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Terra Soft Withdraws Plans for PowerPC Motherboards
DamienMcKenna writes "Terra Soft has just announced it is not going to produce PPC motherboards: 'We regret having launched a product initiative and built expectations prior to receiving first shipment. We have clearly learned a powerful lesson and do extend our apology to you, our existing and potential customers. As the Teron mainboard and associated systems will be made available through other resellers, we will encourage them to sign-on as official Yellow Dog Linux resellers in order that we may continue to support movement of what we hope to be a very popular product.' This leaves Genesi as the only company who still has PowerPC motherboards for sale, with a new board design due later this year."
IBM seems serious about the new PowerPC 970 chip working with lower end workstations. Hopefully they'll provide inexpensive motherboards for use with the chips so that reasonably priced PPC linux systems become a reality.
Remeber the good old days and the promise of CHRP (Common Hardware Reference Platform.). It seemed like such a good idea but just never took off when apple killed macos for CHRP.
Maybe Apple will allow clones again, but I'm not holding my breath.
I mean, it's not like there hasn't been mac clones before. And if y'all remember it didn't work out all that well, for Apple OR the clone makers, IIRC.
And back in the days I remember the clones (and maybe apple in general?) would have windows emulation that would run pretty much anything (that's before the directX days) you wanted... now that I think about it, I really wonder why so few switched over - I mean, back then Apple wasn't cheap either, but neither was PCs, to tell the truth...
Granted, Apple design wasn't as artistically meticulous as today either. The mac community, I think, had about the same amount of elitist / snobishness though. Actually Linux community too - except no KDE / Gnome / etc that we all take for granted.
Ahh the old days.
Anyway - Hardly doubt this will impact the mac world...
My life in the land of the rising sun.
enisi are not the only company. Eyetech also produce PPC mother boards and you can actually buy them unlike the Genisi boards (which they are no longer making).
http://www.eyetech.co.uk/
http://www.eyetech.co.uk/amigaone/
Uh, you can still buy an AmigaOne from Eyetech . (The AmigaOne uses the exact same reference design as the Teron, and is more or less the same thing, although the firmware chip has some different stuff on it for running AmigaOS).
There are also various resellers who will sell you one if you do a little searching.
Supplies are a little bumpy (shipment stopped for a little while while waiting for a newer board revision that fixed some issues with the northbridge), but I know people who have AmigaOnes already. (Regular people, not just people in developers like Hyperion (us))
We were truly excited to bring this particular ATX PowerPC Linux product to market.
You get excited over that and you think the halting of the atx PPC is your biggest problem?
PPC is great in theory, troble is in the real world its just so damn expensive you may as well go the x86 route. its actually so much cheaper that the cost of having the architechure fail is balenced by the fact you can go down the street and buy a replacement. I like PPC, its a nice archatechure, but its exensive, and its still coming out of the old propietary days. I'll be interested to see if it survives to become at least a little mainstream
Terra Soft ATX PowerPC Systems
Terra Soft Current and Pending Customers,
7 April 2003
"Terra Soft Solutions has determined that it is not, at this point in time, prudent to carry the Teron mainboards nor offer Teron-based Boxer systems. This is as great a disappointment for us as it is for many of you. We were truly excited to bring this particular ATX PowerPC Linux product to market.
If you have read the rumor mills, there are a variety of supposed reasons why we have been delayed in shipping, including unqualified statements and speculation at best. It is our corporate policy to not address specific issues regarding any strategic relationship within a public forum, where fact and fiction are not easily discernable, and our fiduciary responsibility to our customers, shareholders, and industry associates may be compromised.
We regret having launched a product initiative and built expectations prior to receiving first shipment. We have clearly learned a powerful lesson and do extend our apology to you, our existing and potential customers.
As the Teron mainboard and associated systems will be made available through other resellers, we will encourage them to sign-on as official Yellow Dog Linux resellers in order that we may continue to support movement of what we hope to be a very popular product."
Kai Staats, CEO
Terra Soft Solutions, Inc.
There are other PowerPC motherboard suppliers our there still, notably Genesi Sarl which ships a Micro-ATX board of its own design, as opposed to the OEMed Mai Teron board that both TerraSoft and Eyetech have been licensing. There are a limited number of Pegasos 1 motherboards available from Genesi and a Pegasos 2 motherboard is in development for release later this year. Additionally Eyetech has been pre-selling their "AmigaONE" boards, which as I mentioned are based on the old Mai Teron design.
Please note that the current Peagsos 1 boards use the same chipset as the Teron boards, except for the addition of a chip dubbed the April which fixes some bugs in the chipset. The new Pegasos 2 boards will use a completely different chipset from Marvell.
A quick Google search would give some indication as to why the submitter would want people to think of Genesi as the only option.
Now I'll be the first to admit that I'm not unbiased -- Google is a double-edged sword, but the original submission is pretty clear and blatant FUD.
This has nothing to do with Apple, the TerraSoft Teron board was strictly aimed at the Linux market.
According to the site, they are simply not going to sell them directly. They are still going to manufacture them for OEM partners.
bp
Not just any PPC board can directly boot Mac OS. Apple has some fiddly copyrighted bits in the firmware that take care of that. Mac OS needs some particular hardware in the machine to boot. Apple doesn't have some sanctified right to prevent the production of PPC boards especially if the boards in question are intended to run a non-Apple OS.
Now it is true that you could run Mac-On-Linux on one of these boards but that is hardly a threat to Apple. MOL has to rely on the underlying OS for it's hardware facilities so it won't automagically work with many things like cd burners the way a native boot of MacOS will. Not many people are going to buy these boards and even fewer of those will run MOL. No threat to Apple whatsoever.
It takes more than a motherboard with a PPC chip to build an Apple clone. Since these don't have an Apple chipset and Apple firmware they won't boot Mac OS. They aren't Mac clones.
These boards won't contain a SWIM chip, Apple power manager chip, Apple firmware and some other fiddly bits to boot. A OS X install cd might not even start to boot and if it did it would probably lock up without so much as a Sad Mac.
Now, you could install Linux on of these and then Mac-On-Linux. That WILL let you run OSX but with non-accellerated video and no automagic use of attached periphreals.
I listened to a QT audio broadcast of an interview with TerraSofts's prez, as he talked about their choice of hardware for the boxer boxen. He couldn't really give concrete reasons that a 600Mhz G3 should carry droolfactor. He said stuff like "our webserver is a 350Mhz G3 running YDL. It handles all our traffic without any problems" and "I think people will be impressed at how well a G3 performs running YLD compared to faster machines. Its just that efficient."
:).
I even asked Terrasoft how they expected to compete with the 2nd hand mac market, and their response was as follows:
As a long time mac/PPC user, and linux hobbyist, I'm very
interested in buildling a custom atx PPC box. You guys are really
spearheading this market, so I guess all my requests should go to
you
Thank you, and yes.
Originally, the announced specs for just mobo+cpu was something
like $495 for a 600Mhz G3, and atx board. I realize that you're
probably positioning this as affordably as possible to grow the
platform. My concern is that there's no way I could pay that when I
can get either a 600Mhz iMac or 500Mhz B&W tower for just $100
more. Is the component price expected to come down any time soon?
It is an issue of volume of production. When volume of production
goes up, price comes down. We are not able to reduce the price at
this point in time. As for iMac and B&W, it is not appropriate to
compare a 4-yr old computer from eBay to a new computer with
Warranty.
Will there be options for faster G3 chips, or multiprocessor
configurations? You probably can't discuss most of this, what is
the expected price range for the G4 based teron board? Do you have
any benchmarks for a teron based linux system vs. a comparable
Macintosh offering (to show off the architectural advantages of the
Mai system, if any)?
We will be shipping an 800 MHz G4 CPU at approximately $650. The
demand for the G3s was limited in comparison to the G4s.
We do not at this time have benchmarks, but will in the near future.
Sincerely,
Amanda
------------
so basically, it was inappropriate to compare a teron board to "older systems" with similar hardware specs, and they had no benchmarks. I drafted a fairly inflamatory response outlining their extreme arrogance, which I havn't sent, but I'm pretty sure they got the message without me.
This is where I get my recommended daily allowance of "Foot in Mouth."
I've recently been looking into building a computer. I looked at their motherboards, and was certainly interested for a while in them. I eventually arrived at the conclusion that I wouldn't buy one of these things. Reason number one is cost. They were damned expensive, and the novelty of having a non-x86 chip isn't worth what they were asking. The other reason is support. The x86 has been dominant for so long that projects are beginning to be tailored to it. Look at the GMP benchmarks. The Pentiums crushed the PowerPC in GMP. Whether it's because x86 had assembly and the PowerPC was just using C or the PowerPC is just inferior to the Pentium, they just don't stack up. Third, the x86 is a pretty good chip. One benefit of the Wintel cartel is the R&D money that went into Intel. I'm thankful for all the Dell-drones out there who've funded my future purchases of x86 technology. :)
Cost is still the number one factor. AMD Athlon-1.1GHz can be bought for around $30. Motherboards range in price, depending on what you want, but a chip+mobo combo can be acquired easily for under $100. Terrasoft's product was just too expensive.
You've been out of the loop for quite some time it seems. :) :)
/$ 800, without any OS but a CD-R with Debian. TSS' announced price for the same board, including the retail version of YDL, was /$ 500.
.sig.
The Teron is an "AmigaOne". The "AmigaOne" is a Teron. "AmigaOne" is one distributor's chosen trademark for the Teron boards. A Teron is not "the primary competitor" to a Teron.
FYI, Eyetech's price for a Teron PX (a.k.a. "AmigaOne XE") is
The original "AmigaOne", that was going to connect to a real Amiga, was to be made for Eyetech by Escena, but that project failed something like three years ago! Plans for a new Amiga were scrapped, and instead AmigaOS 4+ will run on generic hardware like these Terons. But only when they're separated from the rest of the third party hardware market and sold dongled and bundled with AmigaOS via an "Amiga hardware" monopoly.
Of course AmigaOS could run on your PowerBook. Macs, especially those without the juice to run MacOS X at a useful speed, would be an obvious hardware platform to target. Common/business sense is unfortunately not allowed to rule in this case though. Have a look at the URL in my
Help savingAmigaOS and a free PowerPC market