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.

Comments

Good..

[ghack]

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 ?)

Re:Un impressive

[Namarrgon]

When the BeBox came out with its dual Hobbit chipset

Actually, my BeBox came with dual PPC 603s. The original design had AT&T Hobbits, but AFAIK that was never available.

Re:A bit expensive

[swissmonkey]

That's the board AND the CPU.

So now you have 800$ to buy RAM, DVD, HD, Tower, Keyboard/Mouse, Graphic card and Monitor.

Also, you get a much more expandable system than the new iMac.

That's not that bad considering that Eyetech can't afford to produce dozens of thousands of boards at once, and thus pay a higher price for production than Apple.
If their product becomes a success, their price will go down rapidly.

That's not the only board, Pegasos exists too

[swissmonkey]

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.

MacOS, and soldered on CPU

[Anonymous Coward]

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:

OK, lets get the facts on the table. To produce a socketted G4 requires some re-layout of the pcb, the costs of a reliable socket (not cheap), the additional costs of assembly and rework (because a heavy socket is much more difficult to place properly than a normal IC), the design and production of an additional multilayer cpu carrier board (the layout is critical at the speeds involved), the costs of the carrier board 'plug' and its attachment under the chip carrier board, and the costs of the cpu and its mounting on the carrier board.

When all these costs are added together, including the manufacturers, ours and the dealers margins on the additional costs involved our best estimates of the additional end-user cost for producing a board with a 7445 G4 cpu (over the published cost of an A1G3-SE) would be around ukp150/usd220/euro250. I would be delighted if list members strongly disagree, but a 43% cost increase for the sake of future upgradeability and a small performance improvement (until os4/Amiga software supports Alivec in a non-trivial way) strikes me as too much. But those are the costs. There is no slack in there for reduction. The actual cpu costs in this are relatively small - so replacing the socketed G4 with a socketed G3 would only reduce the costs by perhaps ukp35/usd50/euro60 - not worthwhile IMO considering a new carrier board etc would have to be designed and produced for the G3.

Regards,
Ben de Waal
AKA YttriumOx

Re:What PPC processor are they using?

[Namarrgon]

Friends of mine were doing production video animation on them backin the early 80s.

I'm impressed - I didn't even get my Amiga until after it was released end of 1985...

Re:What's so interesting about Amiga? (serious)

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Too expensive for what it is

[SoftwareJanitor]

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.

Don't believe me?

http://www.laboratorycomputers.com/laboratorypri ce sheet.htm

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.

Apple was why I never bought a PPC based PC

[t0qer]

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.

Re:Can it run OS X?

[dhovis]

It should be possible. Darwin is open source, under the APSL, and as you point out, people have modified it to get OS X (even the non-open source parts) to run on pre-G3 machines just fine.

I really wonder how long it will take someone to get OS X running on a non-Apple PPC machine. The code is there, and Darwin is free (as in beer). If you can get Darwin to run on it, Quartz (the closed source part) shouldn't know the difference.

I believe it can be done, and that means that eventually someone will do it.

Re:Can it run OS X?

[dhovis]

Getting Darwin to run natively on x86 is no problem. Apple makes an x86 port available.

The problem is, even if you did manage to emulate well enough to run Quartz, you'd also have to emulate well enough to run all the PPC programs that are the only ones available to use Quartz.

Frankly, it would probably be easier to get GNUstep in sync with the Cocoa api(formerly NeXTStep). Then you could cross-compile Cocoa applications.

Re:DDR not supported?!??

[Wesley Felter]

The PowerPC 750's front-side bus is only ~1GB/s; using faster DDR memory wouldn't help because the FSB is the bottleneck.

Re:MacOS X

[red_dragon]

The ROM-in-RAM thing only applies to classic Mac OS (i.e., vv. 9 and earlier). OS X boots a Mach kernel instead, which is stored in /mach_server and has no resemblance to the old Mac OS ROM whatsoever.

PPC 750CXe vs AMD Athlon

[calc]

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.

Boy do you have a skewed view of history

[maggard]

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.

IBM never had a "strategy" of making an open platform. Instead they fought clones tooth and nail with every means at their disposal and when they finally lost that battle attempted to redefine the market with proprietary PS/2s running Micro Channel. That their architecture created its own industry was as much a shock to IBM as anyone and was never a part of any big plan.

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.

Facts about Darwin, Mac ROMs & Apple HW

[maggard]

1. Apple's MacOS is not based on the exact same code as is Darwin. Any number of times Apple's developers have confirmed that while the two code-bases are regularly synched they are not one and the same and some portions of the MacOS X core code never makes it to Darwin.
2. Apple hasn't used proprietary ROMS for years. Instead they use their code based "New World ROM" that get loaded as a system component. There is no need to talk about stealing one and burning them, they're right there in any MacOS install.
3. However Apple designs their own Northbridge & Southbridge chips. It is with these that the "New World ROM" interacts which means that non-Apple Northbridge & Southbridge chips wouldn't work. Therefore unless one wants to figure out how to get Darwin to boot on 3rd party Northbridge & Southbridge chips and then to get MacOS X to accept this underpinning you won't get very far.
4. Finally, congrats; you'd have managed to make a non-Apple Mac. This has been done before, indeed it is rumored there was a version of the IBM RS 6000 that would boot MacOS long ago. However you've now also throw away that tight integration of hardware & software that makes Apple's products special and likely not saved much money in the long run anyway.

A bad design

[downix]

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.

Re:Interresting but...

[amigabill]

>>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).

>Anyone care to explain the technicalities?

The G3/G4 would still be bottlenecked by their frontside bus speed.
On G3/G4 PowerPCs, this tops out at 133MHz, according to specs on both motorola's
and IBM's web sites.

Motorola PPC compariston chart:
http://e-www.motorola.com/webapp/sps/site/ taxonomy .jsp?nodeId=01M98653

IBM page describing their 750 G3's (pdf):
http://www-3.ibm.com/chips/techlib/techlib .nsf/tec hdocs/852569B20050FF7785256993005870F7

With SDR available at 133MHz and 150MHz to some extent, there's not
much point in attaching DDR that goes beyond 133MHz effective speeds,
as the frontside bus speed will bottleneck it down to 133 anyway. Plus,
Eyetech has been smart in using a standard PPC northbrodge chipset instead of
rolling their own in an FPGA like they originally planned to. Their original
specs were 100MHz SDRAM, AGP1X, and would have taken some time
to debug the FPGA logic. With the ArticaS chipset, the debug is done for them
by the chip vendor, and they also get the added 133MHz SDRAM, and AGP2x support
as a bonus.

Now, for those concerned about the pricetag, which is of course high
compared to PC stuff. Compare the number of sales for a PC
motherboard, to the number of sales you might expect to get out of
the Amiga market, which this product is targeted at. That PC
board sells a hell of a lot more units, no? They have to pay for
production, set up, components, and design with far fewer sales
than a popular PC board does, which means higher price per board to
cover their expenses. They aren't marketing this thing to PC users or
Slashdot folks or Linux users. They're marketing it to Amiga users.
And considering that my only other PowerPC option is an obsolete
233MHz 604e card designed by a defunct company, and these boards are
nigh-impossible to find and start around US$900, I'll happily shell out
$400 or so for this thing that is truckloads better.

And yes, I do also have a PC. Windows 98SE and Red Hat 7.2 on it, though
my new Radeon 8500 All In Wonder doesn't do 98/98SE. >:( Stupid internet
store didn't tell me that, so I'm pondering my options, but the card
really wasn't meant for the PC anyway, I just wanted to test it there to get
support if it didn't work. (Just returned a flaky 8500 AGP no AIW card)
I just don't like Windows at all, and Linux is too cumbersome to get working
reliably the first time, it's still weird. And I like to tinker with Amigas
as an alternative that I do actually like and get along with well.

No, it's cheap. Other PPC boards cost $2,500

[Colin Smith]

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.

Re:MacOS X

[Spencerian]

Not quite. Open Firmware takes the place of most bootstrapping on a Macintosh logic board (motherboard). While the higher level functions of the "BIOS" are part of the OS, you cannot clone a Mac OS ROM unless you want a legion of lawyers with 5 billion dollars to burn on your case knocking on your door.

That said, Open Firmware is a open standard and could make the pleasant BIOS-less experience of a Mac startup possible with these new boards.

A cool idea...not quite a Mac logic board, but something new to play with.