Eve nthough I could never afford such a motherboard, I'd be happy to donate 10 bucks when the site goes up. Keep up the good work smart people!

PS: If ya do go for a gigabit ethernet connection, just kill all the other connections, although I guess two connections are important for a server. Should recoup some cost...

@Hammer

I agree. So in this case it might be best to leave it out. I would most certainly put GigE in there in any case. I use Broadcom and Intel chipsets here, both work very nice. But I don't have a fast enough PCI bus to utilize much of the bandwidth. Still, 130MB copied from the PC to the A1 in less than 4 seconds isn't BAD, it's actually quite ok

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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.

@HMK

Looks a good read, I've read a bit of it (only just got up so I'm in no condition for anything remotly technical) there are a few inacuraseys and common mistakes but hey no-one's perfect, not even the Freidens

@BrianK

Hmmm. that'll teach me to not research a post first. I bet those things just just SATA to IDE converts somewhere inside them.

@marrandy

IDE may be old tech but it isn't yet obsolete and leaving it out would annoy people as much as when Intel tried to leave AGP out of their PCI-Express motherboard plans. Like AGP, IDE is used for many of todays drives and so most of the market uses them SATA drivers a rare and more expensive in most cases, also peopl will want to be able to keep costs down be reusing some of their existing kit. The reason for Intel keeping AGP is for low to mid end markets where you can't afford a high cost graphics card but want a decent motherboard+processor combo, also so that older cards from your "obsolete" machine would work. For example I would be p*ssed off if I coulnd't use my Radeon 9800 Pro AIW in a new mobo jsut cos it had PCI-Express.
Also the IBM CPC925 Chipset doesn't support PCI-Express, neither does the only alternative available in the forseable future, Marvell's Discovery III (the PPC 970 variant)

@Hammer

Yep, and there is a very good reason for that, because it amkes sense! You can replace a lot of legacy ports with USB or SATA via adapters but is it really worth it, when you have just spent a lot of money on a nice new motherboard you don't want to have to go out and spend £15-20 on a PS2 or Serial adapter, and if your adapting say 2xIDE, 1xPS/2, 1xSerial and 1xParallel that's £75-100. Because we can buy the parts in relativly large quantities and we don't need bridging chips or cases or some of the connectors then it is a lot cheaper to include them on the motherboard, most of the part's your tyalking about ahve to be included anyway as they are part of other chips, we might be able to save a few £££ by not putting connectors on but not much. Also you start top use up all of your USB ports on legacy stuff, I run by USB mouse through a cheap PS/2 adapter as I wan't to keep my (plentifull) supply of USB ports available.
If a lmajority think that we should loose these ports then I will ommit them from the design as I am taking a democratic view on what features to include but this is my oppinion

@Hammer

Sorry, my mistake, I don't follow the x86 scene ver closely, I am quite happy with my Athlon MP 2800 system. So there's two mobo'a that have SATA II, one is a high end Xeon board which I guess ios what we would be competing with in the Linux world. I was aware fo the Nvidia chipset but it isn't available yet.

@Jeffimix

If we put 2xGigabit Ethernet connectors on then yes we may well remove the 10/100 connectors, depends how much it costs to keep them. The connectors wouldn't cost much but wou could get a few doalrs back off the PHY's

@Hammer

If I'm board sometime I will sit down and write a similar article for the AmgiaFive website but I will try to be more accurate in some of the more technical and historical areas as well as doing some in depth research, particaully into Amiga's PowerPC history.

@digitaldisaster

I have personally never used Paypal, but having kept myself abreast of the complaints and their method of workig, have also resolved never to use them (see paypalwarning.com for examples etc). However in my search I have found this:

http://www.moneybookers.co.uk/

which appears to be a very viable alternative and is low cost etc (works in much the same way as paypal).

If you would consider setting yaself up there, I'll donate.

Mark

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IceStar Media Ltd.

@Mark

Right, I'm not going to be doing business with thema gain, I had no idea they did anything liek this, unfortuantly that site you posted a link to doesn't seem to work.

@Mark

One site I've found is www.nochex.com which is similar to paypal but seems to be better (Click "about us" at the bottom then read the stuff there, particually the charges section) but they charge a small fee on every transfer (PayPal do this on all transfers if you have a business account so that you can recieve cred/debit card payments, not jsut those from others PayPal account)

@digitaldisaster

there is also Verisign.

@Herewegoagain

Companies like verisign have large setup fee's and/or monthly fees so that's a no go unfortunatly.
The 2.6%+20p charge on Nochex means we would loose about $1 (~50p) per transaction

@digitaldisaster

This all sounds really good, but a couple of questions...
1) Why are you planning the ATX sized board first? Is it easier to develop it, or is it because there is a larger market for it?
Personally, I'd like to see the mini-ITX formfactor first.

2) Regarding the legacy ports, would it be possible to just include header connectors for them? I'd love to see a motherboard that didn't have a built-on backplane - so that the board would be placed in any orientation (within reason) and in small enclosures, and only the necessary ports would be on show...

3) I didn't get here in time to join in the naming of the project, but I reckon something like "AmiG5" would look quite good, especially if a graphics-oriented person could juggle the 5 to look like an A...

4) Paypal - ugh! As per one of the earlier posts, I don't have any online-payment accounts (paypal, nochex, etc.) as after reading the T&Cs, I wasn't very happy with the charges they apply, and the clauses involved. How about a personal cheque? Or a big bottle of spirits?

Anyhow, I'd love to see this project become a reality - for what it's worth, I'd argue against including any legacy ports (unless perhaps as header pins only) and against having an AGP slot. Isn't this pretty much what Macintosh did a few years ago - moved everyone onto USB in one fell swoop? We need to be brave in order to change the future...

All the best!

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@digitaldisaster

Oh, BTW - your nickname isn't really filling me with confidence in your abilities to complete this project!

/joke

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@Chunder

1) Simply because the reference board is ATX, once that is out of the way we can shed the 2 of the 32bit PCI slots and 2 of the DIMM slots and rejig the board, possibly loose some of the legacy features to save sapce to get a micro-ATX board (Still Dual G5's) then a single G5 mini-itx with some seriou sapce saving, a single PCI-X slot, a single DIMM slot and (possibly) a single AGP slot.
2)Certainly possible, what's everyone elses view on this? I think we still need to have some ports on a backplae, though if they come off headers then the backplane can be moved to anywhere in the case, giving more options for motherboard mounting
3)Sorry, we (I) chose AmgiaFive, it's simialr enough to AmigaOne which is what the motherboard will be but still reminds people of the G5 aspect. Also it shows it is something more tahn the current AmigaOne's.
4)PayPal business accounts and all of Nochex accounts allow credit and debit card transfer thought I would certainly accept a personal cheque which i can transfer in myself, what I will ask all of you to take intoa ccount is taht if we are allowing credit and debit card transfers is that all transfers will be chardeg a small fee so please take taht into account when deciding how much to donate. Sorry amte, I don't drink, esspeically when doing electronic design! (Although I have come very close!)
5)Yep that's what Mac did, the question is can we afford to alianate people? I'm actaully in favour of Serial and Parallel via headers but probably not PS/2
6)We need AGP, this system would have PCI-X not PCI-Express. PCI-X is just faster clock speed 64bit PCI (In this case 133mhz instead of 66mhz - i.e. twice the clock) so still not fast enough to compete with AGP 8x. Also there are no PCI-X capable graphics cards to my knowledge, I don't even know if PCI Radeons/GeForce's can do 64bit PCI, I would guess so, anyone know?

@Chunder

Don't worry, I'm still alive aren't I? (I hope so!) So I can't have blow anything up that badly

@digitaldisaster

Quote:

I'm actaully in favour of Serial and Parallel via headers but probably not PS/2

Good idea. But, USB can do serial and parallel. I don't know how many USB 2.0 ports you're planning but I'd say 6-8 would be good.

Quote:

We need AGP

I think it depends on what you're trying to do with the motherboard's market. If the G5 is a solution to take us forward I think PCI Express would be a great addition. This would allow the current and future generations of ATI and Nvidia cards to be able to used on the Amiga. However, I don't know what's involved but you'll probably have to get Hyperion and/or KMOS to agree to create a PCI Express change so that will work as well as AGP. I can see the logic of staying with AGP as there's lots of inexpensive videocards and the AGP stuff is already in OS4. But, why not have the Eyetech G4 w/ AGP and the DD G5 w/ PCI-Express so the Eyetech board would be a low/middle board and the G5 would be a middle/high-end Amiga board.

@BrianK

Providing headers from the serial and parallel facilities built uinto the chips would be more economical (and sensible) than making people buy a converter or building one in.
The AMD8111 southridge provides 2xUSB 2.0 ports so I think I will have to put a host controller on, also there is no firewire provided at all so I will put a host controller on for that as well.
I will proably use the NEC µPD720100A USB 2.0 controller (4 ports + 1 header) and the TI IEEE1394b aka FireWire 800 TSB82AA2, Status: link layer controller and mathcing TSB81BA3 physical layer controller (2 ports + 1 header)