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ATX PPC Motherboards from Eyetech
YttriumOx writes: "Eyetech Ltd, a UK based company now has the AmigaOneG3SE for prerelease to developers.
Anyone who's been craving a PPC motherboard for either Linux or the New AmigaOS can put their orders in now. The developers prerelease board comes with a TurboLinux PPC CD. While this system is targetted at Amiga owners wanting new hardware, there's no reason for anyone needing a good PPC solution for Linux can't get their hands on one. You've got until the 24th of March if you want a prerelease board (note that the only difference between it and the final board is that the ROM chip in the final board will be an AmigaOS4 ROM where as it's an OpenPPC BIOS in the developers board. Exact specifications of the board can be found here."
This is also a good solution for people who want to use Linux on a PowerPC but do not want to buy an Apple machine. Price for the "beta" board is $450 and final will be $500.
You could probably get MacOS X to boot on it, now that the OS's rom is stored on disk.
That, and Darwin comes with source, so you could likely get it going on the hardware.
This will be kinda cool....
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
I hope this means another alternative platform to the wintel architecture, as the amiga is a good os and the ppc is much better in engineering terms thatn the athlon or the p4...
I believe that they should let you flash the board's rom with a Mac ROM (Obtained legally from your own Apple PPC of course).
This would let people run Macintosh software on their board.
Regards, Guspaz.
Finally some open Amiga PPC mother boards! Amiga returns....
Of course, there are already Amiga PPC expansion boards..
http://linux-apus.sourceforge.net/
and
http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/amigappc/
Anyone thought of porting these to daystar PPC upgrade cards for 68k macs (Turbo601 ?)
What is an Amiga? Why do I occasionally hear about these Amiga things on this site? Can someone explain what these elusive devices are?
No one mentioned Atari. Get a clue.
Isn't $500 a little expensive for the board? A new iMac only costs $1,299.00 from the Apple Store and you get much more for the same price. There is also the matter of supporting Apple.
--Metrollica
OS/2, MacOS 8.6, 400$$$ PPC motherboards ?
.
PowerPC has been doomed since the start . .
I am not particularely impressed by the specs of the board. When the BeBox came out with its dual Hobbit chipset, I wanted to get my hands on one of these bad ass mother. But looking at the specs (and high price) of this board, why should I put money into that? To run a Linux port on it? Gee, that's a luxury item.
I'd rather get a second ipaq instead. Actually I start to prefer the ARM architecture over the PPC one lately (Thanks for Mot for goofing heavily on the performance side too.) So I'd rather go light and wireless than underpowered and chained on the desktop.
PPA, the girl next door.
-- I feel better now. Thanks for asking.
sorry i actually like ataris i meant to say amiga, they are easy to switcheroo becuz they both begin with an a and are 5 letters long
can i be modded up now? thx! 1337
I'd be interested to know whether or not it will run Mac OS X. On one hand, Apple built into their operating system a list of computers that it can run on. They did this so non-G3 users wouldn't try to do an install.
1 68&db=mac. Although it's not the one I used, you can see that as an example.
On the other hand, there are several utilities available that override Apple's settings. I've personally used one to get OS X running on my Power Mac 7300. One such utility is XPostFact, http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=11
Does anybody with more knowledge than me have any insight?
Seems like a nice board, albeit I would want a board that had a socketd CPU, not one that's soldered into the board.
Amiga has been dead for long time, killed by its own overly zealous userbase viciously attacking anybody who did not use or even dared criticize it, which reminds of a certain open source operating system.
You mean AmigaOS isn't a vaporious dream?
Blar.
I always thought the Amiga was a neat inovative computer. Friends of mine were doing production video animation on them backin the early 80s. They were clearly more powerful than the Mac at that time. Still I can t help but think that without the latest IBM G5 or whatever its called, its not going to hold up against the best Athlons and P4s.
AmigaOne update 15 March 2002
For immediate release
The A1G3-SE is now ready!
The AmigaOneG3-SE is now production ready and orders for discounted developer/dealer/OS4 beta-tester boards/systems are now being taken (but only until by midnight on Sunday 24th March GMT 2002) for delivery in April. This closing date is necessary so that we can assess the volume required in this initial production run and place the order with the manufacturers. Purchasers of these boards will also be able to obtain a discount on the full user version of OS4.0 when it is released.
If you have previously applied for beta-tester or dealer status YOU MUST REAPPLY as we no longer require beta testers for the A1 board itself, only for OS4 and applications that run (or should run!) under it. Please order via our website here. If you are a dealer, please mention this on your order, and a dealer price will be forwarded to you.
The main production run will be timed so that boards are ready at the same time as the consumer release of OS4, probably in May 2002.
The developer/dealer boards and (at least) the first run of production boards will be shipped with soldered-on G3 PPC CPU's running at 600 MHz which will give a remarkable speed increase over any existing G2 (Blizzard/Cyberstorm) PPC accelerators for the Amiga. Soldering the CPU in place - rather than using BGA sockets or chip carriers - allows us to keep the reliability very high and the costs as low as possible. (BGA sockets and/or carrier board options add a huge amount to the cost of the board).
As OS4 versions (or applications software) are developed which make use of the Altivec processor in the G4 we will make a G4 version available, again with a soldered-on chip (probably the 7441 at 700 MHz). It is possible that we could produce a socketed chip-carrier version, but only if we can engineer the costs down so it adds no more than 15% to the costs of a board with a soldered on CPU.
The A1G3-SE? What happened to the original A1?
In October 2000 when we laid out the design for the A1, there was no commercially available 'northbridge' chip (the interface between the CPU, memory and PCI bus) in the relatively small quantities that we needed, at an economic price. 'Southbridge' chips were available (these handle the system timing, interrupts etc and, traditionally also embed the lower speed peripheral functions such as IDE, USB etc), but clearly these do not come with a built in A1200-PCI bridge - which would have to be built in custom logic. It therefore made economic sense to build a custom southbridge chip which incorporated the A1200-PCI bridge - but without the integrated peripherals (which were available on separate chips at low cost anyway). Things were going nicely on the original A1 design until May/June . . . but not much - and certainly not enough to allow us to even consider going into production - was happening on OS4 at that stage. We therefore ramped down hardware development work and concentrated on finding a workable solution to make OS4 happen.
By the time OS4 development had been signed off in early November the world had moved on. Commercially available PPC northbridge chips were available, and coupled with off-the-shelf southbridge chips, were able to deliver better price performance than the original A1 custom chip design, and (since the big boys had already been using them successfully) without the risk of bugs intrinsically present in any custom logic implementation. This meant that the only custom logic function needed was for the PCI to A1200 bridge.
Alongside this many people had expressed a wish only to have a stand-alone A1 board, without the need (or ability) to run hardware-hitting applications. In addition Hyperion have been making better than expected progress in decoupling the chipset dependencies in the OS with a result that it will cease to be reliant on the Amiga chipset at a very early stage of the OS 4 release cycle. (Of course hardware hitting applications will, to a greater or lesser extent, still need access to a genuine Amiga chipset). Given this, we thought it would be sensible to try to provide Amiga chipset availability as an a option, so that the main A1 board would not have to carry the cost of providing this connection - in terms of PCB and component real-estate, and in requiring a custom tower to mount it in. The upshot is that Escena has come up with a solution which allows the bridge to the A1200 chipset to be made from a PCI card, via ribbon cable, to the A1200 edge connector. The use of a ribbon cable also helps solve the 'will it work in an xyz tower' problem, as there is (within limits) quite a wide range of A1 & A1200 relative board positioning that can be used. This A1200/PCI bridge will be an additional cost item for those who need it.
Revised specifications for the AmigaOneG3-SE
Over the past year or so since the original AmigaOne specifications were first published we have had a lot of private - and more than enough public - feedback on what people would like to see in the AmigaOne specifications over what had been published. Of course several of these wishes were completely commercially unrealistic (eg - I paraphrase - "Why don't you produce a Gameboy-sized and -priced AmigaOne with the power of the top SG workstation that runs on one AA cell for 6 months, and is user upgradable - and still runs my A500 WB1.3 games from floppy") - but there were also lots of sensible comments as well.
The main useful feedback that has come out over the last year concerning the original design - and the way the AmigaOneG3-SE addresses these can be summarised as follows:
CPU speed concerns The AmigaOneG3-SE will handle G3/G4 CPU's to their current clocking limits (but, of course, subject to chip availability at the higher end - Apple currently absorbs most of these chips under contract).
Memory speed concerns The AmigaOneG3-SE supports 133MHz FSB SDRAM. (According to our engineers DDR memory doesn't gain anything in help PPC board design).
Provision of legacy peripherals The AmigaOneG3-SE has on board FDD, serial, parallel, PS2 kb & PS2 mouse ports.
Provision of integrated peripherals The AmigaOneG3-SE provides 2x USB on the motherboard rear ATX I/O panel) + 2 more on headers (for using a front bay outlet), 10/100 ethernet, AC97 audio and MC97 data/fax/modem, and UDMA 100 hard disk/ATAPI interface (2 channels - 4 devices).
Graphics interface speed The AmigaOneG3-SE supports a 2x AGP bus, and PCI graphics cards at 66 MHz.
Will it run Linux? Yes - in fact that's how the AmigaOneG3-SE hardware design was debugged. The developer editions will be shipped with Linux PPC and UAE PPC install CD's.
I don?t need hardware-hitting application compatibility The AmigaOneG3-SE will run in standalone mode as soon as OS4.0 has had all the legacy hardware dependency removed from it. As most of this (according to Hyperion) was in the already-rewritten exec.library this full hardware independence will be introduced very soon after the first release of OS4, if not actually incorporated into it. If your application itself still requires the presence of the original Amiga chipset then you will need to use the optional PCI/Amiga bridgeboard.
Will it fit in an EZTower Mk1-5 / Elbox tower / standard ATX tower? The AmigaOneG3-SE has a full ATX form factor and will therefore fit into any suitable ATX tower with a 250W or higher PSU. It will fit directly into the EZTower Mk4 & 5 (these will need the AT PSU replacing with an ATX unit) in the PC board position, and into the EZTower Mk1-3 (which will need a minor amount of metalwork to accommodate the back panel ATX I/O connectors & an ATX PSU). The EZTower Mk1-5 also allow an A1200 motherboard to be mounted within the same case as the AmigaOneG3-SE board.
The EZTower-Z4, the Power/Elbox Tower and any other Amiga-specific tower design are not suitable for the AmigaOneG3-SE board without substantial modification. However if you have purchased an Eyetech EZTower-Z4 directly from us since 1st January 2001 please read the special arrangements we have made for you in the FAQ's below.
In summary the AmigaOneG3-SE will come with:
* 4 x PCI slots + 1 x AGP slot on 2 buses
* 10/100Mbps ethernet
* 2 x USB connectors + 2 more on headers
* 2 x UDMA 100 channels (4 devices)
* Open firmware-compatible BIOS with OS4.0 extensions & NV memory
* PS2 mouse & keyboard connectors
* Sound, modem & gameport I/O via the AMR header
* Parallel, serial & floppy (PC FDD controller) connectors
* Real time clock
* 2 x SDRAM sockets for up to 2 GB of main memory
CPU options
As far as the CPU is concerned the first series of boards will use a 600 MHz G3 CPU and will come with this soldered in place, thereby keeping the costs as low as possible. As G4's fall in price/become more available we may also offer a soldered in place G4 CPU option as well. If we can engineer the costs of a socketed/chip carrier version with CPU to be no more than 15% above the price of a soldered-in CPU equivalent then we will consider producing these versions.
What happens if you buy an entry level board and want to upgrade it in a year or so's time? Well exactly the same as when you bought a similarly priced accelerator a couple of years back and want to upgrade to a faster one (but this time you get a free computer attached!). You either sell it privately or trade it in to the dealer where you purchased it. In fact in the PC market, despite all processors being socketed, hardly anyone ever changes the CPU to improve the computer - they nearly always have to buy a (at least) a new motherboard as well. We're just being upfront about it!
AmigaOneG3-SE availability
To keep prices down and quality up we are having the boards manufactured in the Far East. Delivery to us in the UK is around 4 weeks from our placement of the order with the manufacturer. The developer/dealer boards will be ordered will be ordered on 25th March and allocated to those that have placed their orders, including payment details, by midnight on Sunday 24th March GMT. Cards will not be charged until the boards are shipped.
The main production run order will be placed by us when Hyperion have told us that they can commit to release OS4 as an end user product. Hyperion's web site will give updated OS4 release information on a regular basis. We will then invite Amiga dealers to place firm volume orders with us for shipment on a first-come-first served (FIFO) basis. There will be a minimum order volume and technical support requirements to become an AmigaOneG3-SE dealer. The revised A1 dealer requirements will be published on the mailing list at www.yahoogroups.com/group/a1dealer.
Dealers (and end users) will be required to purchase one copy of OS4 with each AmigaOneG3-SE mainboard or system. Dealers will be able to purchase OS4 direct from Hyperion.
AmigaOneG3-SE pricing
Dealers are free to set their own end user prices both for the AmigaOneG3-SE boards and for complete systems to take account of import duty, localisation of support, documentation etc. However our recommended pricing for the AmigaOneG3-SE motherboard, inclusive of a 750CXe 600 MHz G3 PPC processor but exclusive of local taxes and shipping charges, is UKP350, USD500, EUR600.
OS4 pricing is determined by Hyperion but is likely to be UKP42.50, USD62.50, EUR70.00 (excluding local taxes) when bought with an AmigaOneG3-SE board or system. The standalone prices for OS4 (for use with the CyberstormPPC etc) are likely to be UKP51.00, USD74.00 EUR84.00 (excluding local taxes & shipping).
Developer/OS4 beta tester systems
A limited number of developer/dealer AmigaOneG3-SE boards will be available for delivery in April to those placing orders by midnight on Sunday 24th March GMT. These will be fully functional and tested boards identical to those produced in the first production runs. These developer systems will be shipped with Linux PPC and UAE PPC on CD (for you to install) and a beta version of OS4.0 will be available for download from the Hyperion website - to board purchasers - from the Hyperion website. Eyetech will not be offering any direct support for the installation of Linux PPC or UAE PPC except via our website pages. If you feel that this task may be beyond your capabilities then please do not order the developers board - it is not meant for you.
These developer boards will be offered at a 10% discount over the regular price (ie at UKP315/USD450/EUR540 (excluding local taxes and shipping). There will be a further 10% reduction on the price of the end user version of OS4 when published, for purchasers of the developer board. (Dealer terms for these boards will be posted on www.yahoogroups.com/group/a1dealer).
FAQ's
What versions of Linux does the AmigaOneG3-SE run? The board currently operates with TurboLinux PPC and we are currently sorting out an installation of SuSE Linux for PPC.
Can I buy a version of the board for running Linux PPC only? We are currently considering making this available. However you should note that it will not be possible to run Amiga OS4 on such a board without purchasing a special copy of OS4 which comes with a firmware update ROM. This is (obviously) to prevent OS4 piracy which is essential if Hyperion/Amiga Inc. are to continue to develop OS4.
Will MorphOS run on the board? The AmigaOneG3-SE is designed to run Amiga OS4 & beyond, and Linux for PPC. It is likely that MorphOS could be made to run on the AmigaOneG3-SE by someone committed to port it but that will not be endorsed or supported by either us or Hyperion.
Where can I buy it? The AmigaOneG3-SE is being distributed on an 'Open Distribution' model. That means that there will be no territorial or market exclusives, and any bona fide incorporated body that can meet the requirements in terms of technical support and minimum order quantities can sell the AmigaOneG3-SE (and OS4). If you feel you qualify (or know a dealer that ought to be interested) please see the dealer information page.
What sort of memory does it take? The board has 2no 184 pin SDRAM sockets each capable of taking an 133MHz SDRAM DIMM of up to 1GB. DIMMs do nor have to be of the same size, but should ideally be from the same mainstream manufacturer and should be of the buffered variety.
Will I need the A1200/PCI bridge board? We anticipate that a 'fully retargetable' version of OS4 - that is one without any Amiga chip set dependencies - will be available with, or very soon after, the first public release of OS4. This means that any applications software which does not rely on the availability of specific Amiga hardware (or rely on specific drivers that hit these chipsets) should work fine without the PCI-Amiga bridgeboard in place. We are referring to these as 'Retargetable Applications', and in general they are the applications which will run using add-on graphics, sound, serial, parallel etc cards. Other applications which need access to one or more specific Amiga chips to run - such as scrolling games and programs like Scala - will need the bridge card present.
How does the Amiga/PCI bridge card work? Can you make one for my Amiga x000? All Amigas (with a few minor exceptions) use a common memory map where the specific chip register addresses, chip memory, Kickstart ROM etc are located. These are all in the bottom 16 MB of the Amiga's memory map so they can be accessed via the 24 bit address bus 680x0 CPUs used in early and low end Amigas. The bridgeboard maps 16 MB of its address space to this 16 MB address space of the A1200, providing address, data & control lines to read and write to the chipset and I/O (eg parallel, serial, FDD, HDD, PCMCIA, etc) registers. The PPC MMU maps the 16 MB of the PCI card's address space to the lower 16 MB of address space in the emulator's memory map, so that any application programs wanting to read or write to addresses in this region will read and write to the actual Amiga chip set registers (ie as the application programmer intended) via the PCI bridge. The interface between the PCI card and A1200 edge connector will use special chips - similar to those used in some microprocessor emulator boards - which ensure the integrity of the data.
In theory we could also use the same PCI card with an A3000/A4000 CPU connector (or possibly even an A2000 CPU socket header) to access the chipsets in these machines. Whether these actually get built will depend on the commercial case for doing so once volume boards are shipping.
What sort of tower case does the board need? The AmigaOneG3-SE board is a full size ATX board and needs a 250W or greater ATX PSU. We recommend you purchase the board first before selecting your tower, or buy it from an official AmigaOneG3-SE dealer, either in component form or as a ready built system. We recommend that a 'super-midi' sized tower (such as the T05AC model which we sell) is used to give plenty of expansion space. Naya Design are also producing some very stylish designs specifically for the AmigaOneG3-SE which will be available via us or you local dealer. Full details will be posted after Easter.
I've already bought an A1200 tower in anticipation - what are you going to do for me? The main reason behind the new design is to deliver much better performance at a much lower price than was possible with the AmigaOne-1200 design. Although no price was actually released, our pricing indications were that 'the AmigaOne-1200 would be comparable with the price a top end PPC accelerator from phase5' - ie around UKP550/USD800/EUR900 ex VAT & shipping. One of the means of delivering this better price performance is to allow the AmigaOneG3-SE to use a standard ATX form factor case, not the custom-modified, more expensive EZTower-Z4 / Elbox Tower / Power Tower etc. Obviously, even if you buy a new tower now for the AmigaOneG3-SE and put your custom Amiga tower out to grass, you have still made substantial savings and performance gains over what the AmigaOne-1200 would have cost.
However for those customers who have purchased an A1200 tower direct from us between 1st January 2001 and 15th March 2002 and who order an AmigaOneG3-SE board direct from us we will give you a brand new T05AC tower (without PSU and clip on plastic panels which you can swap over from you existing EZTower-Z4) free of charge.
Is the AmigaOneG3-SE the same as the MAI Teron Cx? No. During the period leading up to the OS4 development agreement being signed we evaluated the Articia S northbridge chip for possible use in a redesigned AmigaOne. We concluded that it was the most cost-effective chip for the design and proceeded to draw up some new specifications for an uprated, more cost-effectively engineered AmigaOne, the AmigaOneG3-SE. Clearly using the Articia S instead of Escena's custom northbridge design meant that both the schematic design and the PCB layout would be entirely new. MAI logic are a chipset manufacturer, not a PPC motherboard manufacturer, but they had commissioned a low volume, high cost evaluation board, the Teron Cx, to help sell their chipsets. The Teron Cx was never designed to, or intended to, go into volume production. We therefore asked them if they could recommend a design company who was familiar with using the Articia S in PPC motherboard design. They recommended the same (Far Eastern) company that designed their Teron Cx evaluation board.
The new Eyetech AmigaOne design obviously shares a lot of commonality with the Teron Cx board, but more than a cursory glance at the specifications (ATA speed, integrated ethernet, custom firmware, number of active PCI/AGP slots etc) - and the price - of both boards should be enough to convince most people that they really are different designs.
However if you remain unconvinced you are of course perfectly welcome to purchase the Teron Cx evaluation board. It costs $3900, misses many features of the AmigaOneG3-SE, and won't run OS4.
I bought a Party Pack and claim my $100! The Amiga DE SDK Party Pack is an Amiga Inc. promotional program and has nothing directly to do with Eyetech, Hyperion or any of the AmigaOneG3-SE dealers. Amiga Inc. will be handling the administration of this program directly and will announce the procedures to be followed when the AmigaOneG3-SE goes on sale in volume.
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All trademarks acknowledged
Imagine a Beowolf Cluster of THESE!!!
See http://www.bplan-gmbh.de/news/pegasos_e.html for more details.
It can take up to two G4 w/ 2Mb cache each.
The mainboard works perfectly, and two OS are expected to run on the system when it ships(one xxxBSD if I remember correctly and MorphOS).
As a matter of fact, the board will be shipped when MorphOS (http://www.morphos.de) will be ready, in the next two monthes.
Sheesh, I just posted that, how can there be so many comments already?!
Anyway, regarding MacOS - I can't say for certain about getting MacOS to run on it, not being a Mac person at all myself, BUT I have heard it's almost certain that Mac-On-Linux will run fine. Also, once AmigaOS4 is on this baby, iFusion (a brilliant PPC Mac emulator for AmigaOS) will also run fine.
Regarding the CPU being soldered on. Eyetech are quite likely to make a G4 version at some stage, however a socketed solution seems unlikely due to the massive price increase unless there is sufficient demand and people willing to pay the extra. Alan from Eyetech posted the following on the AmigaOne mailing list:Regards,
Ben de Waal
AKA YttriumOx
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: addpart() in /usr/local/www/eyetech/www.eyetech.co.uk/basket .php on line 6
I want one, just to have a home server that is not x86, is this board really for real???
Amiga IS useless, but RISC? Absolutely perfect for notebooks - check out Apple's iBook it has excellent power use vs performance.
The last day for advance registration for Amiga Expo will be Monday March
25th. You need to call 1-800-932-6442 right now to get your Amiga Expo and
banquet tickets!
If you're attending the Learn LightWave seminars at this show you need to
buy that special pass from www.learnlightwave.com which also gives you
admission to the dealers floor and other classes. You'll still need to book
your banquet tickets at the above number!
Pre-orders for tickets will not be accepted at this number after Monday. You
will then have to purchase your tickets the day(s) of the show on March
29th-31st. Remember that Banquet tickets are limited and we cannot promise
to have enough at the door on Friday or Saturday - so preorder your banquet
tickets NOW to be sure you will be there!
The Amiga Expo banquet will open Saturday night at 6:30pm with a cash bar
and dinner will be served at 7pm. You have a choice of Chicken Picatta,
London Broil, or vegetarian platter. After dinner we will be entertained by
the Unplanned Swampland Band featuring Dave Haynie, Bob Fisher, Andy Finkel,
Jim Davis and perhaps a few more Amiga and Toaster guys! They may not be a
seventies superband, but they're gonna be fun!
If you haven't booked your hotel room yet, just call the Marriott Hunt
Valley Inn Maryland at 1-410-785-7000 to book your room now before space
runs out. If you mention Amiga Expo you will get a discounted rate of only
$99 per night for a single, double, triple or quad room!
We look forward to seeing you at the largest Amiga Show of the year - Amiga
Expo!
Kermit Woodall
www.amigaexpo.com
I was trying to email you - is it
evil_@hotmail.com
Or
evil@hotmail.com
You would think that the '_' character is also an anti-spam measure, but I want to be sure in case my email bounces. Thanks.
Anyway, I just wanted to tell you that people who play Everquest are terminally gay, almost as bad as goths. Thanks.
Think I'll pass.
You know that's not going to happen. Asshole!
550 bux for the G3/600 or 600 bux for the G4/700mhz
:)
Not bad, but soldered on cpu really sucks. And 15% seems rather high just to add a socket.
I might have to get one of these bad boys, maybe someone will have an OS/X hack for it too.
I've never considered running Amiga before, what are some of the highlights of runnning it? Is it just so people can tinker around, or can you do things with it where Linux/Windows isn't cutting it?
I'm genuinely curious, not being a negative smart ass.
"Derp de derp."
Would you purchase a preproduction board? I can see if maybe your some amiga maniac collecter. Why would anyone want a motherboard thats not the final build?
Yum. Quiet and cool home web server. G3's don't require a fan and it definate fast enough for a web server.
Check out the briQ by Terra Soft Solutions (makers of Yellow Dog Linux).. Full specs are here. Pricey, but very cute. YDL sells a few other LinuxPPC hardware solutions.
I am the king... of No Pants! www.penny-arcade.com
Amiga's strength in the 80s and early 90s was multimedia. You could do AMAZING things with video and sound that were unsurpassed by anything in it's pricerange (you could only really get similar performance on dedicated video editing hardware).
Later, as the rest of the world caught up, the people who stayed with Amiga did so for several reasons:
1 - some were fanatics. Sad but true fact of any computing group is that fanatics exist.
2 - The Amiga can do pretty much anything any other machine can do with a fraction of the processor and RAM (My old 68030-25MHz performed about as well as a P200 easily, so now think about how a G3-600 will perform...)
3 - The AmigaOS is elegant. It gives you power and flexibility not found in MacOS or Windows, and ease of use not found in Linux (yes, Linux CAN be easy, but as soon as you want to start tinkering it gets complex. You can tinker with AmigaOS even with a minimum of knowledge - greater knowledge just means you can tinker MORE)
4 - There are still some AmigaOS applications that I far prefer to anything on other platforms. Many of these are seriously showing their age, but now that a new AmigaOS is coming out, there are likely to be many developers updating/rewriting the old software and even writing new software. We have a rather large base of ported software (mostly games) too for those that "just can't live" without Quake, Freespace, Heretic, Wipeout2097 etc etc etc.
Regards,
Ben de Waal
AKA YttriumOx
the parts these guys are dealing with are BGA's. a BGA socket is a non-standard part (read: high cost).
if you think they are lying about the %15 cost, why don't you go do some research and try to find low volume pricing on BGA sockets, then tell them what you find. I'm sure they'd be glad to hear about it.
The AmigaOneG3-SE supports 133MHz FSB SDRAM. (According to our engineers DDR memory doesn't gain anything in help PPC board design).
Why not support DDR? Its performance improvement has been quite well demonstrated in the x86 platform. Assuming that the PPC architecture won't see any benefits from DDR technology is silly. With the widening gap between I/O latency and CPU performance, any technology that improves latency (or at the very least bandwidth) will improve performance. I can only think of two possible reasons for this. The second I'll get back to in a moment. The first is that there is a problem inherent to the north bridge they are using or to the motherboard itself. This, of course, could be indicative of manufacturing problems or possibly of lower quality parts.
As far as the CPU is concerned the first series of boards will use a 600 MHz G3 CPU and will come with this soldered in place, thereby keeping the costs as low as possible. As G4's fall in price/become more available we may also offer a soldered in place G4 CPU option as well. If we can engineer the costs of a socketed/chip carrier version with CPU to be no more than 15% above the price of a soldered-in CPU equivalent then we will consider producing these versions.
Why not offer a socketed solution? Granted, they're currently only offering a testing mobo, but that's no reason to put off releasing a mobo without the ability to upgrade the CPU. Apple has already created technology that allows CPUs to be mounted on daughterboards that are upgradeable (effectively the x86 slotted CPU equivalent). Basing their socket on this technology could, potentially, allow users to upgrade their CPUs using currently-available parts.
imho, these are two bad indications that the mobo is either being released too soon (hence, possibly the DDR and slot/socket solution problems) or that the company is looking to stall to earn more profits. By releasing a mobo that is missing some desired functionality, they can guarantee additional profits in the short-run from users looking to upgrade their CPU/mobo combos (of course, that's a required bundled upgrade as well).
I've yet to upgrade my cpu without requiring a new m/board so being soldered don't mean diddly to me.
By the time you put together a complete system, this motherboard doesn't look price competitive to buying a recent Mac, and you have to put everything together yourself. Unless you have a religious reason to avoid Apple, it looks like they are a better option. Don't get me wrong, I think competition is a good thing, but this doesn't look like something that is going to give Apple a run for their money, so I don't think it helps there. And I like putting together machines myself, but if I was going to put toether a new machine for myself today, I could buy a dual Athlon motherboard and two Athlon XP 1700's for not too different than what this 600MHz G3 PPC motherboard is selling for. And that is from a local to me shop.
i ce sheet.htm
Don't believe me?
http://www.laboratorycomputers.com/laboratorypr
ASUS A7M266D AMD760MPX DUAL $249
PALOMINO XP 1.7PR $128
That's only $56 more than the $450 price they mention for the PPC motherboard, and it doesn't have the CPU's soldered down to "save costs" either. And there is no freaking way that a 600MHz G3 is faster than one Athlon XP 1700, let alone two.
Great, someone loan one of these boards to Grog so he can help with the FreeBSD PPC port.
I like PPC, don't get me wrong, but as much as I wanted one, I wouldn't buy it because I was left with only 1 vendor, Apple.
For a while, apple had the right idea. They tried IBM's strategy of making the platform open, then they chicken shitted out and went back to making their own boxes. I can't recall the manufacturers name, but there was PPC boards made by other manufacturers for a while. Why apple did an about face on this issue I will never know.
Thing that has allways kept me next to my trusty PC is I never have had to buy a "Whole new computer" I can get the latest chipset or CPU merely by replacing my motherboard. Mac's never gave me that option, sorry apple.
I think i'll give one of these boards a shot. Word to the manufacturer though, could you drop the price down to the less than 300 dollar range? I know you're going for a niche market but you gotta understand, the only people who are really going to be interested in these things don't really have a lot of money left over to do impulse buying anymore.
That were I to buy the OpenPPC bios board, and run AROS on it, that it would be more of an amiga than the final version?
Have you ever even used an Amiga? Troll.
[atari and amiga] are easy to switcheroo becuz they both begin with an a and are 5 letters long
plus the same people worked on both the original amiga and some of atari's project. wasn't much of the lynx loosely based on amiga?
Why are these mobo's so much more expensive than what I see for x86 ones? Or for that matter what Apple seems to charge for whole systems. Are they actually somehow better? (I know PPC and x86 are hard to compare, and apparently PPC's run "faster" at the same clock speed, etc) Or does it have to do with demand and buying in bulk?
I love Kimmy!
I don't see why running Linux on a PPC is a reasong to buy this thing...
It's true that i86 architecture isn't the best around but still.. I'd rather see something that is designed to be simple but efficient, and that would scale from a handheld to a "mainframe".. dah.
Then port Linux on THAT thing.. there.. go.. but well.. maybe it was just me dreaming..
Software should be free as in speech, but if we also get some free beer, all the better.
Nah -- not among Linux users.
...and nobody cared?
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
For less then that, I can get a P4 or Athlon that runs faster and just wins on every arena except heat.... What's the point, other than to be different?
$450 is a little steep compared with Intel hardware, but this is worlds better than the $3000 developer boards that have been options before. I don't think I can afford it now, but if the final publicly available version is anywhere near as cheap I will get one eventually.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
yep, in fact I've still got an A500+ and an A1200. Don't use them, of course - they're aren't really computers in the modern sense of the word. Thanks for asking, though.
2 - The Amiga can do pretty much anything any other machine can do with a fraction of the processor and RAM (My old 68030-25MHz performed about as well as a P200 easily, so now think about how a G3-600 will perform...)
A lot of people have this impression... The sad think is that they just don't notice that the Amiga could edit video better than a P200 because they were using a 20.000 video card.
I think they faced the same problem as Palm Computing Inc. faces today: they couldn't make enough money on just selling the OS.
Sure, allowing other vendors to sell Macintosh hardware would have given MacOS a greater market share, but that doesn't mean it would have been economically viable for Apple Inc. In the end, it's the profit that counts for a company, not market share.
Making all parts of a computer system (box, motherboard, assembly, operating system, installation) is a form of vertical integration.
It's a classic way of increasing profit for a corporation. There's a small profit in each of the steps of making a computer: the company making the motherboard makes a small profit, the company making the OS makes a small profit, the company assembling the system and installing the OS makes a small profit, and so on. By taking care of all these steps, a company can put all these little profits under one roof, and increase the profit margin, using their organization and economies of scale.
That's probably the reason Apple never released an Intel x86 compatible version of MacOS. It would have been too easy for competitiors to make clones, and too easy for user to upgrade their hardware without buying from Apple. Apple would be stuck with the high cost of developing the OS (and there's a LOT of development money going into it), without making money on the hardware.
The same problem faces the Amiga. There will, most likely, only be ONE company selling Amiga computers. Developing an operating system is so expensive, and the market is so small, they won't be able to survive without the money from selling the hardware.
Unless, of course, the AmigaOS will be some kind of Open Source and gain enough followers...
Its hard to pin down- I guess like any OS. Myself, I switched over to Windows a few years back out of necessity, but kept touch with the Amiga scene figuring it would make a come-back in some form- Windows is the standard but I know so many things can be done better- the Amiga proved this over 15 years ago.
I got back into the Amiga game a few months after Bill and Fleecy took over Amiga in 2000. The main reason was that they had an idea (hazy as it might seem) to do something really new with computers- and they talked about it like a business, not a holy mission. Recient news seems to indicate that they have the business end done.
Not to knock Linux, but we're in pretty bad shape if the biggest news of the last 4 years has been an OS that can trace its roots back before the Apple 1. That's not a strike against Linux- that's a problem with the industry.
Enough rambling from me, the things I liked about AmigaOS was that:
-You usually knew what was going on inside you computer- system files where in a few well known folders, library (like DLLs) where all in one place- basically things where well layed out, easy to find by design.
-Programs tended to be small, compact. Pretty much everything was documented from a programmer's point of view (even things like the adoption of IFF got away from a hundred formats for storing bitmaps and sound and replacing it with a well thought-out storage system was brilliant in 1985).
-Another was the users: lots of people who knew their stuff and where willing to help out a newbe.
Well I could ramble on some more, but I'd say, just keep an eye on Amiga, I think they're on the way back.
Zoltan
So I link to the site to check out the specs on this baby and almost go blind trying to read that itty bitty font. Eyetech? I don't think so.
I don't know about all this Mac talk- isn't Apple going to start suing you, me, Slashdot and that guy in the Bud Lite commercials.
I mean how dare we go off and buy non-Apple hardware to run OSX- and give money to an AMIGA COMPANY to boot!
We've got some nerve- may St. Jobs forgive us for our wondering ways! Playing with the BoingBall again...
Today, I don't see the "value proposition". I mean, that motherboard is more expensive than a similar PC motherboard, Amiga has no advantage in terms of graphics anymore, and there is plenty of really nice software. So, why would I want one?
It's OK to be fanatical about Linux, we will never be obselete, since we are immune to any company going bankrupt and leaving us high and dry (Be), or getting our OS cut because it wasn't popular enough (OS/2).
That's the real value of the GPL and open source. Linux will be around forever.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
My Sinclair was also similarly elegant, not like these complicated, bloated computers we have today. Here is what I liked about it:
- You always knew what was going on inside the computer, because it could only run one program at a time. There was no multitasking in the operating system.
- Programs tended to be small and compact by design-- design of the memory architecture. There were only 16 kilobytes of RAM available so that developers were always on their toes to keep only the essential features in.
- The layout of the file system was based on the extremely elegant, yet powerful design proposed by Alan Turing-- a magnetic tape. Thus there were no complicated directory hierarchies, just individual programs laid out sequentially.
- The user base was very knowledgeable and helpful. Need to solder a memory upgrade onto the motherboard? No problem, there was always a guy in the local radio amateur club willing to help.
I wish today's machines were more like this! I suppose I can find some consolation in the fact that most microcontrollers found in an average PC have the features of the good old Sinclair.
:P
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
I looked around on the web and found these numbers in a IBM pdf:
IBM PowerPC 750CXe 600MHz
specint95 - 25.6
specfp95 - 16.3
AMD Athlon 600MHz
specint95 - 27.2
specfp95 - 21.5
This will probably be good for an Amiga system but don't buy it to replace your shiny new AMD Athlon XP 2100+ box. It definitely is a lot cheaper than those old Motorola developer motherboards though.
On the other hand Apple did try using licensees to get into markets they couldn't enter themselves. The idea was 3rd parties could buy Mac licenses and purchase Mac ROMs and MacOS 7 and sell into education, far east markets, gamers ("Pippin"), and super high-end markets that Apple hadn't the capacity or margins to work in. Instead they promptly began cannibalizing Apple's own markets and were eventually shut down before they bled Apple to death. Every box they sold was one Apple didn't and their licensing fees didn't nearly make up the difference.
Finally, there have been any number of third parties making PPC boards over the years as well as Motorola. However there's little economy of scale so Apple PPC boards are generally just as cheap or cheaper. There is also always IBM PPC hardware. If you're just looking for a constant flow of motherboard upgrades yeah, that's not where the market is at. On the other hand Apple hardware holds it's value a lot longer then PC stuff so you can usually sell it and buy a whole new box with a better return on value then you'd get with a generation or two behind x86 box.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Microsoft is an exceptional monopolist able to extract monopoly rents. I wish that Slashdot posters would stop suggesting that if Apple shipped an x86 OS, they'd become Microsoft.
Microsoft is the ONLY pure OS vendor. Redhat is a service/support company that also sells pretty boxes. Sun ships Iron. IBM ships Iron and does support. HP ships Iron. Until Compaq bought them, Dec shipped Iron.
Microsoft is the ONLY COMPANY, EVER, to establish itself as a large vendor selling the "virtual computer." They managed to make the hardware underneath them a commodity and provided a universal middle level that software rights to.
Forget the IE vs. Netscape web browser/middleware, Windows is middleware.
Most computer companies sell a whole widget. Microsoft functions like a hardware monopoly with outsourced production of hardware (its an economic model), you can't make money selling PCs unless you are the lowest cost provider like Dell, or you sell 'services' or 'addons' like Compaq/Dell/HP's enterprise server lines, etc.
Alex
there's no reason for anyone needing a good PPC solution for Linux can't get their hands on one
Syntax like that makes my fucking eyes hurt. Please knock it off.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
If no one makes MacOSX chipset drivers (you know like the VIA 4in1) for IBM's OpenPPC platform chipset or whatever chipset the boards use, you're going to have buggerall luck loading MacOSX.
Especially when you take into account that Windows already has rudimentry VIA chipset drivers built in (the VIA 4in1s just add more functionality/compatibility/performance at the cost of occasionally fucking things up). Otherwise odds are Windows would not load fullstop.
Look how after Intel bought into BeInc, BeInc refused to reverse engineer post beige G3 MacOS chipset drivers (using the escuse it was patented/copyrighted/whatever, but they could of just reversed engineered the Linux PPC chipset drivers that were post beige compatible) making new PPC hardware off limits
This made me react weidly.
/. users hate microsoft :), I want a technical explanation of that ram issue before trusting my money into a system that "could" have a "potential" of bad design or architecture limitation, and I wouldn't tolerate "don't worry, everything is fine and that's normal" for an explanation. I'd rather hear "look, implementing DDR ram would only give a 5% boost and cost too much of R&D than hearing BS. Still, I am aware that honnesty doesn't drive the computer industry but I can always wish :)
I quote:
---
Memory speed concerns The AmigaOneG3-SE supports 133MHz FSB SDRAM. (According to our engineers DDR memory doesn't gain anything in help PPC board design).
----
Now, I didn't mess deeply with powerPC chips or any architecture, my last CPUs from motorola were the 68040 series on my amiga 2000 (with fusion forthy) and 4000, but unless the memory controller has some sort of on-die SRAM for caching, I don't see why faster than 133mhz memory, especially with 600+mhz CPU, wouldn't help. Anyone care to explain the technicalities?
A comment like that without technical backup would probably make most technical people tend to think "oook... if that comes from the engineer that designed the board, I should stay away from getting this"
Of course I don't want to bash, I "worship" the amiga cause more than most
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
You are all (mostly) missing the point. The board is designed foremost to run AmigaOS4. Linux is supported only as an aide to development while OS4 is being finished. Why run Amiga OS? I don't know. :) I love it...it's a sweet, responsive operating system that I've used for over 10 years. It lacks some modern OS features but it is still viable and performs well. It has a small footprint.....I have one 880K disk with the OS, a TCP/IP stack and an IRC client on it that will run on a 1 meg Amiga 500 with motorola 68000 7mhz cpu. We crazy, fanatical amigans have been waiting for nearly a decade for a new amiga. Many thought it would never come. It may not be practical but it's an Amiga. :) Jay Miner was a genious.
...but everything that makes OS X special (read: Aqua)... special as in "short school buses"?
The AmigaONE I've been familiar with for months now as a completely *BAD* implimentation of a PowerPC ATX board. It is using the MAI northbridge, one of the slowest, least comprehensive northbridges made. In short, this system would make even a Cyrix 5x86 look like a speed demon by comparison, irregardless of CPU it has.
Check out the docs. Lack any kind of I/O handling, using the CPU for every last function. End result, a dog slow system. Pass this one by fellas.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Linux runs fin on my x86, I am not going to buy a PowerPC box just for linux. I would buy the box to install mac OS X but the article does not detail if it would install. This seems to me, seems like valid information to include in the article. legal or not.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Perhaps it is just because of MacOS, but I have been really disappointed by the performance of the G4 "supercomputer". I haven't had the opportunity to run a real OS on one yet. (Played around with OSX for a while, but ended up switching back to OS9 because OSX is just too damn slow and doesn't actually run any software.) And I was using a pretty much top of the line(when it was purchased) G4 733 with 512 RAM! My not-so-supercomputer PIII desktop runs circles around that thing, at least from a useability/feel perspective.
One last thing, more on topic with this article, I wouldn't have a motherboard with a soldered on processor if you gave it to me. It reminds me too much of a certain old Cyrix machine(with a compaq badge on it) that we used to call "the beast". Unless it's embedded, processors don't belong soldered on a mainboard.
Russian Russian Russian RussianDollSig DollSig DollSig DollSig
A lot of the advantage is in the user base. The Amiga has had a dedicated user base since its original release and has maintained a core base in spite of the company changing hands several times and being mismarketed. The operating system had pre-emptive multitasking at its release in the early '80s. The Mac has only recently managed that with the release of OS X.
The user base has generated the largest online repository of shareware and freeware for any platform on the Aminet web mirrors. Many of these applications include source code. A big reason why this code is valuable is that it was economically written to run on, what is by today's standards, a slower older processor... the Motorolla 68000 series...I've got a 68060 50 Mhz in mine.
While the new OS 4 on the PPC is a drastic shift away from "classic" Amiga hardware it surrenders its dependence on the outdated Amiga custom chipset for cheaper, readily available video and sound cards and the processing power of a modern processor.
Running classic Amiga software on these processors will likely yield instantaneous results in most applications.
Bitchin! Anybody runnin Lightwave on it yet? ;)
"Derp de derp."
Well, I'll probably be modded down for this, but isn't there a possibility that Linux will be obsolete one day when OS research has progressed far enough?
For instance, if parallel computers requires the kernel to be multithreaded in order to run efficiently on the new hardware.
Of course, you can keep the POSIX API to keep the OS backwards compatible, while replacing the kernel architecture, but then you can as well run BSD and call it Linux.
Maybe BSD or HURD will replace Linux. GNU may live on indefinitely, even if Linux dies, though.
PowerPC Reference Platform. 1993-ish IBM strategy for building standardized PPC motherboards.
CHRP:
Common Hardware Reference Platform. 1995 AIM Alliance (Apple, IBM, Motorola) strategy for doing the same thing but with details like OpenFirmware defined. Motorola lost several hundred million dollars when Apple killed it's licensing program and they were stuck with warehouses full of CHRP motherboards. Be's BeBox were based on a superset of CHRP. This evolved into Apple's modern line of Macs as well as IBM's RS/6000.
Operating systems that were to run on this hardware:
Windows NT (up to versions 3.5.1 and 4.0, Service Pack 2), AIX (still does on the RS/6000 & AS/400), OS/2-PPC, Solaris, ChorusOS, Netware, Taligent (never released), WorkplaceOS, LynxOS, MkLinux, LinuxPPC, Yellow Dog Linux, MacOS.
Most folks aren't aware that Apple actually did ship some fully CHRP boxes, the Apple Network Server 500 & 700. These ran AIX by the way, from Apple.
Also any number of other CHRP-derived boards have shipped over the years, most based on Motorola's VME series but IBM has also released plans.
On a related topic there was a widespread rumor in '95 that had lots of legs of IBM's PowerPC 615 project. This was supposedly an x86 (486?) core on chip alongside a PPC (604?) core. They'd share data paths, cache, other portions but would be able to run either x86 or PPC OS's. Nothing ever publicly came of it.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Actually, there has been a hack to run MacOS on the Amiga computer, to bring the subject back on topic.
When the Amiga was already on it's decline (after Commodore went bankrupt, actually), there was a little piece of software that loaded a Mac ROM into memory, and booted a Mac partition or partition file off the hardddrive. It was very nifty and worked fairly well.
There were a lot of drawbacks, of course. Virtual memory didn't work. Since the Amiga display hardware was so different from Apple's (and anyobdy else's), everything but monochrome was painfully slow. (This could be made to work better by installing a new graphics card in your Amiga, but these were prohibitively expensive.)
And the guy making all this possible, wrote the program just for his own amusement, and was surprised at how many people wanted it. So it's actually possible to run old 68000 based Mac programs on a quite ordinary Amiga 1200, with a software-only solution.
Can I buy a version of the board for running Linux PPC only? We are currently considering making this available. However you should note that it will not be possible to run Amiga OS4 on such a board without purchasing a special copy of OS4 which comes with a firmware update ROM. This is (obviously) to prevent OS4 piracy which is essential if Hyperion/Amiga Inc. are to continue to develop OS4.
What bothers me about that statement is that there will be people who still feel justified in pirating the OS anyway. "Software wants to be free. They owe me the OS. I don't pay for shit. I'm not buying it because it's just AmigaOS and nobody uses it anyway. It's not piracy if I don't sell it. Information wants to be free!"
The sad fact is that this OS is coming from a company that is trying really hard to keep an OS alive that was elegant in it's time, and had some concepts that still haven't been realized by operating systems of today. And even though AmigaOS isn't perfect, I'm very glad to see it develope further because with some modern touches it could easily be one of the best operating systems ever.
Could be, except there's that money issue. Amiga, Inc. isn't Microsoft. They're not even Apple. Hell, they're not even Redhat. They're just a few pennies and a nickle above what BeOS was a couple of years ago (if that much). So I think it goes without saying that pirating from this company is pretty fucking rotten, but that's not going to stop people from doing it anyway.
"But I'm doing them a favor by using the OS and making it popular." That's another argument I can already hear befor esomeone says it. To answer that shit before someone spews it... "Wanna help Amiga? Buy the OS. Punk."
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
I expect this crowd will do it agian, after all it was this crowd who started the trademark saying thing with "Because we can"(TM). Since none of the technical brilliance (ideas) has been lost from the Amiga, I expect an exceptional Mac emu sooner or later and many other things besides.
--
"we live in a post-ideological world..." - Billy Bragg.
Mod parent up as insightful
The board comes with a CPU!!!
eat shit, Wintel loser. your lies are obvious.
FSB is 133Mhz, so DDR would not help ....
than iMac. What PowerMac you can buy for $1000-1300 or so?
They now have 060/66Mhz+PPC604/233Mhz hybrids without L2 cache, etc... and most of the SW ran on 060/66. Now they suddenly get system where everything runs at 600Mhz and there will be support for Radeon8500 and ...
They'll float to heaven.
RIP
Seriously, this is a bit of a milestone. All the independant PPC boards have been around the $2,500 mark. The only way to get a cheaper one until now was to buy an Apple Mac and bin all the bits you don't want.
Deleted
Those old Amigas truly rocked for video performance, there is no doubt. Small parts of that had to do with AmigaOS, but it's my understanding that the real key to that amazing performance was always the custom hardware. Amiga DMA was stellar, allowing offboard hardware (such as the VideoToaster) to do their own thing without having to wait on the slow CPU, the whole setup with the blitter and the copper - all of this was way ahead of its time, and made for the sort of performance that makes it impossible to even discuss those old boxes today with people that never had the opportunity to use one without sounding like you're telling tall tales.
Now maybe I'm missing something, but I just don't see any chance of the new Amigas being able to live up to those days. The custom hardware, obviously, has long been passed by and the very concept abandoned. The OS is, still, very nice. Put it on this sort of modern hardware and, well, you might well have a better Mac. But hardly an Amiga as-of-old, right?
I must point out, though, that this board would make a base for a positively bitchin' Linux/PPC box.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
The sad think is that they just don't notice that the Amiga could edit video better than a P200 because they were using a 20.000 video card.
Um, 20,000 what? Not dollars, certainly. The Toaster never cost that much.
And the original poster was talking about more than just editing video. The Amiga had better graphics and sound capabilities than anything close to its price range, and it took quite a while for Mac and Windows to catch up
You simply can't buy PPC motherboards for less than $2,500 at the moment unless you go to the hassle of buying an entire Apple Mac and chopping it for bits. That's a bit of a waste.
Deleted
I had one of those clones, a Power Computing system. While it served me well for a few years, I aways found it a bit wonkey. I bought a video capture card and CPU card that never worked correctly with it. Both DID work fine in a real Apple machine. And the CPU card was MADE by Power Computing!!!
While the Power Computing machines were all pretty cool, they could sometimes be a real pain when you added 3rd party hardware.
It's mandatory to wash your hands before returning to the land of Dairy Queen.
Hmmph... I'd rather have an OpenPPC BIOS than an Amiga OS ROM..
blah not again, wont they let it die in peace.
What REALLY helped kill the old amiga's were excessive hardware costs and poor compatibility between versions, because you was locked into a proprietry hardware, expansion of said hardware cost a arm and a leg. And every revamp broke the one before because it made more money if the userbase had to change. If they resurrect the architecture they could charge what they like for the boards when theyre a sucess because its tied to one manufacturer. Soldered on processor is typical legacy amiga choice...
When I finally swapped from a A1200 in a tower case to a 486 DX 33 based pc having owned a a1000,a500, cdtv etc, it was just on cost.
and hardware prices were a breath of fresh air, and now the "New Amiga" is here, they want me to put my balls BACK in that vice????!??
$bfe001
AFAIK lightwave ran on Amiga before it ever ran on anything else. Support was dropped quite a while ago however.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
Lightwave was available on the Amiga before it was ported to Windows. IIRC the last version was 5.0 on the Amiga.
Latly ive been interested in how i would go about writing an article about the growing need/want for PPC system in the Open Source market place.
How exactly do you think would one go about finding out the relevant information. I was thinking about email the GNU & BSD camps, but i dont wanna piss no body off!
You can have your Amigas, I want my Acorns back!
walks off to lil room and strokes his RISC OS box....
EHEH, and there's a version with a socket coming out later too:)
Finally some open PPC hardware, at affordable price.
Things are getting harder for Apple:)
Ever since the "New World" - i.e. the era that began with the first iMacs - began, there is no ROM.
There's only Open Firmware, which is by no means an Apple- or Mac OS-specific thing. Thank you ma'm, we'll take it from there.
When you consider its got the cpu , sound etc on the board its a pretty good deal for ppc hardware.
:)
If i was going to buy a new mobo for my pc , i wouldn`t touch anything under the £150 range , then the cpu , I wouldn`t touch one of those burners inc (AMD) cpu`s and even if i did it would be around £100 for the one i wanted then the sound card would be about £50 for a goodum coming to £300 for a run of a mill X86 box.
/me remembers spending twice as much + on a blizzard ppc and blizzard vision card , worth it tho
Amiga forever !
"the modern sense of the word" - meaning what exactly? up until six months ago (when its 'Paula' chip gave out) I was still using an A1200 as my main machine. The old tech is perfectly capable and in many ways more so than much of the junk that passes for computers these days... not that it's in any way relevant when what's being revived is the Operating System not the old hardware (these new boards are just devices to run the new OS on natively - an OS which is ultimately planned to be hardware independent)
then again perhaps the "modern" definition of a computer you're aluding to would be something like "conterproductive machine to make you tear your hair out in frustration" in which case you're quite right - they're not and never were.
vive la difference! if Amiga comes back I for one will welcome it.
the lack of simple plugins (shockwave) that are used by practically every website these days. it is really painful to get the mozilla popups on toms hardware and other sites.
no cure in sight, either...
Oh fuck off. My A1200 was OK back in it's day, but any half sentient Pentium III or G3 is - LITERALLY - hundreds of times faster. Christ, it takes about half an hour to open a JPEG that takes my G4 or Athlon about half a millisecond. Yeah, I'd just love to attempt one of my typical MPEG2 encoding jobs on my A1200, but my client won't see his disc before the start of the next Ice Age.
Or a big ass spork, get one at Big_ass_spork@yahoo.com
Once you have put together an entire system based on this board, you will have spen nearly enough to buy a brand new iMac straight from Apple. Let's look at a parts-list:
While these numbers are approximate, I think I've been quite generous and estimated on the low side for most parts. You might be able to shave a bit more off the monitor or hard drive, but I'd bet that I'm within $50 either way on the total.
You can buy a used iMac for around $500 at any number of recycled computer shops, so even if you can reuse a bunch of stuff you have lying around, you aren't really ahead of the game, especially if you really want to get OS X running on the beast.
All that said, I think that it would be really nice to have a mass market PPC motherboard (and Eyetech's board looks pretty nice, as far as on-board peripherals and expansion options go) that you could run Linux on. It's too bad that they want to tie it to their proprietary OS (why are they concerned about people pirating the OS if it will only run on this PPC motherboard, anyway?). A nice, integrated, low-power system is just what I need to replace the aging 486 I use as a firewall.
hawk
Now there was one clone vendor that made some damned good hardware. Power Computing did an excellent job. Their engineering team should be commended for their efforts. Apple could have learned a bit from Power Computing.
Still Apple had to pull the plug. How else do you get rid of the problem? Can you think of any other way to kick Epson and Umax in the nads and make them get their shit together? I can't. Apple did the only thing they could do.
Now I won't attack the rest of your comment because I tend to agree. I'd love to be able to buy PPC hardware from people other than Apple. When I want a Mac, I'll buy it from Apple. When I want a solid PPC Linux machine, I'd rather get it somewhere else. I think I might buy one of these boards as well. I'm a bit intrigued by them.
Does it run with kickstart 1.3? it would be nice if you uploaded it somewhere to take a look...
anyway even if it requires kickstart 2 or 3 I'd like to take a look...
the tcp/ip stack is amitcp or another?
Remember that this G3 board is only the beginning.. Just have to hope its enough to make people get chugging again.. Remember the Amiga platform's been on life support for ten years ! So please control any negativity you might feel about this and that. Myself Im not sure ill buy a board right now due to cashflow limitations , but i hope stuff starts cranking up in a while now.. So i can risk the cash... Hope hope hope =) been the mantra of Amiga Freaks for ten years :-) (And lately some would say theres been more freaks than Amiga :-p
Try the following:
Take your unexpanded A1200, open a large directory (drawer) and grab and pull ~100 icons to another directory. The A1200 smoothly animates the drag. Any compareable Windows machine would croak immediately.
Yes, some current Windows versions *can* handle that, but only by removing/fading any icons more than X pixels from the mouse cursor!
PS. And if you have a brand new 3GHz+ computer which can just smoothly drag 100 icons across the screen, don't feel superior. The Amiga could do this with a 14 MHz processor, so your computer is about 200 times more inefficient. And the Amiga is now available at 600 MHz.
PPS. I know that the new Amiga has none of the HW acceleration the original had, and that it probably won't actually move icons smoother than the above 3GHz machine, I was just trying to make the PC crowd think a little about the abyssmal inefficency of their platform.
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
Maybe slow, as a PPC cpu, but heaps faster than the 68060 (at 50MHz) that I've used for the last six years!
And don't forget that the OS won't be handycapped by any seeming lack of CPU speed. My present OS; AmigaOS3.5 has MINIMUM requirements of
- 68020 CPU
- 6Mb RAM
- CD-ROM Drive
- 30-50Mb Hard Drive space for the OS!
.
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
No! You're quite happy to keep your "balls BACK in that vice" that MS and Intel keep seesawing bak-n-forth: 3.11, 95, 98, cs, NT, 2000, XP+ 286, 386, 486, P1, P11, P111, PIV, and 4Mb, 8Mb, 32Mb, 64Mb, 256Mb, 512Mb, 1124Mb ,...NO - WAIT NEW MoBo, next MoBo, next model MoBo, and so on, and so on, and so on.........
... this story was just about ONE of the FIRST boards (or Systems) to be available - my preference is for Merlancias'
Don't critise the mouse when the Gorilla does it MUCH MORE OFTEN!
And if you didn't know, there is a certain amount of freedom for the hardware
"System Series: Merlancia Multimedia Computer - Torro Series
System Name: Tsunami (Tower)
Processor: Motorola PowerPC 74XX Series:
o 7410/500 Single Processor
o 7450/733 Single Processor
o 7450/733 Dual Processor
Memory/Media Specifications:
o 133 MHz SDRAM
o 2 DIMM sockets
o 128MB RAM, Maximum RAM: 1GB
o 30GB Hard Disc (UltraATA, SCSI-III Optional)
o Auto-Inject Floppy Disc Drive
o Slot loading DVD Drive
Expansion & Ports:
o 133 MHz Processor fitted with the system's Processor card.
o 3/5 PCI slots, expandable to 8 with an optional buscard.
o 1 AGP slot
o MIDI, In Out & Through
o IEEE 1394 (Firewire) 100/200/400 Mb/s transfer rates
o Ethernet 100bT RJ-45 connector
o 4 Industry Standard USB Connectors
o 2 Standard PS/2 Connectors (Keyboard and Mouse)
o IDE/ATA100, 4 (up to 4 fixed or removable storage devices)
o Standard Serial and Parallel Ports
o DB15 Game Pad port
The Pilot System is expected to sell for between $1699.95 and $1999.95 to developers.
The Final System is expected to sell between $1999.95 and $2499.95 (around the same pricing as Apple's G4 system).
Dual Processor Versions will be about $3499.95.
The Power to do what you want - The Power to do what you need.
-Merlancia MMC-"
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
You are correct, Sir. Although it should be noted that "back then", Lightwave could not be purchased seperately. It came with the "Video Toaster", and Newtek WOULD NOT release it independently. Only after it was "Hacked" by ??Warm & Fuzzy" (Ive got a copy) did Newtek "See the Light" and release it on its own. (And STILL not in PAL)
>> Anyway, I just wanted to tell you that people who play Everquest are terminally gay, almost as bad as goths.
Great comeback. You think that up all by yourself?
Again, if you had a clue, you would actually *read* something before trying to throw out insults. In this case, you would have found that I *don't* play EverQuest.
Anonymous Coward indeed.