Joined: 3-Feb-2004 Posts: 584
From: Lincoln, England
The recent thread about the PowerPC 970 evaluation boards made by momentum rekindeled a flame in my heart, a while ago on the AmigaOne mailing list someone was moaning about the price and spec of teh A1 and flashing their cash saying they would pay someone to develop a beter one, of course as soon as I made a serious offer he disappeared. After this I forgot all about the idea and went back to my day job for Xion Internet Services - designing embeded systems using PowerPC 405 and 400 series processors. As you can probably tell I am an electrical engineer, I work with PowerPC chips regularly, recently I managed to persuade XionIS to look into expanding their developemnt to include a G3/G4 server system which we could both replace your existing x86 Linux box's and sell. Athough a decision has yet to be made it looks like it should get the go ahead, we have been accepted by Marvell and signed the NDA, we have also been in dicsuccion with Mai, so watch this space. As yet we have not aproached anyone to get AmigaOS 4 running on it as this is not what it is designed for and we are still at a concept phase and are still evaluating chipset suppliers (Also I have no idea who to contact - Amgia inc? KMOS? Hyperion?) If you want any more info on the system or know who to get in touch with to get AmigaOS 4 running on it email me on edward.dore@xionis.com I also asked about a G5 system, but becauses of the cost of the development boards and the liklyhood of Apple taking up the entire supply of G5 shipcs until IBm can get their 90nm manufacturing process fully working with decent yeilds it was turned down for "the forseable future". Time to get to the point, my question is this..... Would people be willing to donate to a fund to develop a G5 AmigaOne board and port the OS to it? My idea is quite simple, setup a not for profit organistaion and sell the boards at cost, at elast to individauls, possibly charge companies a small cost for large orders/batches. Possibly even get IBM involved to cut deals on chips and chipsets or cover some initial costs of manufacturing and advertising. I'm sure they would be interested in it if you could get Linux on it, which shouldn't be too hard for a competent kernel hacker!
Excuse me if this sounds like random mumblings, it is 1 o'clock in the moarning and my typing is lousy at the best of times. Also, please understand that nothing I have said here is an official statment of XionIS etc.
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