Phase5 Digital Products is a defunct German

computer A computer is a machine that can be programmed to Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as C ...

hardware manufacturer that developed third-party hardware primarily for the

Amiga Amiga is a family of personal computers introduced by Commodore in 1985. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16- or 32-bit processors, 256 KB or more of RAM, mouse-based GUIs, and significantly improved graphi ...

platform. Their most popular products included

CPU A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor or just processor, is the electronic circuitry that executes instructions comprising a computer program. The CPU performs basic arithmetic, logic, controlling, and ...

upgrade boards,

SCSI Small Computer System Interface (SCSI, ) is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices. The SCSI standards define commands, protocols, electrical, optical and logical interface ...

controllers and

graphics card A graphics card (also called a video card, display card, graphics adapter, VGA card/VGA, video adapter, display adapter, or mistakenly GPU) is an expansion card which generates a feed of output images to a display device, such as a computer moni ...

Notable products

Like other third-party Amiga developers, Phase5 developed a range of CPU boards utilizing

Motorola 68000 family The Motorola 68000 series (also known as 680x0, m68000, m68k, or 68k) is a family of 32-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) microprocessors. During the 1980s and early 1990s, they were popular in personal computers and workstations and w ...

processors, which powered Amiga systems at the time. Such boards also typically featured onboard RAM controllers with access to faster and greater capacity memory. Notably, Phase5 were unique amongst Amiga developers in offering the Blizzard PPC and CyberStorm PPC products. These boards had a unique dual-CPU design utilizing both a Motorola 68k processor and a higher performance

PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple Inc., App ...

processor. They operated in a novel fashion where both CPUs could execute concurrently while sharing the system address space. This architecture was enforced by the fact that

AmigaOS AmigaOS is a family of proprietary native operating systems of the Amiga and AmigaOne personal computers. It was developed first by Commodore International and introduced with the launch of the first Amiga, the Amiga 1000, in 1985. Early version ...

was still 68k-based at the time and the required emulation software had not yet been developed to run natively on the PowerPC architecture. This design suffered from the need to flush

CPU cache A CPU cache is a hardware cache used by the central processing unit (CPU) of a computer to reduce the average cost (time or energy) to access data from the main memory. A cache is a smaller, faster memory, located closer to a processor core, which ...

s following

context switch In computing, a context switch is the process of storing the state of a process or thread, so that it can be restored and resume execution at a later point, and then restoring a different, previously saved, state. This allows multiple processes ...

es between 68k and PowerPC code. From a software development standpoint, this made mixing code ad hoc and often impractical. Minimizing such context switches required a large amount of effort and planning, making adoption of mixed binaries somewhat unpopular. Phase5 developed a PowerPC kernel called

PowerUP In video games, a power-up is an object that adds temporary benefits or extra abilities to the player character as a game mechanic. This is in contrast to an item, which may or may not have a permanent benefit that can be used at any time chosen ...

which ran alongside the 68k-based

. Effectively, a programmer could then utilize the PowerPC CPU as a

coprocessor A coprocessor is a computer processor used to supplement the functions of the primary processor (the CPU). Operations performed by the coprocessor may be floating-point arithmetic, graphics, signal processing, string processing, cryptography o ...

. German company

Haage & Partner Haage & Partner is a German company established in 1995. The company distributes software products where they usually are the exclusive distributor. Products are aimed at Microsoft Windows and Mac OS, and has been aimed at AmigaOS in the past. T ...

developed a competing multi-tasking kernel called

WarpOS WarpOS is a multitasking kernel for the PowerPC (PPC) architecture central processing unit (CPU) developed by Haage & Partner for the Amiga computer platform in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It runs on PowerUP accelerator boards developed by ...

for the Phase5 PowerPC boards which operated in a similar manner, but was not code-compatible with PowerUP. The most common current reference to Phase5 is in the

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

port to APUS computer systems. Phase5 PowerPC boards are also able to run

AmigaOS 4 AmigaOS 4 (abbreviated as OS4 or AOS4) is a line of Amiga operating systems which runs on PowerPC microprocessors. It is mainly based on AmigaOS 3.1 source code developed by Commodore, and partially on version 3.9 developed by Haage & Partner. "T ...

and

MorphOS MorphOS is an AmigaOS-like computer operating system (OS). It is a mixed Proprietary software, proprietary and Open-source software, open source OS produced for the Pegasos PowerPC (PPC) processor based computer, PowerUP accelerator equipped Amig ...

Corporate history

Phase5 was founded in 1992 as subsidiary company of AS&S (Advanced Systems & Software) by Wolf Dietrich and Gerald Carda, which were the owners of AS&S. Phase5 focused on the development of general Amiga hardware, but mainly CPU boards,

controllers and

s. The company Phase5 Elektronikfertigungs GmbH (hardware manufacturing) was founded in 1996 as a subsidiary, which produced all of the Phase5 expansions from that time on. Following the initial PowerPC boards plans were announced on 22 July 1999 for new PowerPC boards based on the G3. These were to be developed with

QNX QNX ( or ) is a commercial Unix-like real-time operating system, aimed primarily at the embedded systems market. QNX was one of the first commercially successful microkernel operating systems. The product was originally developed in the early 19 ...

Software Systems with the intention of building an alternative to the official Amiga solution of the time, to be known as AMIRAGE K2. These products were never released. On 9 February 2000 the company filed for

insolvency In accounting, insolvency is the state of being unable to pay the debts, by a person or company ( debtor), at maturity; those in a state of insolvency are said to be ''insolvent''. There are two forms: cash-flow insolvency and balance-sheet i ...

and on 27 April 2000 the company was liquidated. DCE bought licenses before liquidation and produced some of the Phase5 hardware products under its own name. The A\Box, a concept for a complete computer scheduled for 1997 and based on

custom chip Custom, customary, or consuetudinary may refer to: Traditions, laws, and religion * Convention (norm), a set of agreed, stipulated or generally accepted rules, norms, standards or criteria, often taking the form of a custom * Norm (social), a r ...

technology, was planned but never released. Much of Phase5's skill and experience was retained in a new company, bPlan GmbH, which in partnership with

Genesi Genesi is an international group of technology and consulting companies in the United States, Mexico and Germany. It is most widely known for designing and manufacturing ARM architecture and Power ISA-based computing devices. The Genesi Group cons ...

produced the

Pegasos Pegasos is a MicroATX motherboard powered by a PowerPC 750CXe or PowerPC 7447 microprocessor, featuring three PCI slots, one AGP slot, two Ethernet ports (10/100/1000 & 10/100), USB, DDR, AC'97 sound, and FireWire. Like the PowerPC Macintosh ...

, a final realisation of several attempts to build an alternative Amiga system.

References

External links

Phase5 Unofficial Support Homepage

PowerUp Support Homepage

Amiga Hardware Database
- Descriptions, photos, drivers and benchmarks of Phase5 products.
Phase 5 corporate history

DCE
{{Amiga hardware Amiga companies