Pure G3 Power
About ESCENA
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.
The BrainStormer
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.
Prices and
availability
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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