I find the Mediator card a fascinating product from Elbox, plus this Coldfire card with PCI/AGP looks interesting too.

What I'm curious to know is how would this work with the Amiga and what would you be able to do with it?  How well does it work?

Does a PCI ethernet card work much better/reliable than a Zorro card?

How would the Amiga take advantage of a sound card and video card plugged into a PCI slot?  Are there Amiga programs out there that can take advantage of setups like this, or would new programs need to be made?

I can see AmigaOS 4.0 being able to take advantage of a setup like this, but I'm not sure how something like that would affect classic programs.

Does Elbox provide a list of cards or chipsets supported with the Mediator?  I think I'm finally going to take the plunge and buy a Mediator 4000Di.  I'm assuming my best bet for video is a VooDoo card so the PCI system has a DMA buffer.

I have numerous 8139-based network cards; S3, Trident, Cirrus Logic, and ATI video cards (personally, I loves me a Matrox!); and a few various SoundBlaster or compatible sound cards.  That's pretty much a full board right there, eh?

[EDIT: I found it in their website.  I have a buttload of supported PCI cards, yay!]

@Starrfoxx:

Just a small sample of the kinds of programs that can take advantage of this stuff: games

Having an advanced 3D card on the PCI bus will be certainly much faster than using an outdated "Amiga 3D" card such as a Cybervision 64/3D or Cybervision PPC or BlizzardVision PPC.

I personally don't have a Mediator (or Prometheus, or G-Rex), but trying to collect cash for one.

As for their Dragon card using the Coldfire CPU... I can't wait! It's been demoed this year in Poland, and that's great news! (look at the latest update for photos/video: http://www.elbox.com/news_04_12_17.html#UPDATE ..it'd be great if a Polski-speaking person could translate what is being said in the videos...) Getting closer to release, which means faster Amigas for all of us! I don't know much about the architecture but my understanding is that a lot of the 68k code will work easily. I could be wrong here though. I'll let the gurus speak on that stuff.

Cheers

LoadWB,

I'm not sure which CPU boards you're refering to exactly. But, if you're refering to the Dragon (one board, not many, made by Elbox, more info on their site) which uses the Coldfire CPU, well then from my understanding it's sitting on a PCI card. You take this card and plug it into an existing "PCI solution" (Elbox Mediator 4000Di for example, or Prometheus or G-Rex, even though I don't know if the last two will be supported by Elbox), which itself is sitting on top of the existing existing Zorro bus of your Amiga. Therefore performance between native chips (OCS, ECS, AGA and the Coldfire CPU won't be so hot, I think ZII caps at 10MB/sec?), but performance between the Coldfire and the other *PCI* cards will be as fast as if it was on a typical PC system (ex: 32bit PCI @ 33Mhz = 4bytes*33Mhz=132MB/sec max theoretical transfer rate, which you won't ever achieve ...unless there's some burst or double-clocking magic that these PCI/CPU gurus can pull off? or perhaps with faster PCI like 66Mhz or 64bit).

Anyhow, the end result is you get backwards compatibility with your old, make that "original", Amiga hardware and new capabilities with endless PCI hardware. Of course no AGP and no PCI-X So we still can't catch up with present day PeeCeez and Macs.

A couple of questions of my own for gurus:
Many modern day PCs rely on a "southbridge" chipset to do the PCI handling, meaning that there is a bottleneck between the PCI cards and the CPU or more importantly (for DMA) memory! Does having a Dragon with a Coldfire on the PCI bus mean that we can "skip" the southbridge chip completely and let the PCI devices access memory (on the Dragon, I assume, or another PCI card), at much higher speeds? Although now that I think about it, I don't see how, as the PCI itself is limited (ex: 32bit x 33Mhz or 64bit x 33Mhz or 32bit x 66Mhz, etc), while the CPU to memory interface is MUCH faster: 64bit x 133Mhz (for PC133 FSBs) or 64bit x 400Mhz (for DDR-200Mhz double triggered FSBs) or 64bit x 667Mhz (for quad-pumped FSBs), and if you through interleaved memory access or dual-channel (NVidia motherboards) you double from 64bit to 128bit, which is MANY GB/sec, not a measly 132-528MB/sec for PCI.

Clues anyone?

Coldfire: I hear that, it is slooooow now. Slower than 68060. Theoretically it has more benefits, but now with os 3.9 its got many incompatibility. I see the future in ppc. Maybe if shark ppc see the sun, it will be great andvantage of us. (And os4 too)

@ da9000

t'd be great if a Polski-speaking person could translate what is being said in the videos

"Polski-speaking" sounds a bit odd, it's better to say "Polish-speaking"

Back in the day I've gathered the most important things said by this Elbox representative seen in the videos and put it on AW.net.

Cheers,
[Yak]

The dragon does have AGP, It will also work with the shark PPC. I assume people you buy the dragon will probably buy the Shark so in essence between the two you are going to pay about a grand for a dual processor solution for compatibility issues. The cyberstorms comand a high price and these will too but hopefully the new setup will allow more functionality for newer software and hardware.