PowerUP (accelerator)

PowerUP boards were dual-processor accelerator boards designed by Phase5 Digital Products for Amiga computers. They had two different processors, a Motorola 68000 series (68k) and a PowerPC, working in parallel, sharing the complete address space of the Amiga computer system.

In 1995, Amiga Technologies GmbH announced they were going to port AmigaOS to PowerPC. As part of their Power Amiga plan, Amiga Technologies was going to launch new Power Amiga models using the PowerPC 604e reduced instruction set computer (RISC) CPU and in cooperation with Amiga Technologies Phase5 would release AmigaOS 4-compatible PowerPC accelerator boards for old Amiga 1200, Amiga 3000 and Amiga 4000 models. However, in 1996 Amiga Technologies' parent company ESCOM entered into deep financial problems and could not support Amiga development. Due to a lack of resources, the PowerPC project at Amiga Technologies stalled and Phase5 had to launch accelerators without a PowerPC-native AmigaOS. As a stopgap solution, a new PowerUP kernel was created allowing new PPC-native software run parallel with 68k Amiga OS. To complicate things even further, former Commodore International chief engineer Dave Haynie questioned Phase5's plans to develop PowerPC boards without Amiga Technologies: "Their approach on the software front is kind of a hack, and on the hardware front it's just too much like the old Commodore; at best, they'll wind up with interesting, non-standard, and overpriced machines that can't keep up with the rapid changes in the industry."

Nevertheless Phase5 had decided to go their own way and develop a PowerPC-based AmigaOS-compatible computer without Amiga Technologies. They also announced plans to write a new Amiga OS-compatible operating system. Wolf Dietrich (managing director of phase5) earlier commented that "we found that Amiga Technologies offers us no sort of outlook or basis for developing into the future".

There is no detailed information about how many PowerPC accelerator boards Phase5 (and later DCE) sold. According to Ralph Schmidt in an AmigActive article featuring MorphOS, there were about 10,000 people using Phase5 PowerPC accelerator boards. The unofficial PowerUP support page estimates similar figures.

PowerUP kernel is a multitasking kernel developed by Ralph Schmidt for Phase5 PowerPC accelerator boards. The kernel ran alongside the AmigaOS where PPC and 68k native software could run parallel.

The PowerUP kernel used Executable and Linkable Format (ELF) as the executable format and supported runtime linking, relocations and custom sections; it used GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) as its default compiler. This caused controversy in the Amiga community when developers thought that phase5 was bringing "too Unixish stuff" to Amiga. It was feared that PowerUP kernel introducing shared objects and dynamic linking would replace the original shared library model and shared objects were indeed adapted into AmigaOS.

Another controversy was caused by different designs and purposes of Blizzard PPC and Cyberstorm PPC boards. The Blizzard PPC was designed to fit Amiga 1200 as a standalone device which would not need installing additional software but utilised Amiga's unique Autoconfig feature. This caused problems to some 3rd party developers who developed their own PPC kernels for PowerUP cards since they could not work on Amiga 1200 without removing the PowerUP kernel first.

A few hundred titles were released for PowerUP including TurboPrint PPC, Amiga datatypes, MP3 and MPEG players, games (Quake and Doom video games to mention few) and various plugins including Flash Video plugin for Voyager web browser.