE/ATAPI header, which would neatly sideline all the motherboard bottlenecks.  It's the only way to go with our aged hardware IMHO.  I'd love to see this system running some benchmark tests to see how it performs.

One thing no-one's picked up on yet:  It's said to support ATI graphics cards.  That means that someone's coded 68K native versions of drivers?