By my estimates at 10,000 is will cost $2000 per board (~£1000)
$2000! yikes!
How many do you expect to actually sell? I rekon you'd be lucky if you sold any at that price!
You're making Apple low positively low priced...
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That said I'm inclined to think you're somewhat overestimating volume pricing but I don't have figures to confirm this. If the prices really are that high then I don't think there's much point in the project, it'll not sell at that price.
I think it's safe to say that only dropping unwanted things from the eval design would make the project a LOT more realistical than introducing new features and/or replacing things like the service processor.
What's so wrong with the original design?
_________________ This weeks pet peeve: Using "voltage" instead of "potential", which leads to inventing new words like "amperage" instead of "current" (I, measured in A) or possible "charge" (amperehours, Ah or Coulomb, C). Sometimes I don't even know what people mean.
IBM CPC925 + NVIDIA nForce4 = Key to success for a PPC high performance desktop?
A Non-Apple company uses this system architecture with PCI-Express for its new dual-G5 mainboard.
While the first product based on the IBM G5 Northbridge and NVIDIA Hypertransport Southbridge (originally meant for AMD64 CPUs) is an AdvancedTCA LINUXblade PPC20A, it could also be used for a most up to date desktop system since it implements all of today's neccessary and cutting edge features in just two chips:
* 16Bit 1000MHz Hypertransport interface * 20 PCI-Express lanes, different configurations possible (e.g. 2 gfxcards) * Standard 32Bit 33MHz PCI bus with up to 6 slots * 10 USB 2.0 ports * RAIDable storage controllers o 2 channels of parallel ATA-133 o 4 ports of Serial ATA 3Gb/s * AC'97 sound with up to 8 channels and dual S/PDIF output with AC3 or Stereo PCM up to 24Bit 96KHz * Gigabit Ethernet with CPU offloading engine
Thanks to IBM's choice of Hypertransport as chip interconnect there is now a situation that lets PPC board manufacturers use cheap and modern southbridges from the PC world and together with IBM's G5 northbridge create a turnkey solution for most demanding desktop or workstation applications based on the PPC platform.
Read more about the first product that implements this design in the German part of PPCNUX.
And btw after reading this ArsTecnica post (Bad Andy) I'm quite impressed that you think that you can pull this all off. :)
Quote:
system integration is A B*TCH. When I realized how ugly this is... my interest in 970 embedded vaporized... until it gets fixed. The fundamental problem is that the 970 doesn't come up out of reset ready to talk through the FSB, nor does the CPC925 (which is aka UN3) ... instead both need to be brought up from reset with control parameters loaded via I2C (JTAG) ports, from another micro or state machine. IBM's JS20s use a 405 to do this job! As I've heard it second-hand, Apple uses a HC-08 (far less overkill) but in either case the system integration is a big, big job, and Elastic-bus control parameters a very tedious job to optimize for any new PCB (and variability of same). Embedded folks simply don't have the interest or resources to deal with this level of system design and complexity.
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