GigE is essential if you wanna look professional nowadays.
_________________ 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.
I was just about to chime in with "why not add SATA controllers" but someone beat me to it already. The Gigabit Ethernet could always go into an add on controller if needed (usually only in a server role), although it may be useful if you had a render farm of G5 Amigas.
So my vote for deviation from the eval board would be to add SATA. I think UDMA IDE is like AGP... it's going to go the way of the dinasaur soon, so better to look at forward technologies as much as possible. SATA drives are also hot swappable so that would be nice too.
BTW, if you are just talking about a donation of $10 - $ 20 bucks to help out the project, I could easily do that. It's not a large price to help start a project that I've been hoping someone would start on, and not much more than the cost of a couple of Pizza's, so count me in.
If as many people invested $10 into this project as purchased a Club Amiga membership, you should be well on the way to getting that first board designed and have something concrete to start out with.
@ Tomazkid
Quote:
Not at the moment, due to the lack of gigabit wires for homes, and the cost of installing it.
Gigabit will run across the same CAT5 cable that is used for 10/100 connections.
Joined: 30-Sep-2003 Posts: 8111
From: Minneapolis, MN, USA
@digitaldisaster
Quote:
Do you think we need Gigabit Ethernet? How many home or busniness environments support it?
AmigaOS is not a server OS and clients rarely need 100Mbps. Also, I don't know if any Amiga TCP-IP ports will fully utilize a Gig-E. In my opinion it'd be safe to say that Gig-E isn't a requirement. There are some users and critics who will say this is necessary for their application but my opinion is they are a minority of the Amiga users.
Everyone likes low cost/ high performance in their computers so a good balance of price/ usable features needs to be retained. It'd be nice to leave two 100Mbps ethernets available.