Wolf Dietrich
Phase 5 digital products My name is Wolf Dietrich from phase 5 digital products, a Frankfurt based manufacturer of AMIGA perhipherals. I am happy to present to you at this re-introduction of the AMIGA series of computers the latest generation of the 68k series of processors, the superscalar 68060 CPU. phase 5 digital products has developed the first fully operational implementation of this processor for the Amiga marketed as the Cyberstorm 060 accelerator, which is available now and shipping. With this implementation of the powerful 68060 processor the new AMIGA models make a step ahead into the leading group of today's microcomputer systems. The 68060 processor combines the powerful functionality and instruction set of earlier 68k processors with a new superscalar architecture and adds performance-boosting features like two parallel integer instruction units, larger data and instruction caches of 8k size, a branch cache, and pipelined write accesses; this all means a combination of the industries most advanced technologies for processing performance enhancements. While software compatibility with existing applications is fully maintained, more than 80 mips processing power ie: real world applications on the AMIGA perform competitively with other high-end systems such as Pentium and PowerPC based machines. In combination with the AMIGA's other architectural advantages this makes a powerful system for all semi-professional and professional applications, perfectly suited for today's requirements for multimedia computing. The figures shown here indicate the performance leap which the 68060 brings to the AMIGA. With speed increases by a factor of between 4 and 5 times over the performance of the original 68040 based AMIGA systems - which have been powerful machines already - time-consuming applications are dramatically accelerated. These application benchmarks, however, still use unoptimized 68040 code, which can be accelerated another 1.5 times by simple optimization to the 68060's special features, which is a most simple task for software developers now that the 68060 is available. The scalable superscalar architecture also opens a wide future for options such as multi-processor systems, which either combine multiple 68060 processors, or even integrate other CPUs into such a system to build a most flexible computer system for many various tasks. As a conclusion, it can be said that the 68060 processor, integrated into the AMIGA architecture, offers true workstation power. With this competitive performance and the full integration with the AMIGA's architectural advantages the AMIGA will hold it's position as an outstanding multimedia computing system.