Pure G3 Power
Pure G3 Power
ESCENA - as a company - may not be familiar to most Amiga users. This is because the developers, for whom ESCENA stands for, have been working on several hardware projects for other companies like DCE and IBH (Ingenieurbuero Helfrich). These projects include 3D-Graphic accelerators, digital video and, of course, processor cards. The project "BRAINSTORMER" is the first project that is directly developed under the name ESCENA.
With the BrainStormer, ESCENA presents the first G3-PowerPC accelerator board for the Amiga. The BrainStormer is the first PPC board without a 680x0 processor onboard. It uses the WarpUP driver package and the 68k emulator from Haage&Partner, which ensures compatibility with today's software. The board can take G3 processors (which will come on separate plug-in "modules") from 233 to 400 MHz with 512KB or 1MB Backside Cache and up to 512MB SDRAM.
The Brainstormer is a Zorro3 card, which means that a 68k-processor is still availible to the Amiga to boot from. One of the main points of the development was the G3-RAM interface. It was developed very carefully as it is critical to the speed of applications. The full speed of the direct Zorro bus access will be made possible when there are low-level drivers for graphics boards in PowerPC native code.
An interesting feature for the future is the ability of the Brainstormer to take a second G3-processor. That possibility, however, is still some time away, since taking advantage of a multiprocessor system requires drivers that support multiprocessing.
The final product - including adapted driver - is expected to be available around the end of the first quarter ยด99. The board (without a processor module) will about 450 $. The prices for the processor modules range from approx. 300 $ for the 233 MHz version up to approx. 1600 $ for the 400 MHz version - but these prices may still change.
For more information, please visit: http://www.escena.de/
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