@digitaldisaster

RE: Serial and Parallel -- I'd say put the header on then.

RE: AMD8111 w/ 2 USB 2.0 ports --- I'd like to see more but if you got rid of the Gig-E and freed up ports to use for PCI-X then someone can add in their own USB port card if they needed more then 2 and didn't want to use an external USB Hub.

RE: Firewire -- again there are PCI Firewire cards and some sound cards, such as the Sound Blaster Audigy 2 come with Firewire built in. Once again this would be great to have on the board but if it's an ATX board there will probably be room for the expansion.

Maybe you should think about getting a board to work then adding on the additional USB and Firewire ports as a step prior to production if time allows.

CHIP IDEAS:
Philips PDIUSBD12 has double buffers that store two full setsof data in each direction the mulitplexed parallel bus can transfer up to 1Mbps.
Philips USA 1321 has Digital to Analog converters so someone could use USB speakers.
-- Though I'll admit my data is old I haven't looked at USB Chips in quite a while.

@digitaldisaster

hmmm, the link works ok here try this version:

MoneyBookers

They do charge a small fee for using a credit card and transferring money, but they are a business .

The site is a bit slow at the moment but does work. Its also more or less worldwide unlike nochex which I believe is UK only.

Mark

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IceStar Media Ltd.

@BrianK

IMHO it preferable to have as much as possible on board, so that I don't have to run around to buy a ton of extra cards. But of course there might be practical reasons for not doing so such as greatly added cost or complexety(ie will take ages to finish) of the board.

@On the subject of PCI-Express

I've done some looking around, and there are three "possible" solutions that I, as a layman, can think of.

1) Change the northbridge to one that supports PCI-Express. This is of course (sadly) not an option with the products on the market today.

2) Change the Hypertransport to PCI-X chip to a HT-to-PCI-E one. Sadly the problem with this one is that therer are no such chips on the market today. This of course doesn't mean that there might not be chips that do this on the horizon, unfortunately I don't know of any. (Might be a good idea to check around about this)

3) Use a PCI-Express southbride. Now one of the special things about PCI-Express is that you don't have to use 16x connection to a 16x slot, you can use a x8 or even, say, a x2 one. This is because the graphics card will adapt itself to the available amount of lanes. There might be a problem with some kind of mecanism that prevents it from working unless there is a minimum amount of lanes available. But I've not been able to find anything on if there exists such limitations. Unfortunately this is allso not an option (I think), as the SIS 965(L) and the upcomming VIA VT8251 both use aproprietary interconnect to communicate with the respective northbridges.

@Mark

The link works now, nice and fast too.
The fees seem very competative, especailly as the all have a maximum of a few euros
The fact that it is internation is also good, does anyone have any objections to using this service? If not I will register soon.

@BrianK

We wouldn't sacrifice any PCI slots by assing USB as they would attach to the AMD8111 southbridge and use the spare PCI targets on that. PCI devices like that can normally master 6 targets, the reference board has 3, we could increase that to 4 to give the maximum number of expanion slots support by the ATX form factor (7 - 1xAGP, 2xPCI-X, 4xPCI) and use the other two targets for the USB and FW chips.
ATX may hve the room for the expansion but it's nice to provide these sorts fo features bult in, esspecailly if it is a high end board, then you can use all of those ports for whatever else you want. The size of an ATX boards allows for the extra features to be built in.
I certainly wont add these until the essential parts of the board are finished and tested on the prototypes. It's just good to diucsuss what features we want in advance, especailly as I don't really have anything else to do until we get the eval board.
I will read up on those chips alter when I have a chance.

@Eric_S

It certainly is better to have these on high end boards, especaily thsoe that cost quite a bit as we could buy the chips in relativly large quantities and wouldn't ahve to use things such as PCI backplanes etc.
Unfortuantly, as you say, for now now non of these solutions are viable as the parts simply don't exist. Ideally what we need is for a second revision of the board to feature a different southbridge, connecting using the same 1.2ghz Hypertransport bus and featuring the SATA II, Gigabit Ethernet and Firewire 800 that the current one lacks, as well as more USB 2.0 ports. Then we could use the 4 PCI-X ports for expansion as well as two or three PCI-Express ports (One 16x or even 32x - the maximum allowed by the current revision of the PCI-Epxress protocol allowiung a whopping 6gbps of data in each direction if my memory serves me correctly) from the southbridge. Until such a chip exists though we will have to make do with what we have.

@Eric_S

You are correct the momentum motherboard only has an AGP port and a PCI-Express isn't an option at this time. The work to add PCI-Express would probably be too much so we'll have to stay with AGP.

@digitaldisaster

Sorry, I mispoke the Gigabit ethernet, not USB, are taking up a PCI-X interface. I'd rather see the extra PCI-X ports and someone add in Gigabit ethernet on a PCI-X card if they feel the need for it.

Something to think about is how you could use the $4,500 system and perhaps save some money.
* Kingston 1GB DDR2 memory = $300
* CD-ROM = $25
* 400W power supply = $70
* 40GB WD 8MB Cache HD = $55
* Add some for shipping
Seems that you could put together the $6,000 system for ~$5,000. Might be a bit easier getting $1K less contributions and may be able to roll the project a bit quicker.

@BrianK

Unfortauntly that is not possible, you can only buy $4500 systems once you have a $6000 system, they are extra systems for if you require more than one.

@Eric_S

NVidia are set to include PCI-Express in there NForce 4 chipset but this is an AMD64 specific Northbridge so we can't use it.
Via have PCI-Express 2x on their upcoming VT8251 southbridge which gives a pathetic 0.5gbs bandwith, nothing compaerd to AGP and it's locked to Via Northbridges with their propraitry V-Link connection
SiS Southbridges only have PCI-Express 1x and are locked to SiS Northbridges with a propriatry connection protocol
ALi Southbridges don't do PCI-Express
ATI's website doesn't seem to want to tell me about any of their upcoming products, infact it doesn't even mention chipsets unless you search, I suspect that PCI-Express will be in their AMD or Intel specific Northbridges

I know money is being raised for the reference board but isn't something missing? The cost of development of the new board.

To produce prototypes you're going to need small quantities of all the parts involved and in those quantities the prices can be extraordinarily high. Buying single CPUs from IBM or Freescale is in the order of $1000+ each (the top end G5 Mac is cheaper than buying a single G3 from IBM). Consider there's quite a few chips and do a few prototypes to test and thats a hefty sum, what if you need a second or third prototype run?

I'm not one to disuade future developments (quite the opposite in fact) but you need to be realistic, has this even been considered?

Also, to go into production I can't give a good estimate but you're taking at least $50,000, probably a lot more - where's that coming from?

I think this is a good project, I'd love to see a lower priced G5 on the market, in fact I'd like to see several of them (competition is a *good* thing) but I think finance is going to be a real problem for any community project.
I suspect the only way of getting a reasonably priced G5 anytime soon will be the new iMac (due next month).

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Whyzzat?

Well, this looks intresting folks, if i can aid in any way (logistics, webspace, whatever) let me know ochal kefren be.

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Amon's digital home

@minator

Let me outline the basic plan for you

Once we have raises the money for the board we would lend that board to Hyperion for them to do a full port, once AmigaOs is running on the board then we can go to companies like IBM and ask them for support with parts, money etc. In the meantime we design the final board with our own features such as more USB 2.0 ports, Firewire 800 prots and SATA II ports (The required chips were discussed ealier). Your figures look a bit excesive and I don't know if you have any evidence for them or they are number that you just heard but I am willing to invest a substantial ammount of my own money in this project to pay for construction of prototypes but I can't justify that money of trying to get a lona for it until there is something to invest in.

@Amon_Re

Organisational help as well as financial would be much apprcieated, PM me with what you can offer. We are looking to host on Aw.net but I may take up your offer of webspace as things appear to be progressing slowly and I am eager top get the website moving

@digitaldisaster

Just as a small note, it'd be 1GBs in full duplex for a 2x connection. If I have understood things correctly.

I can agree with you that it's far from the most optimal solution, but it could have been a temporary one in an AGP slot + 1 PCI Express x16 slot solution. That is if the graphics cards would have accepted it. :-/

@Eric_S

I'm not sure if I have understood you correctly but you cannot put a 16x PCI-Express card in a 1x or 2x etc. slot AFAIK as they won't physically fit.

@digitaldisaster

Precisely, but you could have a 16x slot with only two or one pair of lanes going to it as the PCI-E card would negotiate with the controller on how many lanes there would be available. (In this, theoretical, case only x1 or x2).

But as we both have concluded, this is still not an option due to the proprietary bus interfaces on the available southbridges that could possibly be able to do this.

@Eric_S

I don't like quoting "full duplex" figures, I just usualy add "full duplex" after it, this time I assumbed every one would know so didn't put it. I think full duplex figures are missleading as you can only have hlaf of teh data in each direction at once so it isn't really xGbps.
If anyone is interested here are some speed figures for you:
XT: 5.3Mbps,
ISA: 8.3Mbps,
EISA: 33Mbps
16bit Micro Channel: 20Mbps,
32bit Micro Channel: 40Mbps,
64bit Micro Channel: 80Mbps,
32bit VL-Bus: 132Mbps,
64bit VL-Bus: 164Mbps,
32bit 33mhz PCI: 133Mbps,
32bit 66mhz PCI: 266Mbps,
64bit 33mhz PCI: 266Mbps,
64bit 66mhz PCI: 533Mbps,
64bit 100mhz PCI-X: 807.5Mbps
64bit 133mhz PCI-X: 1066Mbps,
64bit 266mhz PCI-X: 2132Mbps,
64bit 533mhz PCI-X: 4624Mbps,
AGP 1x: 256Mbps,
AGP 2x: 512Mbps,
AGP 4x: 1Gbps,
AGP 8x: 2Gbps,
PCI-Express 1x: 250Mbps,
PCI-Express 2x: 500Mbps,
PCI-Express 4x: 1Gbps,
PCI-Express 8x: 2Gbps,
PCI-Express 12x: 3GBps,
PCI-Express 16x: 4Gbps,
PCI-Express 32x: 8Gbps,

@Eric_S

Ah, now I get you, cheapting a bit but yer I think it would work, may have to fake some of the other lanes with a FPGA though, duno, would have to get access to the PCI-SIG docs and that means a huge subscription fee.

@digitaldisaster

Re. speed figures - are they in megabytes per second, or megabits per second?

What speed was Zorro (2 and 3) capable of?

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@Chunder

Sorry, my mistake, all speeds are in MegaBytes/GigaBytes.

By comparison Zorro II could manage accound 3.5Mbps. It was a 16/24bit bus that ran between 7.09mhz and 7.16mhz. The faster 32bit Zorro III bus could manage 50Mbps without bursting. The speed however depended upon the CPU driving it, a 25mhz A3000 could manage about 20Mbps.