@minator
from the FAQ section of yellowTAB.com
Quote:

Are there any plans for Power PC processor support for future releases of Zeta? When a PPC port proves to make good buisness sense, it will be done.

I suspect that they do have the source code otherwise they wouldn't be able to do half of the things they done ant the speed at which they have done them with their limited resources.
I am under NDa with yellowTAB but I can't get a response from anyone on anything! I suspect they are simply too busy to reply but this is ceratinly frustrating.
BeOS under a virtual machine behaves like windows!

Also I would like to add that this is the 200th post in this topic which has received 7113 views and so averages a post every 35.565 views. This is by far the most popular topic on the latest posts page both in terms of posts and views with about 7 times more views than any other topic and over twice as many posts!

@all

NovaDesign have just announced that they are putting the code and Ip of Aladdin 4D up for sale, they are auctioning it on ebay starting at $35,000 or you can buy it outright for $89,000. If only we had some cash, this would be a brilliant thing to develop alongside the G5 board, esspecailly with G5 optimisations this could really show the power off. I only hope that a good company like Hyperion buy this and continue to develop it, it would be sad to see another software package die.

@digitaldisaster

Quote:

digitaldisaster wrote: @blitterstorm It would not be possible to run BeOS on this, BeOS only runs on the BeBox and 603/604 Macs, Apple would not give Be Inc the docs for the G3 systems when they laucnehed and Be had no wish nor the resources to reverse engineer a solution from the hardware, Mac OS binaries and Linux driver source code for such a small market, they stopped developing for PPC and went entirly x86

I mostly had the smaller die hard, BeOs freaks in mind, because the probably would be the only ones willing to buy, a dedicated "BeBox".

I must amit that i did not do my homework about, the status of the varius open source, BeOs derived operating systems.

I have however done a litle homework, about what makes the old BeBox hardware special.

And came out with this conlusion in short.
Highend dual cpu hardware, if I remember correctly at the time it reached market it was had a quite good price/performance ratio, cheap dual cpu solution.

"the geak port", which in short allows cheap comercial / homemade hardware to be
connected to the BeBox.
the geak port in it self is not the most complex hardware

I imagine that using open source BeOs implemplementations, the only way to go creating a complete BeBox-BeOs solution.

Here's a great reason for a Amiga G5 machine....

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/26/ibm_ppc970mp/

Quote:

IBM is preparing a dual-core version of its 90nm PowerPC 970FX processor - aka the G5. Codenamed Antares, the chip will be delivered - likely in sample form - to Apple later this summer. Either way, the chip, to be formally called the PowerPC 970MP, is said to contain two 970 cores each with its own AltiVec/Velocity Engine SIMD unit and 1MB of L2, up from the 970FX's 512KB, but still without L3 cache support. clock initially at 3GHz with a 1GHz frontside bus

However, Motorola is supposedly working on a dual core G4. This chip is a bit more attractive to the embedded market. But, I'm all for a dual core G5 Amiga!

@digitaldisaster

Quote:

digitaldisaster wrote: @blitterstorm I will look into the possibility of open sourcing the design, it depends on the licensing restrictions palced on the design by momentum.

I lost the thread here!
what kind of licensing restrictions are you talking about?
Is momentum going to be involved in the actual motherboard design?

Quote:

Yes, I want to involve as many communities as possible but I am not sure how to go about this and I am but one man, if you know forums where you can publicse this then by all means go forth and do so, we will have to come up with ways of publicising the website once it laucnhes.

I think it's a good idear to wait a litle while with involving more, communities.
I think at least we need to get the website mature.
So ppl can get a nice presentation of the projects goals, overview of the project, and information about the project,etc.

I think with some good planning, the mutual benefits of collaborations will be much
better in practice, the big question is how does we get ppl to work more organized and focused.

Quote:

Also Apple killed their clones business a long time ago and I don't think jobs is about to change his mind, although I sup[ose there is no harm in asking closer to the time. I don't think their is a simulator available, I certainly haven't heard of one if there is and momentum and IBM don't publicise details of it, you would probably ahve to buy a board to get it anyway, that seems to be the only way to get anything out of momentum.

I think there is a small glitch in the communication, at least I am confused.

What I ment about simulator, is virtual hardware.
NB I am not a hardware Engineer, og even hardware technican, and does only know a little about the subject.

The idear was, to make a functional blueprint of the entire motherboard.
If it can be done in a resonable effort, I can see some realy nice advantages.

Cheap to get started, in theory no nead to buy any hardware before the actual blueprint
is finished.

Distribution of the testing effort, potential bug sweeping speedup.
Porting of operating systems could be done, with only use of the simulator, I belive that
to be only partial true in practice, but I think much of the work could be done in this way
and only small glitches need to be corrected to get it running on the real hardware.

It will probably be much easyer to find sponsors for the actual construction of the mobo
prototype if an functional blue print is ready for demonstration.

I made these assumsions, but have not checked them.
The chips needet for the mobo is availebel as VHDL, or other syntesis language, package. The different busses are also availbel as VHDL package.

Quote:

IBM have tried a few times to create an open PowerPC specification first with CHRP (COmmon hardware Reference Platform) then with POP (PowerPC Open Platform) but both times a lack of support from the largest PowerPC desktop manufacturer (Apple) has sunk the project before it canget off the ground. Check out www.openppc.org

I just stared to look at Open PPC spec, so no comments at this time.

Other good links, the practical issues of hardware prototyping, and cost of manufactoring, will make me happy.

@blitterstorm

They wont be involved in the actual design process but they provide a reference design which our design would be based on. I don't yet know what restrictions (if any) they put on the designs created from their reference material. There will more than likely be none.
Creating a simulator for a PPC970 chip would be dificul let alone adding the other chips such as the CPC925 northbridge, 8111 southbridge, gigabit ethernet controller and SATA II controller. I certainly wouldn't want to undertake this task. The OS will be ported using the evaluation board suplied and the testing and checking will be done with the design tools. I don't know if any of the chips are avilable in VHDL or Verilog and they would need to be licensed (as it would be possible to constuct a clone of the chip form the code) so that means more money

@BrianK

Note the 970MP will be pin *INCOMPATIBLE* with the 970/970FX, this means more work in a design and a different motherboard if the current design reaches production beofre then. Something that strikes me as odd is that the chip is reported to be 3ghz use a 1ghz bus which means that it has a 3x multiplier. To date the chips all have a 2x multiplier on whatever bus they use e.g. 1ghz for a 2ghz chip. The Momentum docs state that the CPC925 northbriudge can do a maximum of a 1ghz bus (The 970FX based PowerMacs use 1.25ghz and so run at 2.5ghz) this could simply be outdated info from when the chips had a maximum speed of 2ghz.

@blitterstorm

At the time there were NO affordable dual CPU systems and none of the desktop OS's took advantage of them, you needed a high end Unix server/workstation OS and an expensive computer to have 2 or more CPU's. The PowerPC BeBox and the BeOS changed this, the OS was designed from the ground up to be heavily multithreaded, multitasking and to support multiple processors (up to 8, this was a hard coded limit ass there wasn't any point in having more CPU's supported when you couldn't buy the hardware - you still can't, *-way Opteron systems have yet to ship AFAIK - a lmiti which could have been easily changed acording to the Be developers). The BeBox and BeOS was designed as "an OS for Geeks" hence the Geekport, it wasn't designed with aparticular use in mind, it was just designed to be fast and support just about any kind of use. It would be possible to create a geekport compatible system using an FPGA or even a PIC but I can't see why you would want to, it was never really used, esspecailly not commercailly.
OpenBeOS, BeFree, Blue Eyed OS or Cosmoe are the only way that you could do it unless you could write the drivers to run the BeOS on a G5 but even then it would run in 32bit mode and PalmSource have been unwilling to license the code to anyone (yellowTAB only have it as they allready had a license with Be Inc.). Cosmoe is a BeOS like API and interface to run on Linux (and "soon other" systems), BeFree and Blue Eyed OS are both recreations atop of the Linux kernel and Open BeOS (Now Haiku) is a completly new implemntation writen from scratch but designed to be binary compatible (to the extent that you can drop the app_server or net_server in a BeOS R4 or R5 install and it will work). None of these systems are even close to being ready, Haiku is the most advanced and it still needs a lot more kenrel work though all of the kits can be used in BeOS R5 with varying degrees of success depending on how complete they are (the Networking kit and MIDI are very complete, the Application/Interface Kit and Media Kit are well on their way to being usable and the OpenBeFS system is finished and ready for use), if you build and boot Haiku you get a command prompt where you can test some command line apps, it will even run most BeOS command line apps.

@BrianK

Motorola stopped focusing on the desktop chip market long ago, with only Apple buying chips and clock speeds dropping behind it just didn't make sense to pour the money into development that it would need to catch up. Instead it focused entirly on the embedded market using the PowerPC chips to cover the areas which it;s other ships couldn't - high processing power but low power consumption. They didn't give up completly but they just wern't commited to high cloock speeds any more and focused on power consumption, this means that while a dual core would be a huge processing powe increase don't expect a huge clockspeed increas, a few hundreds megahertz probably (200-300?) but maybe not even that (the 7447A was up 233mhz from the 7447 which was up 267mhz from the 7445. The one good thing I can see about this chip, esspecailly from an AmigaOne point of view, is that Motorola have a habbit of making their PPC chips mincompatible (all 744x and 745x AFAIK) so that would make an upgrade module relativly painless, although until AOS4 gets SMP support it will be as useless as the 64bit fetaure of the G5.
Also note taht that article (Dual core G4) is over a year old.

@digitaldisaster

Yup you can tell I'm used to Win and Unix with it's threading that would make use of a dual core CPU in a better way. Hopefully, AmigaOS 4 they've made extensionable such that changes to create it threaded to do multi-core or multi-cpu or both would be easily accomplished along with updating to 64bits. Ahh to dream.

Damn our AmigaOne G3's aren't going to be looking pretty to hardware by the end of next year compared to the migration to 64bits, dual cores, and faster speeds.

Again to futher add to performance VIA and Nvidia are creating motherboards with dual PCI-Express slots where you can band the video cards together. You don't quite get 2x the performance but from what I've seen the #s are still very impressive.

We need the Amiga Five to roll!

@digitaldisaster

Quote:

digitaldisaster wrote: @blitterstorm They wont be involved in the actual design process but they provide a reference design which our design would be based on. I don't yet know what restrictions (if any) they put on the designs created from their reference material. There will more than likely be none.

nice
Quote:

Creating a simulator for a PPC970 chip would be dificul let alone adding the other chips such as the CPC925 northbridge, 8111 southbridge, gigabit ethernet controller and SATA II controller. I certainly wouldn't want to undertake this task.

That was not what I had in mind, creating a simulator for the PPC970 chip, or the other chips for that matter, makes no sence to, almost equals the task to create a new CPU.

what I had in mind was, using existing "buliding blocks" if they, were availible.
The main idear was that it could be done without too much work, an making complex chips would compromise that goal.

I hoped it would be possible, to just "glue" the "building" blocks together, and check that the design as a whole works, the building blocks are themselfs tested.

Quote:

The OS will be ported using the evaluation board suplied and the testing and checking will be done with the design tools. I don't know if any of the chips are avilable in VHDL or Verilog and they would need to be licensed (as it would be possible to constuct a clone of the chip form the code) so that means more money

The goal was to check if it was posible to use, software simulation to cut development time and cost.

I guess creating a motherboard is a huge task, done in alot of "steps".
what are your guess, about cost before the prototype can be manufactured?
what about time?

@digitaldisaster

Quote:

digitaldisaster wrote: @blitterstorm At the time there were NO affordable dual CPU systems and none of the desktop OS's took advantage of them, you needed a high end Unix server/workstation OS and an expensive computer to have 2 or more CPU's. The PowerPC BeBox and the BeOS changed this, the OS was designed from the ground up to be heavily multithreaded, multitasking and to support multiple processors (up to 8, this was a hard coded limit

I guess the magical 8 comes from limitation from the bus system, If you make a graph
for the performance gains for numer of cpus on a bus, you will se that the gains in performance pr cpu decreases, untily finaly the performance is getting worse by adding more cpus, because of the shared bandwidth of the bus.
Quote:

It would be possible to create a geekport compatible system using an FPGA or even a PIC but I can't see why you would want to, it was never really used, esspecailly not commercailly.

I know that It wasnt a commercial sucess, but I was taking about the original design goals. I guess that there would have been some commercial hardware avilable if, the BeBox hardware wasent canceled. But back to the main question why.
Because I think, some Be freaks care!, and also because I see it could be used to connect cheap homebrew harware to the computer, yes It can of cause also be done in other ways. It dont think it would be too costy, to add this geek port to the mobo.
If this geekport could help sell more than x motherboards of the Amiga 5, and the be freaks will be happy to use the Amiga 5, thats almost all I and alot Amiga freaks would need to know.

I would not mind doing a litle reseach how much It maters to Be freaks, If you thinks It will make sense to market the Amiga 5 as being a cool BeBox.

I guess that the software support is the potential showstoper here!

@BrianK

The impresion I get from Hyperion is that they REALLY know what they are doing and when they designed this they did it in such a way that it would be easy to add features like this in the future, dunno why, I just do.
G3's and G4's are allready starting to look out of date, and I don't just mean in terms of megahertz. 64bit has been commonplace on the desktop a while now and processors are all moving to 90nm. It took motorola long enough to move to 130nm! The rumoured IBM 750VX (G3 + Altivec = G4!) is meant to be fabbd using 90nm.
We won't see taht on an AmigaFive, at least not unitl I can find someone who makes the chips or convince myself to buy a the specification from the PCI-SIG and learn how to design chips ;). We don't really need it anyway, for now AGP 8x will still do, it's beter than the AGP 2x on current boards.
In that case I shall make it round like a G4 iMac logic board ;)

@blitterstorm

For someone that knows how to write a good emulator/simulator this wouldn't be as hard as it semes, just long and laborious. Most of the work has allready been done by IBM, most development time is spent on design and not implementation, this is why Haiku ahve acheived so much in such a short space of time, Be had allready done the design work for them, they just had to program it. The difference here is taht there were a lot of docs from Be, there are hardly any (publicly available) ones from IBM at the moment.
I don't think it is possible, I could check with the manufacturers but I sincerly doubt it.
There is no need to use software with relation to the porting of OS 4 as the package you buy from momentum comes with one evaluation board pre-made.
Apart from the $6000 ealuation board package I couldn't say, I asked momentum about this and they gave me some half cocked response about "similar products which I may be interested in" got to get back to them but for that I need CityLink to deliver my monitor cable (They were meant to arrive yesterday but they never came and then claimed no one was in when they called, someone was in all day!)

@blitterstorm

On most systems yes but the G5 and Opteron systems don't suffer from this as each processor has a sepearte bus (The Opteron actaull has interprocessor buses so that each processor can talk to another one close to it or hop through it to talk to the one enxt to that!). Pity they didn't ahve a G5/Opteron when they designed the BeOS, that would be one kick ass system!
I can't remember what off ahnd but there were a couple of things in developemnt which were scrapped when the BeBOx was cancleled, it was in production for a few years though as either the 66mhz or 133mhz version, there was even a few 200mhz versions used internally by Be and their most trusted developers. A quad version was in development but never finished.
A lot of the old Be freeks who had BeBox's (About 1,800) would see that and go "WOW! I remember that... not that you could ever do anything with it but man was that cool!" and if you could run the BeOS on it may buy one but a much bigger adavtage would be homebrew hardware which was mainly what the Geekport was used for. It would be cool and don't get me wrong I'm not against the idea but it is adding more cost to the system. This would mean wither and FPGA would need to be added or an ASIC designed and fabbed, neither would be cheap, esspecaily bulk FPGA programming (I am not doing that in house! You would have to get someone to write a load of them for each batch of motherboards) this isn't my are of expertise. though am more than willing to learn which means expenisve devlopers kits and books/documentation.
If you do the research and enough people tpo make it worthwhile say that they would buy an AmigaFive motherobard if either 1)It had a Geekport 2)It could run Haiku/BeFree/Blue Eyed OS/Zeta/Hacked BeOS R5 Pro or R5.1 Dano or 3)Both then I would be happy to develop such a fetaure providing these people were able to raise funds to donate to the project for both a board and devlopers kit (Unless there is someone here or in the BeOS community that is good with VHDL or Verilog and has the nessacery hardware and would be willing ot do this for free).

@blitterstorm

Note that EV6 bus is a point-to-point bus protocol. Refer to http://www.zen26266.zen.co.uk/ath3.htm

Both Alpha EV6 and K7 Athlon uses this bus protocol.

_________________

@digitaldisaster

One may have go custom for *-way Opteron based systems i.e. custom glue logic based from Cray?s Red Storm (MPP) technology i.e. "10,368 Opterons are linked in a three dimensional mesh using Hypertransport."

_________________

@Hammer

If it ever appears and assuming cray don't run outa dosh before they finish it.

@digitaldisaster

Any news about the website? I'm thirsty for more infos Also I'll donate some bucks asa the website is up with the corresponding infos and your accounds are ready.. (just checked my paypal acc, you'll get all the bucks on it.. but don't expect any miracles, it isn't Fort Knox )

Keep it up!

_________________
Regards, Cyborg.
AmigaOS4 development team member

"In the beginning was CAOS.."
-- Andy Finkel, 1988 (ViewPort article, Oct. 1993)

@Cyborg

Yes, but unfortuantly it is bad news. Although we have been given a domain name (Kindly donated by HereWeGoAgain) we no longer have a server to host it on. I was going to host it on the BEZilla.org server but we have just been told that that is no longer possible as they can no longer host the BeZilla website for free as their business is bad right now and they can't afford it.
So it looks like I'm on the lookout for a webserver, any ideas? I've got a couple of people I need to get in touch with and I will get back to you.