I admit that the AmigaOne offers a lot of fun and that the OS4 thing is interesting. I just have a lot in my mind right now...i'm sorry...

@Helgis
> The Amiga-developers really needs to get their fingers out of their butthole and really start to
> work even harder to make these Amiga dreams become true!

Yes, it seems to take forever for Amiga devs to get stuff done. Guess what? Microsoft has a couple more developers than we do. They work full-time, we require day-jobs to pay the bills. Some days, after 12 or 13 hours at said day job, I don't feel like working even more at home that same day. Most other Amiga devs suffer the same lifestyle as I do. We work on stuff as we can.

My own personal responsibilities:
1. Day job as a chip designer
2. Board member of neighborhood Homeowners Association
3. I'm a landlord and have 3 tenants to keep happy, which requires manual labor on the building and lots of paperwork, especially with tax season upon us in USA
4. Forefront stuff
5. Participate in a Volleyball league that I have paid to play in and have teammates that will beat me with a tire iron if there aren't enough players showing up to play
6. Sleep every now and then

And guess what? Every now and then I'm going to take some "me time" off and relax. If no devs do this part for themselves, they'll all burn out and projects will slip into limbo.

Legal requirements of 3 take priority over others, lest I be sued. 2 can be a big thing at times, at others not so busy. 1 takes priority over 4. Etc...

If you don't want devs having free time to stay sane and productive, then you should at least join the club and swear off any leisure activities as well. :)

_________________
All glory to the Hypnotoad!

@billt

Quote:

The only real problem with PCI-X is that most of the rest of the world skipped over it.

Yes, there's a serious lack of PCI-X cards. But the PCI-X slots will, I believe (it's some time since I read the PCI-X spec) function as standard 64-bit/66MHz PCI slots. Several of those will prove useful to quite a lot of people I expect.

_________________
Who do you serve, and who do you trust? - Galen

@billt
@wegster
>'local PC superstores' aren't really 'super'- they generally offer a large amount of mediocrity.
>Most people that need PCI-X cards generally purchase them at the same time as a pre-built
>server, or buy them direct from their system vendor.
Quote:

Exactly my point, and why PCI-X doesn't excite me very much. This can certainly be very desirable for Eyetech's industrial systems business, but for you and me as consumer-grade consumers, what does it really offer us? I personally don't have much use for RAID or fiber HBAs or quad server nic cards... Even in my high-capacity PC the drives are not Raided, there's just two normal IDE drives adding up to 360gig on a normal parallel IDE bus.

Umm, you asked the wrong person that question! (sun box with dual HBAs going to a fiber channel RAID array, sorely tempted to offload into an x86 BSD box at the moment).

But yeah, you're right. Those boxes are servers, and AOS is a desktop OS. SATA or other (but that becomes $) RAID might be nice, even if just for drive striping for speed for people doing a lot of media work or similar I/O intensive work, but that doesn't require PCI-X either. The rest of the stuff currently really is relegated to servers or 'frankenstein' unusal need desktops/workstations only

Quote:

The high-end PC that you or I or our friends would use is moving from AGP to PCI-Express, and at some point the AGP bus will go the way of PCI graphics cards. Still out there, yet not kept up to spec with PCI-Express models just like PCI cards aren't kept up to spec with their AGP bretheren these days. Do we want to again end up left out of what consumers actually put in their computers, or have to deal with "elite" price tags for harder to find and lower in variety PCI-X cards while our PC using friends get the equivalent at the PC superstore for noticably lower prices, and have much wider variety to choose from than we would?

Yeah, I know it...which is why I'd like to see PCI-Express. However...I think there's already a PCI-Express revision underway, which means it could be a fair while yet before companies stop producing boards for AGP. Remember, it took a few years before AGP really replaced PCI as well for graphics cards...

The issues I have there is mainly that I'm not sure what the 'lifetime' of the XC board would be. I haven't checked benchmarks recently, but I believe a single G5 is a good bit faster than a dual G4 setup even at comparably similar speeds (single G5 1.5Ghz vs dual 1.25Ghz G4s)...nor is AOS4 currently SMP enabled AFAIK....but even when it does get there, if there's a G5 board say , 1.5 years down the pipeline...ok, fine, then the XC is a stepping stone if an upgrade is later needed. If it's the last board to be seen for several years......then yeah, I'd want PCI express Although to be fair, I really don't expect too much in the Amiga world to really _need_ it. The 9800 is a capable enough card for anything in the PC/Windows world today, and itself is 'getting old' in the GFX market. I've still got a geForce4 MX 64MB or similar in my 'old' (bit over 2 years, was close to high end but fairly reasonable then) Athlon box, and it ran the few games I needed it to, just fine. I guess it's all relative, but if a system of handling HD video streams, I think we're reasonably 'safe' for a while, even if it's a few years until the next board is available.

Quote:

I can't name one person that could tell me, without looking it up, where one might get a PCI-X graphics card of any chipset or generation of same, or single 10/100 ethernet card, or single gigabit ethernet card... Can you? Do you think that situation is a good one?

Nope, PCI-X isn't for GFX though. PCI-X looks like ~450MB/second throughput, AGP8x is ~2.1GB, and I _think_ the theoretical PCI-express is something ike 8GB (so trim this to 4GB likely). by comparison standard PCI is ~300MB/sec.

PCI-X is _supposed_ to backward compatible with PCI as well, although I think only for 3.3v cards. To be honest, on all of the PCI-X systems I've dealt with, they were all servers..which generally don't get all their PCI slots filled, as each is a special purpose box. The only system I've come close to filling up all PCI/PCI--X slots on was a purpose build VMWare ESX Server box, which was using local disks + dual HBAs plus several dual NICs to eliminate as many IO bottlenecks as possible between all of the virtual machines.

So, short of that, you could just count the PCUI-X slots as 'free PCI slots' and be happy

To answer your question specifically...hmm. I don't think they _make_ single PCI-X NICs. besides, you don't really want a 10/100 card now anyways, buy a GigE, an 8 port GigE switch, a GigE equipped file server, and then wireless in a 'media center' somewhere in the mix

_________________
Are we not done with the same silly arguments and flames yet??!

@billt
Quote:

My own personal responsibilities:

Wow! I'm sold.

(if I was in the market for excuses, I'd be saying...)



I'm just kidding you, we all know Amiga OS 4 is a hobby effort.
Good luck.

I think Eyetech making the realease of the XC dependent on the sales of the micro A1 would be flawed thinking. They pretty much know that the micro A1 is not that upgradable and not that suited for a desktop expandable system. You almost dont have ANY PCI slots and you can't upgrade the Gfx, come on! This model is for a different market, settopbox like, I'm sure they'll release the XC anyway, and if they don't their loss, as I and I bet others out there, aren't interested in the micro A1.
The XC would also be the first one to be on par with current PC systems and so would attract a lot more sales from outsiderst too (old Amiga users etc..)

_________________

José

@DrBombcrater
Quote:

* Core speeds up to 1.5GHz. * Support for 400MHz DDR and 667MHz DDR2 memory. * PCI-Express capability (8 lanes). * 2 x 32-bit PCI busses, or 1 x 64-bit bus. * 4 x Gigabit ethernet interfaces.

This seems to me to be the best bet for the Amiga to go whilst we are stuck with PCI based southbridges from 1999 as the other option.

The chip described above would allow for current technology graphics cards with PCIe (x16 cards work electrically with x8, the slot would have to be x16 physically of course! x8 PCIe is still more than enough for the current generation and probably the next generation of PCIe graphics cards). Stick a SATA controller and Firewire controller on one PCI bus, and Audio, USB2 controllers on the other bus. Stick a few PCI slots onto the board. Connect up a couple of the GigE ports, ignore the other two. Two PC3200 memory slots (DDR is cheaper than DDR2).

Forget about serial, parallel and PS/2 ports (typically on southbridges) - if people want the former, they can get a PCI card with the ports on.

Alternatively, and this is a bit of a compromise:

x4 PCIe for graphics card slot (erk, 1GB/s in each direction, between AGP4x and AGP8x - not terrible, not ideal)
x2 PCIe for a slot
x2 PCIe for ATI SB400 or ULi PCIe connected southbridge (SATA, USB2, IDE, Audio, etc)
Thus giving you the option to include PCI-X slots!

@DrBombcrater

Quote:

Oh heck, none of the information I've seen on the e500 code suggested code incompatibilities. That's a pretty serious bummer.

Oh dear. Yes, it is. Still, the MPC8641 looks quite capable, looks like it has the chipset capabilities of the e500, with the processor abilities of up to a dual G4.

Quote:

Indeed, we need something that's available now, not next year.

Actually designing a board for that processor now isn't a bad idea, when it comes out the hardware will be ready to go. Look how long the current motherboards have taken to do and get released.

The only issue with the e600 processors is that there is not really an option to have them on a separate card. They'll be part of the motherboard, as they have the dual memory controllers and PCIe controllers and the RapidIO controllers on board. The processor has 960 connectors! A G4 has 360...

http://www.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/fact_sheet/MPC8641DFACT.pdf

@DrBombcrater

Quote:

You can look at a picture of the PX2 v1 here. I have quite detailed specs for this board, which come from a very plausible source and tally 100% with the picture. I'm not prepared to say any more about that source.

The problem with that is you cannot backup you statements so as far as we know it is nothing more than fantasy.I am not saying it is, nor am I saying it isn't, but I am sure you see the problem.

I really think we should be going G5.If we stay on G3/G4 we will end up behind AGAIN. If we go G5 now it means we can catch up completely on the hardware side of things.Who cares if we cannot use all that power, all that means is that a G5 will have much greater longevity.I am quite sure linux users could make use of it, and at this stage, that is the market Eyetech MUST target to get volume sales for it's boards until OS 4.0 catches up AND we get appropiate application software.

Furthermore, people will not port applications to hardware that wont run it, or will struggle in running it.They will port it to hardware that will eat it for breakfast.There ARE advantages to having powerful hardware even if WE cannot use it right now.

We also have to look at what the PC/MAC world is doing and follow suit so we can take advantage of mass produced NIC's and other expansions. PC is moving towards PCIe slowly. We are in a position to move there now and prevent some double handling. (writing drivers for card X for PCI then doing it again for PCIe or PCI-X)

It is my humble opinion that people are not looking far enough into the future. I think we should look at where we expect the hardware to be in 2-3 years and get that hardware as standard NOW, or as close to now as is possible so our platform is matured a bit and we are not playing catchup anymore.

_________________

@DrBombcrater

Quote:

The board in the picture is the Teron PX2 v1, I'm totally certain of that. The specifications for it are:

ya know, I'm not getting impressed with these specs.

Remember all the talk long ago how the Amiga would be better off without the custom chips and buy in the open market?

We are still talking custom chips MAI & Via, Nividia, and ATI etc. Some of these companies could care less about the AmigaOS or market.

Your thoughts?

_________________
"The system no longer works " -- Young Anakin Skywalker

@IonMane

Quote:

The problem with that is you cannot backup you statements so as far as we know it is nothing more than fantasy.I am not saying it is, nor am I saying it isn't, but I am sure you see the problem.

Of course. There's no requirement for anybody to believe a word I'm saying, they are free to disregard my information completely if they wish. I won't be offended if they do

There's been plenty of fantasists peddling their own brand of vapour in the Amiga world over the years, so I'm expecting the majority of people reading this thread have been with the Amiga long enough to be able to tell the difference between garbage and solid information.

Quote:

I really think we should be going G5.If we stay on G3/G4 we will end up behind AGAIN.

We cannot go G5. The financial realities of the situation prohibit that course -- the one commercial G5 reference board design in existence (the Momentum one) is far too expensive and complex to produce in quantity for the Amiga market, and the money required to design a cost-reduced version is simply not there.

And the work required to adapt OS4 and U-Boot to a whole new architecture would be far from trivial. Going with the PX2 board represents an evolution of what we have now, paying large dividends with the minimum of time and money invested.

Quote:

Furthermore, people will not port applications to hardware that wont run it, or will struggle in running it.

CPU grunt is way, way down the list of obstacles for app porting. There very little a G3 or G4 can't do, they'll just do it a bit slower than a G5.

Quote:

We also have to look at what the PC/MAC world is doing and follow suit so we can take advantage of mass produced NIC's and other expansions. PC is moving towards PCIe slowly.

Very, very slowly. PCIe would be very good as a marketting tool, but it's of limited practical usefulness. There are almost no PCIe devices on the market other than graphics cards and that isn't likely to change any time soon because there's no compelling reason for it. There's almost no consumer or semi-pro level hardware out there that can saturate a 66MHz PCI slot, so the impetus to change to PCIe is just not there.

Why do you think most non-server PCIe motherboards devote 75% of their PCIe lanes to the graphics card?

And I'd point out that 100% of the Athlon 64 systems on the market are still using AGP and PCI, but nobody regards them as out-dated or incapable.

Quote:

(writing drivers for card X for PCI then doing it again for PCIe or PCI-X)

PCI, PCI-X and PCIe are all compatible at software level. No driver re-writing is needed.

_________________
Who do you serve, and who do you trust? - Galen

@DrBombcrater
A good point is raised with chasing faster CPUs and new designs. SAomewhere you have to jump, and the best jump is not for the most adavanced but for the most versitile (price, performance and versitality) in a sense for the forseeable future OS4 has jumped for G3 and G4s.

My feeling is that the passvely cooled G3 is actually the real edge, that the trick is to what extent we can adapt to use multiple processors, that is itself no short development aim.

These things all do amazing speeds relative to what we use to have. The design and engineering costs to follow the latest just seems a waste, consider the little HW problems we now face beiung increased by several magnitudes. which I think is the gist of your point.

I am all for making the best of superceded models and really squeezing the most from them by lean software desgin, good bus design and just plain innovation. If we can start using multiple CPUs profitablely (even at thread level) the effective speed will outshine any G5.

The four PCIx slot PX2, and the compatablile computer on a PCI card is probably a more interesting thing to tackle in the medium term, when it comes to turbo charged setups.

_________________
Greg Schofield, Perth Australia

@DrBombcrater

Quote:

We cannot go G5. The financial realities of the situation prohibit that course -- the one commercial G5 reference board design in existence (the Momentum one) is far too expensive and complex to produce in quantity for the Amiga market, and the money required to design a cost-reduced version is simply not there.

$4500 is not that much more compared to MAI's $3900.
From where do you get you information on production costs?

Quote:

And the work required to adapt OS4 and U-Boot to a whole new architecture would be far from trivial.

Why? The PPX970 will run 32 bit as well as 64 bit software....perhaps uboot.
Quote:

CPU grunt is way, way down the list of obstacles for app porting. There very little a G3 or G4 can't do, they'll just do it a bit slower than a G5.

Thats the point, comsumers of this kind of product don't want a board that will just do the job, they also want it done fast.And a G3 is more than "a little slower" than a G5.

Quote:

Going with the PX2 board represents an evolution of what we have now, paying large dividends with the minimum of time and money invested.

This is pure speculation., based on your bias for the board and no factual basis provided whatsoever.

Quote:

Very, very slowly. PCIe would be very good as a marketting tool, but it's of limited practical usefulness. There are almost no PCIe devices on the market other than graphics cards and that isn't likely to change any time soon because there's no compelling reason for it. There's almost no consumer or semi-pro level hardware out there that can saturate a 66MHz PCI slot, so the impetus to change to PCIe is just not there.

This time last year I had never heard of PCIe, now at least half the board that are easily available to me have two PCie slots. That is not a slow change.By the end of the year I doubt that 20% of the motherboard market will be continuing with AGP. Also, I never said we should replace all the current PCI slots with PCIe, but replacing some of them would be a good idea.
Quote:

And I'd point out that 100% of the Athlon 64 systems on the market are still using AGP and PCI, but nobody regards them as out-dated or incapable.

You are absolutely wrong here. Look here

Quite simply, if we do not move in this direction NOW in two years we will still be running on 32 bit, still using old cards, still a generation or two behind the PC and Apple.

In two years I would expect OS 4 to be well on the way to upgrading to 64 bit, something we cannot do effectively without 64 bit hardware to run it on.

Currently MAI is developing a referance board for the 970 that can support pretty much everything that everyone has mentioned in this thread. Be sure, there will be people wanting the new firewire 800 when that becomes available in the not to distant future.Now if Eyetech can get on board with MAI perhaps thier development board could support ALL the feature with a minimum of rediesign.

referance is here

Of course the board was supposed to be finished already, and perhaps Eyetech IS in fact contributing to the design of this board but saying nothing, who knows, but this is exactly the way we should go so we don't have to be playing "catch up" for the next ten years like we have in the previous 10.

_________________

Can I be totally on topic and say its snowing here?

@DaveP

You lucky mixed-bred canine!

_________________
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.

@Hattig

Quote:

The chip described above would allow for current technology graphics cards with PCIe (x16 cards work electrically with x8, the slot would have to be x16 physically of course! x8 PCIe is still more than enough for the current generation and probably the next generation of PCIe graphics cards). Stick a SATA controller and Firewire controller on one PCI bus, and Audio, USB2 controllers on the other bus. Stick a few PCI slots onto the board. Connect up a couple of the GigE ports, ignore the other two. Two PC3200 memory slots (DDR is cheaper than DDR2).

This is similar to what I have as spec for such a board (see my earlier postings). Though we would only want to use the 8545E (not the 8548 which Dr.B talked about), as only the 8545E has double precision FPU (the other ones only have single precision and use the integer registers for FPU, too - which gives fast context switch )

The 8545E "only" has 4x PCIe, 2 GigE, PCI instead of PCI-X and no Rapid-IO (see http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=MPC8548&nodeId=01DFTQJk19 for detailed specs). Still more than good enough for us, I guess

Quote:

Forget about serial, parallel and PS/2 ports (typically on southbridges) - if people want the former, they can get a PCI card with the ports on.

As the chip comes with 2 serial UARTs already, why not use at least one of them!? Serial is very helpful for board bringup, debugging etc. I fully agree on ditching the PS2 and parallel, though A couple of USB ports should do the job

Quote:

Alternatively, and this is a bit of a compromise: x4 PCIe for graphics card slot (erk, 1GB/s in each direction, between AGP4x and AGP8x - not terrible, not ideal) x2 PCIe for a slot x2 PCIe for ATI SB400 or ULi PCIe connected southbridge (SATA, USB2, IDE, Audio, etc) Thus giving you the option to include PCI-X slots!

This not possible with the 8548, you get 4x PCIe or 8x but not 2x4x But the 8548 is not suitable for a desktop computer anyway, in my opinion, as it lacks the DP FPU.

So anyone here of you who can solder a 783-pin BGA by hand!?


PS: people who talk about speed here: "3065 MIPS at 1333 MHz (estimated Dhrystone 2.1)". So at 1.2 GHz (cheaper price) the CPU still gets about 2750 MIPS - roughly the same as a G4 and more than a G3 at the same clock speed

PPS: @billt: Did I mention that the 8545E may also fit nicely in a notebook design!?

Last edited by fisk on 26-Jan-2005 at 08:16 AM.

@helgis

Can you please start your threads with "Helgis wrote this", or "Helgis was here", as most of the postings lately you posted almost looks like "Spam"........and it looks like quite a few others think so too

Also you seem to try to bash everyone actually doing anything like the coders who actually produce something, comments like "get your fingers out of ***********" just seem like childish wording.


no offence ment...

@Interesting

Quote:

ya know, I'm not getting impressed with these specs.

So.... nothing will impress you in this comunity

Those specs are amazing for out little market. We must wait and see.

_________________
ikir

@Helgis

Quote:

At least a modern PC with Windows XP seems to have everything up-to-date! Hardware and software, and games and applications! ALl of them up-to-date!

That is a rather botched reasoning. The Wintel PC *define* what is up-to-date, at least in the view of most people. However the fact that many still stick with Amiga seems to indicate that "up-to-date" does not necessarily mean "fun".

Quote:

Amiga isn't even that close yet! How SAD is that? I'm sick and tired of it!

If you are, then why are you even here?

Quote:

The Amiga-developers really needs to get their fingers out of their butthole and really start to work even harder to make these Amiga dreams become true!

This is an extremely offensive and immature statement. I invite you to take a look around. Amiga developers are already hard at work, but there are limits to what can be done. We also have to earn money for a living.

And please watch your language.

_________________
Seriously, if you want to contact me do not bother sending me a PM here. Write me a mail

@Interesting

Quote:

We are still talking custom chips MAI & Via, Nividia, and ATI etc. Some of these companies could care less about the AmigaOS or market.

What is your definition of "custom chip" anyway?

_________________
Seriously, if you want to contact me do not bother sending me a PM here. Write me a mail