@all

Images, description within:

Amiganews German

Amiganews English

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

@number6

Awesome! 😎

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@number6

Baby X5000 with some additional features.

It shouldn't be too much work to port both OS4 and MorphOS to this hardware.

Hopefully the price will be reasonable (for Amiga market).

Seems to be what a no nonsense X1000/5000 Tabor should have been a decade ago.

!IF! they can beat the economics of scale and !IF! they avoid tacking any extra BS to it could be a spiritual PegasosIII (read PPC HW that at least kinda makes sense even if much to late).

Last edited by Kronos on 30-Apr-2025 at 08:19 PM.

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@thread

Please read the German comment section of the Amiganews article.

People are making some confusing assumptions which are currently being clarified as time permits.

Thank you,

#6

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

@thread

Significant additions to the Amiganews.de article now posted.

#6

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

@number6

A T2081 version will need a PCIe NVME or SATA card since the T2081 doesn't have a SATA controller to drive the onboard SATA and NVME. No problem with the x4 slot on the board.

The FPGA used has a similar ammount of logic cells as the Spartan 3 used in the Minimig. Maybe there's enough space to implement a DSP alongside the audio controller they're working on.

A 1.8Ghz T2081 is should outperform the X1000, it would be interesting to see by how much.

@number6

Looks good!

Is that the same "geenaam" I had a run in here with when arguing how dead PPC is?

Fair play to the guy, you can't say he's not committed. I hope he has success with it.

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Doing stupid things for fun...

@number6

That is interesting. I do hope it reaches production.

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@number6

Definitely sounds promising. If the price works out right, I may look to getting one when OS 4 is available for it.

Since the network chip on my old AmigaOne G4 board got fried, I haven't had a working physical Amiga of any kind. Stuck running WinUAE on my AMD Ryzen 9 5900XT system. It's fast enough, but only when I run AmigaOS 3.x. PPC emulation on it is not as fast as the real AmigaOne was with a 1 GHz G4 CPU.

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@thread

For those who have not checked the Amiganews.de article since last night, there is another --extensive - addition from the board designer.

#6

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

@number6

Hopefully dual booting between AmigaOS 4.x and MorphOS is a possibility.

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@Thread

A bit late for April Fools isn't it? Says the man wearing a Santa's hat!

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@AmigaMac

Quote:

AmigaMac wrote: Hopefully dual booting between AmigaOS 4.x and MorphOS is a possibility.

Be grateful if either of these is ever ported to this board.

This board is quite a bit "all dressed up and nowhere to go". It's being brought up at a time when Hyperion don't have the capacity to even update existing releases of AmigaOS 4, and the MorphOS team is mostly working with a new ISA.

At best this is an inexpensive PPC Linux board for that niche market.

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All the way, with 68k

@AmigaMac

Lets see if kernel and drivers get sorted for OS4 first.
Bet they will be met with all the same broken contracts and promises we had to deal with.
Hence Tabor took so long to get done.

Last edited by F0L on 02-May-2025 at 08:20 AM.
Last edited by F0L on 02-May-2025 at 08:20 AM.

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@F0L

Quote:

Hence Tabor took so long to get done.

Tabor took so long to get done for different reasons. The primary one was, of course, the wretched SPE on the board, which took ages to write support for. The other main reason was that A-EON waited too long to start production and Covid got in he way, jacking up the price and ruining the original idea of an affordable board.

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The Rear Window blog

AmigaOne X5000/020 @ 2GHz / 4GB RAM / Radeon RX 560 / ESI Juli@ / AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition
SAM440ep-flex @ 667MHz / 1GB RAM / Radeon 9250 / AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition

@Trixie

So what are your thoughts about this new PPC board?

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@AmigaMac

Quote:

So what are your thoughts about this new PPC board?

Looks good on paper, has good and dedicated people behind it. We'll see how the MOS and OS4 support turns out.

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The Rear Window blog

AmigaOne X5000/020 @ 2GHz / 4GB RAM / Radeon RX 560 / ESI Juli@ / AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition
SAM440ep-flex @ 667MHz / 1GB RAM / Radeon 9250 / AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition

agami Quote:

Be grateful if either of these is ever ported to this board. This board is quite a bit "all dressed up and nowhere to go". It's being brought up at a time when Hyperion don't have the capacity to even update existing releases of AmigaOS 4, and the MorphOS team is mostly working with a new ISA. At best this is an inexpensive PPC Linux board for that niche market.

Define inexpensive in the PPC AmigaOS 4 market. Yea, this board a decade earlier likely would have attracted some PPC AmigaOS 4 users. Now, it is likely too little too late to change anything. Nice effort but the old silicon now has to compete against RPi hardware. I will do some comparisons starting with a CPU performance comparison.

CPU core | fab tech | clock | DMIPS/MHz/thread | DMIPS/thread
68000 3500nm 8MHz 0.16 1.3
68060 500nm 50MHz 1.80 90

PPC601 600nm 66MHz 1.41 93
PPC750 260nm 233MHz 2.25 525 (G3)
QorIQ-P5020/e5500 45nm 2000MHz 3.0 6000 (X5000: 64-bit, 2 cores)
QorIQ-P1022/e500v2 45nm 1200MHz 2.4 2880 (A1222: 32-bit, 2 cores. no standard FPU)
QorIQ-T1042/e5500 28nm 1500MHz 3.0 4500 (Mirari T1042: 64-bit, 4 cores)
QorIQ-T2081/e6500 28nm 1800MHz 3.0 5400 (Mirari T2081: 64-bit, 4 cores, 2 threads/core, Altivec)

ARM1176JZF-S 40nm 700MHz 1.25 875 (RPi)
Cortex-A7 40nm 900MHz 1.90 1710 (RPi 2)
Cortex-A53 40nm 1200MHz 2.30 2760 (RPi 3)
Cortex-A72 28nm 1800MHz 5.45 9810 (RPi 4)
Cortex-A76 16nm 2400MHz 6.60 15840 (RPi 5)

When the QorIQ embedded communication chip series switched from PPC to ARM, the ARM cores were Cortex-A7, Cortex-A9, Cortex-A15, Cortex-A53 and Cortex-A72. The Cortex-A72 had more performance at the high end using a similar process where PPC cores had previously had better performance than ARM cores. ARM licensed, copied and improved SuperH (copied from the 68000) for the Thumb ISA with the primary intention of improving code density for the embedded market and ARM looks like it copied and improved the PPC ISA for ARM64/AArch64 with the primary goal to improve performance. It appears they were successful again.

The Mirari PPC board has easier expansion than RPi boards. PCIe and NVMe are on the board where only the RPi 5 supports PCIe 2.0 x1 and hats (small boards) are required for it and NVMe drives. The Mirari has PCIe 2.0 x4 in a x16 slot for a graphics card and two other PCIe slots. A more modern PC with PCIe 5.0 x16 with all lanes would have 63 GB/s of bandwidth compared to the Mirari 2 GB/s of bandwidth and RPi 5 0.5 GB/s of bandwidth. The RPi 5 has integrated graphics which have improved but not as much as the CPU performance. Memory performance is important in both CPU and GPU performance.

device | memory
X5000 DDR3
A1222 DDR3
Mirari DDR3L (L is for low power but not the same as LPDDR3)

RPi1 DDR
RPi2 DDR2
RPi3 LPDDR2
RPi4 LPDDR4
RPi5 LPDDR4X

In general, the newer the generation given with the number the more memory bandwidth but there are many factors. The DDR3L choice to support multiple SoCs could make the memory more expensive and more difficult to source. Modern SoCs often use DDR5 and LPDDR5 memory.

One nice feature of the Mirari board is a sizable Trion FPGA. It is intended for audio and glue logic but can likely be used for other purposes too. There have already been questions of whether a 68k Amiga can be simulated or even parts like the CIA timers to improve 68k Amiga compatibility. With enough support, early PPC software for Phase 5 boards may work on it. If audio and with CIA timers, Paula audio could be provided but that was replaced instead of enhanced. Throwing away the 68k and chipset likely loses 95% or more of the Amiga market and a large percentage of Amiga software, including popular retro games. Never look back and fix mistakes that could make hardware more than a micro niche market with micro production for the classes instead of the masses.

In conclusion, these are just basic factors and there are plenty I have not covered. The Mirari board looks like a more sensible design than the X5000 and A1222 designs. The PPC SoCs supported make more sense too although it may have been better to support just one SoC better. For example, only supporting the T2080 likely would have been better for the high end and I doubt the price will be low enough for a low end SBC like RPi SBCs with any PPC SoC even though it is good to try to keep the price down. The PPC market is too small for mass production so even a cheap populated board is unlikely to be below 1000 €/$ but may be low enough to kill the A1222 and X5000. The RGL THEA1200 was attacked as it was too much of a threat to the A-EonKit Hyperion alliance. This may be a larger threat financially. The easiest way to reduce sales of the Mirari board is to restrict or delay the AmigaOS for it and threaten business partners as was done with the RGL THEA1200. This will likely backfire in the long run as AmigaOS 4 users convert to MorphOS and AROS and boycott A-EonKit Hyperion alliance products. One thing that can be expected from the alliance is more shenanigans than professionalism.

Last edited by matthey on 03-May-2025 at 12:12 AM.