@KimmoK

FOR THE LAST TIME, WE DON'T WANT A PROCESSOR FASTER THAN AN I7 2600K, WE WANT HIGHER CLOCK SPEEDS.

_________________
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

_________________
- KimmoK
// For freedom, for honor, for AMIGA
//
// Thing that I should find more time for: CC64 - 64bit Community Computer?

@KimmoK

Quote:

KimmoK wrote: @Arko You need a reality check. Isn't macmini a desktop HW? All mac minis run below 3Ghz, worthless for desktop?

Back where it began:

Quote:

Hyperionmp wrote: If you look at the roadmap of Freescale and IBM, ...

As long as you want to produce a router or web server with a good scaling SMP OS like Linux they might be a good choice. As long as you can't get boards with a 3GHz CPU on it they are ... worthless for desktops.

_________________
AmigaONE. Haha. Just because you can put label on it does not make it Amiga.

I borrowed this comments from here (#27 & #28):
http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=38873&forum=2&start=20&order=0

@Arko

2.5ghz HT PPC processors on the roadmap are not aimed @ routers.
Neither are those MacMinis or PowerMac.

1.6Ghz x86 is good enough for a lot of mainstream desktop needs (millions of people use laptops as their home desktop, @ work (below 3Ghz) laptops serve the desktop needs in bultibilliondollar companies).

We have no lack of powerfull enough CPUs. We have in many ways better CPUs than the x86. And there are better PPC CPUs on the roadmap. Architecture change would not solve any of our niche's problems. (+currently alternatives like ARM is a lot worse than PPC)

What we need is a solution that can be produced in larger volume (wider than our niche market) to get the motherboard price down and a lot of SW. This debate does not help either issue.

Last edited by KimmoK on 06-Mar-2012 at 12:15 PM.

_________________
- KimmoK
// For freedom, for honor, for AMIGA
//
// Thing that I should find more time for: CC64 - 64bit Community Computer?

@KimmoK

But how do you want to get high volumes in this market? This is simply not possible except a big company would start to invest in it. But that is not realistic.

@OlafS25

There exist a lot of industry around PPC + things like multimediaterminal needs + opensouce gaming box +retrostuff + some Telecom stuff + some emerging markets + MOS needs + AOS4 needs... I will look at one such option, unless I get overly employed soon. Initially, I need to draft the HW specs (+big plan) that please enough investors.
(with my current semi-professional activity I have seen some millions of euros spent on some pretty silly sounding things, I have some contacts with HW manufacturers, SW firms, marketing, mainstream sales channels, etc. Most likely the big plan does not work out, but then I have tried at least and know a lot more about a lot of things & can redo my CV... )

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_________________
- KimmoK
// For freedom, for honor, for AMIGA
//
// Thing that I should find more time for: CC64 - 64bit Community Computer?

One thing is sure, whether PPC evolves or not, it isn't because Amiga hardware development. The majority of PPC chips today are destined to embedded, or custom made design for large companies (i.e consoles), no one aims for desktop computing.

_________________
Amiga 1200 desktop. Apollo 030/50 Mhz 8mb ram + ClassicWB + Wb 3.1
Amiga 500 + ACA500plus 8mb + 30gb CF
Raspberry Pi 3b+ and Amibian 1.4
Mac Mini G4 1GB Ram with the butterfly!!

@KimmoK

Getting price down is just as much choosing cheaper (and fewer) components as it is getting volume up. Todays SoCs contain mostly everything you need to turn a piece of copper plated fiber glass reinforced epoxy into a full fledged motherboard.

But Amigans don't stop there. It must have this, it must have that, it cannot exist without having such.

Take one P4080, at 500USD. Take one µATX PCB, at 50USD. Take a few PCIe connectors (you can have up to 3), a couple of DDR3 connectors, USB 2.0 and GbE PHY, bootrom and power supply chips. All for less than 50USD. Get it soldered together for around 100USD.

There you go. 8 cores, 1.5GHz, Book III-E (same instruction set as the PPC440 used in a SAM). Yes, it will have a few drawbacks like what to boot from (I would put the OS4 and Linux kernels in the bootrom anyway.

Now add Amigan: It must have SATA onboard. It must have sound onboard. It must have more USB ports onboard (actual input I got a few years back before the SAM was even out. I had even started on a layout of a very tiny board with a 440SPe, which has PCIe). Before you know it you've gone from cheap end to expensive end, without moving anywhere on the high end/low end scale. And this is before even thinking about routing complexity, number of layers on the board etc. Yes, you would need a SATA controller, GPU, sound and maybe some more USB ports, but all of this can be done. SATA and USB can even be combined on a single card.

If you decide to make something, please don't fall into the trap that anything in the system has to be soldered onto just one board. A 20 dollar high volume sound card would cost 30-40 dollars to put onboard in low volume. So to get cost down you can either get volume up or just avoid putting it onboard. Easy as pie. PCIe connectors aren't exactly gonna break your budget.

My 440SPe idea was to take a microATX formfactor, put 3 PCIe and a DDR2 connector on the board, then shave off from the PSU end of the motherboard. The board could still mount in a normal ATX enclosure, but I had designed a fitting minitower for it, where the side was of A4 paper sise.

Outer dimensions: 210x297x160mm
One huge 120mm fan in the front, SilentX shuttle PSU which unfortunately wasn't entirely quiet.

As seen from the front:

************************
*                      *
*                      *
*       Big fan        *
*                      *
*                      *
*                      *
*                      *
************************
*PSU *   3.5" bay      *
*    *******************
*    *   3.5" bay      *
************************
* 5.25" bay            *
*                      *
************************

Last edited by olegil on 07-Mar-2012 at 09:33 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

The idea is even more fitting if used with a P4080, btw. This has onchip USB, GbE, SD, UARTs. The chip has 1295 balls, requiring at least an 8 layer board. This gets expensive when size goes up, so the smaller the PCB the better.

Such a system could be designed by one man in about a month. The mechanical parts are easy enough to have manufactured anywhere in the world, but I would go to a local sheet metal bender for prototypes. The plastic front would take about 2000 EUR to pay for tooling, then peanuts per unit.

Unfortunately, this whole project is then dwarfed by the monumental task of getting OS4 to run on it. The porting itself wouldn't be much work, but the cost is prohibitive.

_________________
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

I personally don't know how much it would actually cost. But have you investigated the possibility to make a donation driven HW company, where each donator could acquire a given number of shares in said company. That way no single person or investor would face the risk of loosing a lot, and if it comes out with a profit, donators could actually gain from this success.

_________________

@Arko

I guess all my computers are worthless as desktops. But then again I would need that nth core cpu running at +3ghz for typing text, editing images and surfing the web.

_________________

I still have my PC from 2006 (upgraded video card, ram and cpu) that's a dual-core 2.7Ghz with 4Gb ram and Geforce 9600 GT. Running Win7, been using it it's sufficient for me needs and plays some games still too. Not worthless IMO...

Last edited by Bamiga2002 on 07-Mar-2012 at 10:30 AM.

_________________
Amiga - still alive & kickin'!

@olegil

the only things I would request onboard would be USB... Graphics and Audio can be cards,
with an initial boot mechanism to be considered from the ROM Bootloader.
(I would not hard-ROM the kernel modules for Kickstart and Linux)

But apart from that a single board with USB on the back and little else on the board itself
beyond the connector for Memory and expansion cards sounds really good to me.

the only consideration I would think about is where to allow the USB headers and ports to connect to the board itself so that there were more than plenty.

but making everything "off-board" requires a lot more expansion card slots, so possibly having a PCIe-16 slot then an integrated bridge controller of some kind (something already usable by PCI-Express and providing extra slots for ease of use... the simpler the better really)

I think the VIA 686b as used in the AmigaONE early boards was such a choice as well.

My desktops:
2Ghz dualcore
1.7Ghz singlecore
1.4Ghz singlecore
1Ghz singlecore
0.7Ghz singlecore
0.55Ghz singlecore
0.5Ghz singlecore
...
0.05Ghz singlecore
0.007Ghz singlecore


Currently I think none of my friends or neighbours have 3Ghz desktop.
(many of them have 3Ghz PPC, but not on desktop)

@olegil

Thank you for the input, good things to consider.
I'll PM at the time if/when the community R&D power is needed.

_________________
- KimmoK
// For freedom, for honor, for AMIGA
//
// Thing that I should find more time for: CC64 - 64bit Community Computer?

@Belxjander

As soon as you try to go outside the scope of "what's available on a SoC we can use" you have started the feature creep that ends with too much crap. The minitower I mentioned would have 3 x PCIe (x8, x4 and x4) or 2x PCIe (x8 and x4) and 3x PCI. Plenty of PCI ports there to get enough USB. Modular isn't bad, it's good. Cause as time goes, you can reuse or replace modules as you wish.

The PPC460Ex SoC costs less than 100 EUR. A full SAM460-Ex lite costs over 500 EUR. That there should be a hint that it's overengineered. Unfortunately, it's got too little connectivity

I don't know what a 460SX costs, but it's probably a bit more.

On the software side, it's the same amount of work to get support for a chip no matter if it's on a plugin-card or onboard. But hardware wise it's not like that.

Engineering time is expensive. Work around the problem by doing less engineering.
For the 440SPe project, it didn't even have USB. So guess what? I didn't put USB on the main board. This would mean bundling it with a multiport USB controller, as well as a sound card and a SATA controller and graphics. But you know what? Those are cheap and available everywhere.

The fact that they are inside the box when you purchase the box is what you should care about. Not which PCB they are soldered onto.

_________________
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.

@KimmoK

I still think such a small tower would be absolutely beautiful on a desk. I'll drag out the prototype and glue it back together, then take some pics and you'll see.

Such a small formfactor severly limits a few options, but sometimes thats good as it forces you to think differently. Once we get the hang of designing DDR2/3 and PCIe busses changing to a faster SoC is a routine task. Upgrading graphics, USB, sound, SATA etc is merely changing which card gets bundled to the end customer.

_________________
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.

@Belxjander

what do you mean by hard-rom? It's obviously a StrataFlash. I use a 64Mb (8MB) 16 bit wide device here. Size of my smallest finger nail. On this I have UBoot, Linux kernel and a Linux rootfs. Replace the rootfs with a minimal initrd and you can have the OS4 kernel there as well.

I just checked the price at Digikey, if I swap to another pin-compatible family I can get a 16MB device cheaper than the 8MB device I use now. 4USD for 16MB flashrom. Surely there is no problem putting the kernel in that?

_________________
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

Ideally AOS kickstart needs to start loading before HDD are "online". So kickstart on flash is also my idea.

+
one PCIe x16(mechanical) connector
one PCIe x1 external
a lot of SoC I/O available via some connector at the front of the board
miniITX compatible, must be also usable in the "fantasy" case.

Last edited by KimmoK on 07-Mar-2012 at 12:23 PM.

_________________
- KimmoK
// For freedom, for honor, for AMIGA
//
// Thing that I should find more time for: CC64 - 64bit Community Computer?

@KimmoK

Quote:

KimmoK wrote: @Arko 2.5ghz HT PPC processors on the roadmap are not aimed @ routers.

LOL AFAIK the XBOX360 has faster chips.

As long as you can't get boards with this 2.5 GHz CPU it is ... worthless for desktops.

As long as Hyperion ignores a board, it is as worthless as the PPC on PS3, XBOX360, Wee, GameCube several G4 or G5 Macs, IBM workstation or PCI CPU cards.


Quote:

We have no lack of powerfull enough CPUs.

As long as there is no usable motherboard available, you can use them as jewellery.

Quote:

We have in many ways better CPUs than the x86.

LOL they are not your CPUs, and some only exists on the roadmap. Roadmaps are wortheless, there where first class PPCs on Roadmaps that where never produced.

_________________
AmigaONE. Haha. Just because you can put label on it does not make it Amiga.

I borrowed this comments from here (#27 & #28):
http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=38873&forum=2&start=20&order=0

@Arko

Great! I got you down to 2.5Ghz with the reality check!

btw. xbox360 performance outside games is not that great.
PA6T at 1.8Ghz should already be around 2/3 of the CPU speed of xbox360 in general tasks.
2.5Ghz singlecore e6500 (two threads) might be pretty close to the xbox360 speed. And 12 core 1.8Ghz HT PPC chip ...

Anyway, even though T series of Freescale chips are in the hands of the HW builders (like Varisys?), it's far from being available in general.
We have some baby steps to take before AOS+friends could use them anyway.

Last edited by KimmoK on 07-Mar-2012 at 12:34 PM.
Last edited by KimmoK on 07-Mar-2012 at 12:33 PM.

_________________
- KimmoK
// For freedom, for honor, for AMIGA
//
// Thing that I should find more time for: CC64 - 64bit Community Computer?