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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'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?
Actually, my BeBox came with dual PPC 603s. The original design had AT&T Hobbits, but AFAIK that was never available.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
I'm impressed - I didn't even get my Amiga until after it was released end of 1985...
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
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
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.
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.
I want one, just to have a home server that is not x86, is this board really for real???
Depending on what type of server and how heavy of use it's going to be getting, then why bother with a $600 motherboard that you just have to buy more parts for anyways? If you're willing to do a little messing around, just get an old PowerMac for cheap (make sure it's at least a 2nd generation PowerMac as anything before doesn't have PCI, and try to avoid those with the 601 processor, especially the 7200.)
Although it's not quite the same thing that you want to use it for, my router is a PowerMac 7600/132 (604 processor at 132MHz, 92MB of RAM) which was purchased for ~30 USD (+ shipping). As of this post it's been running for 32 days, 7 hours and 24 minutes without any sort of problems.
Only possible problems are the hardware quirks, but NetBSD has a good model support page detailing most of them for anyone who wishes to run any *nix, and the fact that if there isn't enough storage space then you may have to pay a bit for it depending on whether or not the drives are SCSI or IDE. But, with PPC you tend to pay a bit more for the hardware anyways...
Either way, PenguinPPC is a good place to check out info on Linux on the PPC architecture. (And for old Mac owners, MkLinux is a good place to check for solutions to problems that may be missing from the documentation of your chosen distro (*cough*Debian*cough*) )
"I won't mod you down - I feel the need to call you a twit explicitly, rather than by implication."
the Amiga is a mythological computer from before the dawn of the Web. Some say it was 6 feet tall and had a case constructed entirely from diamond encrusted platinum. Others tell tales of it's mighty computing feats, such as it's reputed ability to fold virtual space with a magical application known only as "Imagination...". I once met a traveller who claimed to have once owned such a computer, but he was full of wild tales of a game called "Xenon 2 - Megablast" and talked of a holy ritual required to conjure the Amiga into life - apparently you had to circle it three times before picking it up above you head, holding its platinum case by opposite corners and bending as hard as you could. Mind you, these stories sounded rather fanciful to me, and I told him so. He quickly became very angry, insisting that the Amiga would rise again and we'd all be using "Wordworth" instead of Office before long.
That was classic intercourse!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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