The Articia P seems as a good replacer of the Articia S,
when the time comes to switch to next-gen of Amigas.

In the meantime, I'd like too see the current-generation in action with AOS.

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Site admins are people too..pooff!

Don't you just love how the bottom left side of the pages on that pps reads "confidentia"?

It's a very high time to replace the old artica... Eyetech should concentrate on creating mA1/A1 with the new artica instead "almost" existing mA1 - OS4'll rather not see the daylight earlier :)

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Harthon gerithach raid gelin a chwest adel thraw lín :)

D6 TEAM

For those who cannot view the Poiwerpoint presentation:

There will be two Articia version suporting the PPC970:
The articiaI and ArticiaIs.

Spec of the Articia I:

ElasticI/O (CPU bus) : Supporting dual PPC970 (AKA G5) or single PPC750FX or single G4.

Buses:
- Pheripheral bus 1: PCI-X or PCI-EXPRESS (NOT the same thing)
- Pheripheral bus 2: Internal VGA controller with LCD controller OR AGP8x
- Pheripheral bus 3 / memory bus: PCI-X or DDR1/DDR2.

Misc buses:
- XD / NVRAM bus.
- SM bus

LPC interface
DMA controller
MPEG4 CODEC
Video processor with video link (S-video??)
Power management

Spec of the Articia Is:

ElasticI/O (CPU bus) : Supporting DUAL PPC970 (AKA G5) or single PPC750FX or single G4.

Shared buses (two options):
- Pheripheral bus 1: PCI-X
- Pheripheral bus 2: AGP8x
- memory bus: DDR1/DDR2.

Misc buses:
- XD / NVRAM bus.
- SM bus

LPC interface
DMA controller
Power management

Note that the G4 uses a shared bus, so a single bus can support multiple G4 processors.

The 970 uses a point-to-point bus, hence the requirement for 2 controllers.

Regardless, the Artica I and Is look like much more interesting northbridges. Now if only they had a HyperTransport link as well ...

@geen_naam:

Thanks for translating the slides for us. I could view them, but since it was written in chinese characters all I got was a mass of question marks! (not that I would have been able to read it anyway if the original characters had come through )

So, it looks like the Is is the 'budget' version of the I?

Can you tell us what the slide that mentions OS4 says? were they really talking about AmigaOS4 or was it just a linguistic tease?

@CodeSmith

Yes the Is is the budget version of the I just like the Articia Sa is the budget version of the P.

Drop in to the IRC and i'll send you pngs of the Articia I and Is block diagrams, if you wish. ("made" by geen_naam)

Quote:

Can you tell us what the slide that mentions OS4 says

[unreadable] ... OS4 ... [unreadable]

So nothing special really, which is why I said that they mentioned an OS4 not Amiga OS4.
Still, though that it was interesting enough to atleast mention it.

So how does a budding developer get engineering samples of Articia + PPC970s

- Paul

@geen_naam

Welcome to Amigaworld.net.

Thanks for posting the detailed info! I didn't know that the Articia I would be available in two versions, and didn't know it could be used with the 750 or G4, as I thought it would be only for 970. That is good news indeed.



Quote:

So, it looks like the Is is the 'budget' version of the I?

@Codesmith

That's what I thought too. It's the perfect solution, as it allows for a high end and lower end model which still supports "the good stuff"

@geen_naam

Thanks for you embolded rendetion -- it really helped.

Quote:

MPEG4 Video processor with video link (S-video??)

repeat:

Quote:

MPEG4 Video processor with video link (S-video??)

I just heard the penny drop, bigtime!

The Articia P has MPEG4 codec built-in, and Video processor with video link (S-video?? - hopefully HDTV componant out -- preety please!!!) - built-in. From another source:

Quote:

MPEG-4 builds on the proven success of three fields: * Digital television; * Interactive graphics applications (synthetic content); * Interactive multimedia (World Wide Web, distribution of and access to content)

No double bridging -- no sending stuff to a graphics board, from a PCI slot directly out!

Hook the new A1's video out to the telly, hook the AGP graphics board also to the telly, and now we have an AVI channel dedicated to video streaming and on the other AV, a functional computer to control everything simulatenously.

Perhaps that is not all.

Quote:

PCI-EXPRESS

From another source:
Quote:

Streaming data from various video and audio sources are now commonplace on the desktop and mobile machines and there is no baseline support for this time?dependant data within the PCI 2.2 or PCI-X specifications. Applications such as video-on-demand and audio re-distribution are putting real-time constraints on servers too.

I don't know what it is, but it ain't just a PCI slot.

Quote:

Supporting dual PPC970 (AKA G5)

Now this is sounding very good, very very good, given the role the chip plays in terms of the CPU.

At a guess this excatly the region Apple is going in hardware wise -- and now also Amiga.

Finally, we seem to be turning a big corner in the coming tech revolution, and there is our own little Amiga at the forefront -- yipee!.

I can't believe this is the technology which is being lampooned in some quarters. I dare say IBM is rubbing its hands in expectation, and the Intel mob have got to be scratching their heads (maybe they just pushed in deeper into the sand -- who knows.

See the connections folks, see the connections!

KMOS and the OS, DE, OS4-5, VIA, PPC it is all sorting itself out in a rather magical way.

Desktop machines, microboards, set-top boxes and consoles __ what is Sony up to I wonder?

And there is Amiga, not at the side, small but right in the middle -- exzcellent stuff.

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Greg Schofield, Perth Australia

And now for the important question. Did Alan gave any idea of how long it will be before we se an Amiga based on these new chipsets?

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José

whoops
Quote:

KMOS and the OS, DE, OS4-5, VIA, PPC it is all sorting itself out in a rather magical way.

Should be :
Quote:

KMOS and the OS, DE, OS4-5, MIA, PPC it is all sorting itself out in a rather magical way.

MAI not VIA. Soory all.

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Greg Schofield, Perth Australia

It seems as though Mai would have a similar number of engineers as Commodore . Quite impressive considering the tiny userbase .

@Bodie

It amazes me bodie how some people lionize the old custom chips and then disparage the Mai approach, this is custom chipping with gonads. It looks like I will be buying a another new board soon the P series looks really interesting, even though I am happy with the S chip, but I like the idea of getting rid of the bridge chip.

I am just getting so happy, I think we might be able to crack things in the next few years in a really big way.

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Greg Schofield, Perth Australia

This is just an observation:

Why in the world would any company who is associated with Amiga use a product of Microsoft (PowerPoint) for their Presentations instead of SCALA MM 400? at least they can even use Scala for WindowsXP!

Just an observation that annoys me!

Scala is definitely better than PowerPoint in its Windows version.

Sadly PowerPoint is the defacto standard for presentation software.

Also a lot of people have experience in using it to create the same old bland presentations.

Not very useful to hand out a Scala presentation file, or a Hollywood presentation file, etc, when all your clients have is PowerPoint!

Quote:

Why in the world would any company who is associated with Amiga use a product of Microsoft (PowerPoint) for their Presentations instead of SCALA MM 400

I'm forced to use PPT presentations at Uni because otherwise I'd have to install different software at each of the datashow PCs at the lecture theatre.

So perhaps if the presenter was not using their own PC this might be the reason...

But you'd think they could afford a laptop

I hope that the Artica I and Is come out quicker than the Artica P has taken to appear. Wasn't the P on MAI's website a year ago, and still nothing has appeared. The presentation shows an Artica I based motherboard however, with a 970, 4 PCI-X slots, 3 PCI slots, AGP slot and 4 DDR-DIMM slots ... and a VIA southbridge still.

Why bother with the southbridge anyway? Why not just dump a USB2 controller, a SATA controller and an IDE controller on the PCI bus and say "bye bye VIA"? Artica S and Sa appear to lack something (PCI interrupt controller, or something, I forget) that requires the VIA southbridge. Hopefully this is removed in the P, I and Is.

(Stick the USB2 and IDE controllers on the PCI bus, and the SATA and GigE controllers on the PCI-X bus, leaving 2 PCI-X slots and 3 normal PCI slots for user use. PCI-X versions of SATA controllers and GigE controllers exist too, and that would get the most performance out of the configuration.)

MegArray
.....||
Artica P == SATA ---- GigE ---- PCI-X ---- PCI-X
...||.......||
AGP PCI ---- PCI ---- USB2 ---- IDE

SATA would be the PCI-X 4-port Silicon Image controller
IDE would be any generic PCI IDE RAID controller
USB2 could be the VIA discrete USB2 chip
GigE would be a PCI-X version of 3Com's GigE chip

I'm glad to see that Eyetech is continually trying to keep the technology on par. I just hope they can get the prices down a bit soon.

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'Having no way as way, having no limitation as limitation.' - Bruce Lee

Computer Specs: 1.3Mh