Phase 5's announcement of the A\Box specifications was stunning, but to those who know about Phase 5 it wasn't surprising. The German based Oberursel firm (near Frankfurt) has plodded on with developing high-powered expansion systems all through both of the two Amiga buyout dramas.

A relatively recent newcomer to the Amiga market, Phase 5 started out making the Amiga's first Zorro III SCSI card, the Z3 Fastlane. However they moved swiftly on to producing the first 68030 card for the A1200 with DMA-SCSI capability. They were also the first to provide 68060 accelerators for the Amiga. Their Blizzard range of accelerators didn't stop with the 030 and moved up to the incredible 68060 with the Blizzard 1260. They also created the Amiga's first 64-bit graphics board, the Cybervision.

Statistically, Phase 5 shipped Amiga hardware products to the value of £5.5 million in 1995 and since Christmas 1995, 30.000 hardware products have been delivered. Their meteoric rise from a minor developer to a major player in the Amiga market lies firmly in the hands of the two owner/directors Gerald Carda and Wolf Dietrich racking up over 20 'products of the year' style awards from international Amiga journals. More recently and behind the scenes, Phase 5 have been working on a plan to move the Amiga from the 680X0 CPU to the powerful RISC PowerPC just like Apple Macintosh has done. Phase 5 are also Macintosh developers which explains some of their experience with this type of technology.

At one stage, Phase 5 had an arrangement with Amiga Technologies to provide a drop-in PowerPC upgrade for the ill-fated 'Walker'. Though Amiga Technologies wound down with the financial failure of Escom, Phase 5 continued to work on the PowerPC.

Recently Phase 5 started shipping the so-called 'PowerUp' upgrades to Amiga developers. Initially an upgrade to Blizzard 68040/060 accelerators, even the later low-end A1200 units possess both an 680X0 CPU of some kind in addition to the mighty PowerPC. This approach allows both professional and amateur Amiga developers to port their software gradually across to PowerPC.