@olegil

Ah OK! So then Firmware just initializes the hardware and peripherals and then ceases activities. My Amiga experience deforms my point of view as I thought firmwares are active entities just as like our Kickstart ROM that included also Intuition and graphic primitives.

_________________
"When the Amiga came out, everyone [at Apple] was scared as hell." (J.L. Gassée, former CEO of Apple France and chief of devs of Mac II-fx, interviewed by Amazing Computing, Nov 1996).

@Raffaele

You don't want any active parts of an OS running on a fast CPU to reside on a slow ROM. Anything faster than an unexpanded 68020-equipped Amiga deserves to have Kickstart in RAM.

_________________
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.

@olegil

Quote:

olegil wrote: @Raffaele You don't want any active parts of an OS running on a fast CPU to reside on a slow ROM. Anything faster than an unexpanded 68020-equipped Amiga deserves to have Kickstart in RAM.

Not entirely necessary I think.

Once hardware is initialized you may also discard firmware part of Kickstart.

In RAM you need filesystem, Graphic primitives, GUI and Intuition taken out from Kickstart, nothing else...

_________________
"When the Amiga came out, everyone [at Apple] was scared as hell." (J.L. Gassée, former CEO of Apple France and chief of devs of Mac II-fx, interviewed by Amazing Computing, Nov 1996).

@Raffaele

Apparently you don't know the meaning of "kickstart" in reference to Amiga. Kickstart is not "firmware", it's "OS".

Edit: You know, the scheduling algorithm on Amiga "exec" resides in kickstart, so hundreds of times each second, kickstart is accessed no matter WHAT you do (short of taking over everything with one big forbid(); obviously). Hence, put this in RAM. As fast as you can find, as quickly as you can do it.

More or less end of discussion.

Last edited by olegil on 21-Nov-2015 at 08:49 AM.

_________________
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.

@olegil

Quote:

More or less end of discussion.

Well, more or less this ends of the off topic part of the thread, anyway.

OK, I have a group of basic specs.
They start out simple with a T10XX based Mini ITX board, and end in an MATX T2080 based board (with an intermediate T10XX-T2081 board in between).

Memory looks like DDR3L across this spectrum.
But we are unsure if the CPU should be directly mounted, adapted to a socket, or contained on a mezzanine board.

Except for a specific sound codec, that about summarizes it.

Any further suggestions or alterations?

Last edited by iggy on 22-Nov-2015 at 11:13 PM.

@iggy

Dunno! If you can share these infos via mail with me, I will give a check to the list of specs that you made with other developers.

_________________
"When the Amiga came out, everyone [at Apple] was scared as hell." (J.L. Gassée, former CEO of Apple France and chief of devs of Mac II-fx, interviewed by Amazing Computing, Nov 1996).

@olegil

Quote:

olegil wrote: @Raffaele Apparently you don't know the meaning of "kickstart" in reference to Amiga. Kickstart is not "firmware", it's "OS". Edit: You know, the scheduling algorithm on Amiga "exec" resides in kickstart, so hundreds of times each second, kickstart is accessed no matter WHAT you do (short of taking over everything with one big forbid(); obviously). Hence, put this in RAM. As fast as you can find, as quickly as you can do it. More or less end of discussion.

Really? How unusual and slow. I never thought Exec was kept resident in ROM all the time. I believed it was loaded in RAM at famous address $000004 at boot and that then Kickstart kept only filesystem and primitives for GUI.

It is never too late to learn new things.

_________________
"When the Amiga came out, everyone [at Apple] was scared as hell." (J.L. Gassée, former CEO of Apple France and chief of devs of Mac II-fx, interviewed by Amazing Computing, Nov 1996).

@Raffaele

There's a POINTER to execbase in RAM at address 4, exec itself resides in ROM unless you've patched it to be in RAM.

Filesystems and GUI are some of the things that are typically NOT in ROM for performance reasons, so I think you got the logic backwards

_________________
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.

So is any one working on it?
Does any one in this thread have the experience to do it?

Maybe this is just the usual dreaming thread, which is perfectly fine, but realize there is a reason why we have the motherboards we have.

_________________

@Yssing

Quote:

Yssing wrote: So is any one working on it? Does any one in this thread have the experience to do it? Maybe this is just the usual dreaming thread, which is perfectly fine, but realize there is a reason why we have the motherboards we have.

What happened to this? Anyone heard anything more? Anyone been in contact with them?

No offence to you guys, but I'd rather see a board developed by bPlan...

@Yssing

Quote:

Does any one in this thread have the experience to do it?

I would ask do any one in this thread have money to do it.

_________________
Rock lobster bit me. My Workbench has always preferences. X1000 + AmigaOS4.1 FE
"Anyone can build a fast CPU. The trick is to build a fast system." -Seymour Cray

@Yssing

Seems that Iggy, Ole-Egil and another guy or two are enough skilled in hardware design. We count on them.

_________________
"When the Amiga came out, everyone [at Apple] was scared as hell." (J.L. Gassée, former CEO of Apple France and chief of devs of Mac II-fx, interviewed by Amazing Computing, Nov 1996).

@Tomppeli

Quote:

Tomppeli wrote: @Yssing Quote: Does any one in this thread have the experience to do it? I would ask do any one in this thread have money to do it.

I found a prototyping facility in Italy that asks about 570 euro for the manifacture of 2 boards up to 8 layers.
Pretty cheap for the Amiga Community to afford with a bounty.

If you have infos of any cheaper and reliable prototyping service facility in your country (France, Spain, Netherlands, Germany, United Kingdom, Sweden, Denmark, Norway or perhaps Poland, where there is a strong community of Amigans and that is very cheap East Europe Country, and mainly it is rising again as industrial and technological modern country) please share your knowledge.

Our common goal is a mainboard cheaper than actuals in Amiga market and born from knowledge skills and informations shared by whole Amiga Community.


[EDIT]

WARNING!

Sure I had some Alzheimer attack as I inverted cyphers of amount of money for prototyping...

It is not 570...

It is 750 euro

My bad...

[EDIT END]

Last edited by Raffaele on 24-Nov-2015 at 10:38 AM.
Last edited by Raffaele on 24-Nov-2015 at 10:34 AM.
Last edited by Raffaele on 23-Nov-2015 at 11:55 AM.
Last edited by Raffaele on 23-Nov-2015 at 11:53 AM.

_________________
"When the Amiga came out, everyone [at Apple] was scared as hell." (J.L. Gassée, former CEO of Apple France and chief of devs of Mac II-fx, interviewed by Amazing Computing, Nov 1996).

@Raffaele

2 boards 170x170mm, 8 layers? Using a stackup-of OUR choosing, or a stack-up of THEIR choosing? minimum track width/space, via size, annular ring?

In addition, you need some way to reliably solder some rather large BGAs (allthough for two units this is plausibly done in anyones kitchen).

Edit:
Hmm, is it https://portal.multi-circuit-boards.eu/ ?
I put in 0.1mm tracks/spaces/annular rings, 0.2mm vias, mini-ITX size, 2 boards, custom build-up and got a quote of $540 plus VAT/shipping, which I feel is totally fine. Adding a few boards didn't break the bank either, as the major hassle here is the custom build-up which they only need to do once. First 10 boards: $94 each. Reordering in batches of 10: $76 each. Plus VAT and shipping. Batches of 100 brings it down to $28 (which is on par with my previous estimates).

Last edited by olegil on 23-Nov-2015 at 03:01 PM.

_________________
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.

@olegil

Did you mean the board only?

_________________
retired

@TRIPOS

Bill? Yes he has an appointment with Freescale in December.
Now that I have three basic system specs, I am sending those to him.

And yes, I contacted him early in this discussion to see if power2people might consider hosting a bounty,

You know, I don't think he would mind further creative input.
His snail mail address is posted on the power2people website and I don't doubt that he would address PMs as well.

Quote:

I'd rather see a board developed by bPlan...

Me too, it might be more affordable.
Right now, this is just a speculative investigation of the potential market.
But if there is enough interest, well they do have engineers and prototyping facilities at their disposal, so...

@olegil

That works for me.
My board manufacturer turned it down as too complicated and the company they referenced me to just got back to me.

Right now, I need an Orcad upgrade.

But yes, I think we could pull together the simpler board.

Freescale is willing to provide me complete details on their reference design boards if I sign an NDA.

@Raffaele

570 euros, that is very cheap, I guess that is for the bare board only.

_________________

@Raffaele

Quote:

I found a prototyping facility in Italy that asks about 570 euro for the manifacture of 2 boards up to 8 layers. Pretty cheap for the Amiga Community to afford with a bounty.

Nice! Can't wait to have this unproven pile of wires in direct competition with the X5000! May be we'll all appreciate the professionalism that A-EON and ACube have brought to the market after this falls on its bottom Has this pipe dream got any assurances from Hyperion that they will port AmigaOS to it if it gets designed and built or shall we worry about that in 5 to 10 years time? Is it really that likely to get anywhere close to even a 100 board manufacturing run? Does anyone here care beyond trying to antagonise A-EON and A-Cube?

Sorry to spoil the flow of the thread, some people obviously love vapourware and the whole 'when it's done' joke more than they actually like Amiga/AmigaOne computers. Long live the spirit of Troika, Adam 'ACK', Mike Tinker and all the people that thought they could do it better

Last edited by BigD on 23-Nov-2015 at 08:05 PM.

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@BigD

Quote:

Sorry to spoil the flow of the thread, some people obviously love vapourware and the whole 'when it's done' joke more than they actually like Amiga/AmigaOne computers. Long live the spirit of Troika, Adam 'ACK', Mike Tinker and all the people that thought they could do it better

ahh...you forgot about the lawsuit.
Could you at least accept the "possibility" that Hyperion stating to everyone that "we can't issue licenses at this time" does not make this all the fault of the 3rd party h/w devs?

#6

_________________
This posting, in its entirety, represents solely the perspective of the author.
*Secrecy has served us so well*