Offer from Elbox!

If you are looking to buy new hardware for your Amiga, then you might consider doing your shopping at Elbox. Here's the announcement with info on their offer:

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All orders over 79.00 EUR placed between 13 October and 02 November 2007 will be delivered without any shipping costs! This offer is valid for orders from all countries of the world.

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Hopefully we'll get some news on the Dragon Coldfire soon as well. It's been a while since news was posted regarding it, so let's cross our fingers. :)

Edit: For those of you unfamiliar with the Dragon Coldfire, here's some information concerning it: (taken from the Elbox website)

ELBOX COMPUTER is proud to announce its breath-taking new product for Amiga 1200 computers - DRAGON ColdFire. DRAGON is a ColdFire-based accelerator card combined with the PCI/AGP Expansion busboard.

With its DRAGON ColdFire development, Elbox brings to Amiga computers top performance of the latest Freescale's ColdFire V4e core based-processor, the successor of the 68k dynasty. DRAGON-equipped Amiga computers are ready to run most of the 68k Amiga programs/applications several times faster when compared against Amiga 1200 with the fastest 68060 accelerators.

'By combining many attractive features like the high-performance ColdFire processor, fast DDR memory, AGP graphics, powerful PCI 66MHz technology and comprehensive software support, DRAGON-equipped Amiga computers turn into modern, fast and extremely functional power machines,' said Maciek Binek, president and CEO of Elbox.

The DRAGON's mainboard and the DRAGON's ColdFire CPU card are designed on two separate circuit boards. With modular design, the DRAGON can be easily upgraded and configured to meet the needs of the most demanding Amiga users.

That is indeed some great news and could save someone ordering a lot some money.

I'm also waiting eagerly for the Dragon Coldfire board. I have wanted to build an A1200 tower conversion for some time, but after hearing about this great expansion system I've been holding off. I just hope it does eventually become reality and gets released.

The images taken from the preview party really got me interested too. A much easier solution with the PCI and accelerator all in a single solution.

I can't see it happening.
Reported speeds for the coldfire see to be in the 040 region.
To hit 060 and faster, stuff has to be written specifically for it.
The market is already split between, classic, morphos and os4.0.

Does anyone know how compatible the coldfire will be for existing Amiga software and games? That is one area I've not read much, if anything about.

Harrison wrote:

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Does anyone know hoe compatible the coldfire will be for existing Amiga software and games? That is one area I've not read much, if anything about.

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Here's the link to the official FAQ about the Dragon Coldfire.

I found this particularly interesting:

Q: Are the ColdFire processors PowerPC-compatible?
A: No, they are not. ColdFire processors are compatible with the 68k processors. The main ColdFire processor instruction set is a subset of the 68060 instruction set. It has been common practise in case of each new processor from the 68k family: some instructions are reduced in the new processor in order to gain better performance.

Q: What is the speed of the DRAGON's board compared with the A1200 turbo cards available so far?
A: When only clock rate of the processor is taken into account, the ColdFire MCF5475 speed is comparable with 68060 clocked at 266MHz. Much higher performance of the DRAGON board compared with the fastest A1200 turbo cards is definitely affected also by: over 25 times faster speed of DDR SDRAM as compared with SIMMs used in A1200 turbo cards, bigger processor caches, and many times faster access to peripherals. For example access to the frame buffer of the graphic card in the DRAGON's AGP slot reaches up to 264MB/s, which is over 20 times faster then the access to the graphic card from any A1200 turbo card available so far.

Q: Is DRAGON able to execute 68k apps faster than G3 based boards?
A: Yes. Most of 68k Amiga applications run faster on DRAGON ColdFire then in the JIT emulation on currently available PowerPC G3-based boards.

As it shows in those answers, the coldfire card should speed up classic 68k code by quite a lot, and that is really all I'm interested in, not PPC compatibility. I hope this does get finished and released.