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

[rayt]

Here
They call it Dragon or something, and on the website they say it has a 266mhz coldfire, 2 sdram sockets, agp, pci, and all that for ~350Eur and available at the end of january 05! I guess that means that there will definately be no sharkppc.. And will it affect/destroy the os4 "market"?
They also have a new banner at amiga.org.. But why isn't something about it in the news section?
They talk about special upgrade offers for mediator users.. beeing a mediator user myself I considered buying a shark to run os4 on it, but now I don't know, 68k looks like a dead end road imho.. but ~350Eur is much cheaper than a csppc+mediator or a microA1 for example.. I don't know what to think about it.. its a big surprise, they didn't announce anything like that afaik..

[B00tDisk]

Absolute vapor.  Wouldn't trust the annoucement as far as I could throw the server it's hosted on.  There are apparently still significant problems getting the Coldfire to (properly) emulate the 68k instruction set (so I've heard).

EDIT:

Although I will say that if they've pulled it off, maybe it will open the door for the other Coldfire project - the one aimed at CDTV, A1000/2000/500/600 systems.  We can only wait and see...

[rayt]

Yeah but that was afaik a different (hobby) project.. Maybe elbox had somebody working full time on this for a long time.. but anyway the release date is in a month or something, shouldn't they have at least a prototype ready for demonstration or something?

[x56h34]

Well...the specs look impressive, but even if it does come out (in 1 month?), who would provide support for it other than Elbox? Are we to expect that the existing 68k stuff would simply work and run at 266Mhz (supposing that they make the Coldfire cpu run with no errors)?

[jj]

Sharkppc anyone, I bet people will still be asking in a few years time, when is the dragon being released...........

I really dont see it exisiting, and if it does, whats the point, as it says on their website, will support most 68k programs, so whats the point of breaking compatibilty for some extra speed

[x56h34]

It also seems to be compatible with A1200 only, for now. :-)

If it does come out, it would be a classic Amiga dream come true. It would also be bad for AmigaOne/OS4.0 sales, and would most definitely discourage some people from migrating to AmigaOne from the classics.

I personally don't think we'll ever see this thing, just like the SharkPPC cards. Realistic expectations from Elbox on future products would be to release FastATA1200 Mk.4, of course still with no sign of any DMA operations, however we will have a complete logic and pcb redesign! :lol:

[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".

[smithy]

This looks really good!!  Perhaps competition for OS4.  If I had to run OS4 I think I'd prefer to run it on my expanded A1200 than an Amigaone.

[x56h34]

@smithy:

If indeed released, this thing would be capable of running 68k environment on steroids, and would not be able to run OS4.0 which is a PPC operating system.

In other words, you would still need either a BPPC/CSPPC card for your classic Amiga, or an AmigaOne, if you wish to run OS4.0.

[CU_AMiGA]

This coldfire accerator board seems more useless than a bunch of broken lawn mower engines! :-)

[x56h34]

@CU_AMiGA:

Del: These are not ordinary lawn-mower engines.
Rodney: Yeah?
Del: Yeah. They are broken lawn-mower engines.

:-)

[CU_AMiGA]

x56h34 wrote:
@CU_AMiGA:

Del: These are not ordinary lawn-mower engines.
Rodney: Yeah?
Del: Yeah. They are broken lawn-mower engines.

:-)

lol I knew you'd remember that.

[x56h34]

Del, I've got executive qualifications.
Oh leave it out Rodney. You couldn't even sell a black cat to a witch!

:-)

[smithy]

x56h34 wrote:
@smithy:

If indeed released, this thing would be capable of running 68k environment on steroids, and would not be able to run OS4.0 which is a PPC operating system.

In other words, you would still need either a BPPC/CSPPC card for your classic Amiga, or an AmigaOne, if you wish to run OS4.0.

Yeah I hear what you're saying... but I'm a MorphOS user and ever since all this kufuffle kicked off I've been keeping one eye on potential new platforms just in case MOS dies.

Or maybe MOS could be ported?  Or maybe Elbox could line up another OS for it?  (68k AmigaOS won't take advantage of the hardware and has no future path anyway), or maybe OS4 could be ported - I might be more tempted to go OS4 if I had an alternative to the AmigaOne hardware.


Edit:
I really hope they plan to produce a standalone motherboard.  I'd buy one for sure.

[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.