@digitaldisaster

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digitaldisaster wrote: @blitterstorm I will look into the possibility of open sourcing the design, it depends on the licensing restrictions palced on the design by momentum.

I lost the thread here!
what kind of licensing restrictions are you talking about?
Is momentum going to be involved in the actual motherboard design?

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Yes, I want to involve as many communities as possible but I am not sure how to go about this and I am but one man, if you know forums where you can publicse this then by all means go forth and do so, we will have to come up with ways of publicising the website once it laucnhes.

I think it's a good idear to wait a litle while with involving more, communities.
I think at least we need to get the website mature.
So ppl can get a nice presentation of the projects goals, overview of the project, and information about the project,etc.

I think with some good planning, the mutual benefits of collaborations will be much
better in practice, the big question is how does we get ppl to work more organized and focused.

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Also Apple killed their clones business a long time ago and I don't think jobs is about to change his mind, although I sup[ose there is no harm in asking closer to the time. I don't think their is a simulator available, I certainly haven't heard of one if there is and momentum and IBM don't publicise details of it, you would probably ahve to buy a board to get it anyway, that seems to be the only way to get anything out of momentum.

I think there is a small glitch in the communication, at least I am confused.

What I ment about simulator, is virtual hardware.
NB I am not a hardware Engineer, og even hardware technican, and does only know a little about the subject.

The idear was, to make a functional blueprint of the entire motherboard.
If it can be done in a resonable effort, I can see some realy nice advantages.

Cheap to get started, in theory no nead to buy any hardware before the actual blueprint
is finished.

Distribution of the testing effort, potential bug sweeping speedup.
Porting of operating systems could be done, with only use of the simulator, I belive that
to be only partial true in practice, but I think much of the work could be done in this way
and only small glitches need to be corrected to get it running on the real hardware.

It will probably be much easyer to find sponsors for the actual construction of the mobo
prototype if an functional blue print is ready for demonstration.

I made these assumsions, but have not checked them.
The chips needet for the mobo is availebel as VHDL, or other syntesis language, package. The different busses are also availbel as VHDL package.

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IBM have tried a few times to create an open PowerPC specification first with CHRP (COmmon hardware Reference Platform) then with POP (PowerPC Open Platform) but both times a lack of support from the largest PowerPC desktop manufacturer (Apple) has sunk the project before it canget off the ground. Check out www.openppc.org

I just stared to look at Open PPC spec, so no comments at this time.

Other good links, the practical issues of hardware prototyping, and cost of manufactoring, will make me happy.