Joined: 3-Feb-2004 Posts: 584
From: Lincoln, England
@Troels Simply because to atract new and old users back to the platofrm we need a fast machine, the current A1's are expensive and slow, even compared to the budget G4 macs. They use old processors (The 1.4ghz modules aren't available to the public so they don't count) they use old, slow, rare and expensive RAM. They don't have modern conectivity options (AFAIK, I can't actually find any detailed specs regarding IDE, USB etc. on Eyetech's website). Mai haven't released the Articia P or Sa chipset so we will be stuck with the slow RAM and PCI and AGP until they do. Also we need to keep up, Apple have G5's, who is going to but a slow and old G4 system twhen you can go and get a fast G5 with many more expandability options. Yes OS4 is a very good reason, but I doubt it is good enough for a lot of people to spend the sort of moeny we're talking about on. Another aim of this project is to cut prices, IBM are ehavily backing 3rd party PPC970 motherboards and I hope to get help from them, also if KMOS are interested. The money that we raise from such companies would be used to pay for inital production costs to do relativly high volume runs (compared to the current A1's), end users would then be able to purchase 1 board per year (possibly per 6 monthes) at a discount which means they only pay cost, there is no money made. FUrther boards from teh same customer or large quanitity orders by companies would be cahrged the full price, this money would then be used for developing and producing new/more boards.
@AmigaMac I'm not sure if I understand you, what do you mean what does it lack? It has everything taht a normal motherboard would have, it uses the IBM CPC925 northbridge which gives it 8x AGP, 64bit PCI-X slots, DDR400 Dual channel 128bit RAM (A huge boost over PC100/PC133 single channel 64bit SDRAM) and up to 2x1ghz FSB PPC970 connections. The southbridge is an AMD one that connect via a hypertransport bus, this would give the same connectivity that AMD 64 motherboard have as they alsouse the 8111 southbridge.
@all I hate to say this but can we please get back on topic, this is about getting a the money to make our own PPC970 board, not about Eyetech and their future plans.
Joined: 30-Sep-2003 Posts: 8111
From: Minneapolis, MN, USA
@Troels
Quote:
Why make a G5 capable motherboard now?
I would offcourse buy one if it was priced right (which would be hard with a little production) but how many others would.. 1000 maybe 1500 Amigans and some Linux people?
1) Geek factors 2) Power factors 3) Price factors
1 and 2 are kind of related. The people that like the latest, greatest or the ability to use the latest greatest may find it attractive. I don't know of any announcements saying the G3 and G4 series are ending but the G5 is out and the G6, Power5 derived chip, is to be the next CPU so it seems the newer setup may be better for the future. However, no geek will look sad at a G5 that's 2Ghz vs having a 1Ghz G4. Even if AmigsOS doesn't make use of 64bit extensions the system will still be able to render faster then the G4 system.
Price -- Apple, supposedly, is buying G5 processors for cheaper then G4 processors. If this is the case and someone can make a G5 motherboard for equal to the cost of the G4 motherboard it'll save us all a bit of change. What can we do with that money? Buying more Amiga Software to use on the machine sounds like a great idea to me.
Joined: 31-Jul-2003 Posts: 11694
From: Kristianstad, Sweden
@Troels
Well spoken!
Agree that the most important thing now is to get OS4 ready, and get some good PPC-native software running on it.
It's no harm though in planning a few steps ahead on the hardware-side. But what's the use of a G5 without software that can use it to it's full potencial? Except the geek-factor
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