Elbox announce the development of the SharkPPC G3/G4 add-on board for the Mediator busboard. It's a pure PPC-based board and it's supposed to be able to work in co-operation with an existing 68k/PPC board. The boards should go into production in January 2001 with prices starting from 390 euros. Read the full press release below.

ELBOX COMPUTER is proud to announce the breath-taking new product: the most powerful PowerPC accelerator for Amiga 1200, 3000 and 4000.

The new accelerator - SharkPPC G3/G4 board - is a pure PowerPC-based processor card to be fitted in MEDIATOR PCI A1200 and MEDIATOR PCI A3/4000 busboards.

SharkPPC G3/G4 cards give Amiga Classic computers the top performance of the latest PowerPC technology and the power of the long-awaited next generation computer.

New PowerPC750 processors installed in SharkPPC G3/G4 cards offer the following performance: 17.4SPECint95@400MHz, 11.7SPECfp95@400MHz, 928DMIPS@400MHz, 22.4SPECint95@550MHz, 13.3SPECfp95@550MHz, 1276DMIPS@550MHz.

The SharkPPC G3/G4 design combines speed of PowerPC G3/G4 processors with extremely fast on-board memory interface controlling two SDRAM modules, up to 512MB each. The peak memory transfer rate reaches 582MB/s. The accelerator card takes control over the PCI busboard with a 66MHz PCI 2.1 compliant interface fitted with a two-channel DMA controller.

Communication between the existing Amiga turbo accelerator and the SharkPPC G3/G4 card is executed with the shared SDRAM memory and the interrupt controller in the MEDIATOR PCI hardware. The new accelerator offers excellent bandwidth to any PCI card: 264 MB/s (132 MB/s in the system with 33 MHz PCI cards). This powerful performance in PCI graphic cards enables development of new superb games/graphic applications in the native PPC code.

All the currently available Amiga software may be executed in the 68k processor with full use of all the PCI cards installed in the computer. It is possible because both accelerator cards installed in the computer access all the PCI cards independently.

On top of that, in new applications to be developed both accelerators may enhance performance of each other just the same way as it is done in advanced multi-processor systems. This is due to the fact that processors in both accelerators (68k/PPC and SharkPPC) work fully simultaneously, which is for the first time available for Amiga users.

The first SharkPPC G3/G4 cards for developers will be available by end of November, with production planned to commence in January 2001.

When new speed versions of PowerPC processors are available, the SharkPPC line will be expanded with more models.

The suggested retail price (VAT excl.) for the SharkPPC G3/G4 accelerators are:

Pricing of versions with other processors will be announced separately.

1. Development progress of PCI Sound and TV card drivers for MEDIATOR PCI 1200.

2. MEDIATOR development line (A4000 and A3000).