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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.
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))
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.
...is why this would have been a Good Thing in the first place. I'm genuinely curious about this, but why would anyone shell out cash for a PPC mobo that only supported G3s? It's a good chip, yeah, but for similar cash you could get a much better x86 solution and run some variety of Linux on it, no?
Obviously there must be some advantages to a PPC board running YDL as compared to an x86 board running a comparable Linux distro that I don't understand, but I can't imagine what sort of market would pay for a board that would run such an aging processor.
Why is this in the Apple category? What does Linux running on a non-Apple PPC motherboard have to do with Apple?
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.
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.
This is the major problem with Apple, I think.
You raise some good points but I think there's an important piece of this equation that you're missing. The lack of clones is the major problem with Apple? Sure, it keeps prices high and marketshare low. It's true. It is the worst thing about the platform.
And yet, it is also the one single thing that makes them unique in the market and gives them value. The vertical integration they have (hardware/os/iapps) allows them to a) innovate their product line faster and more radically than some other hardware/software makers and b) allows them to sell an entire end-to-end solution (like firewire-imovie-idvd-superdrive) with a user experience better than anyone elses. These things are at the core of what makes Apple Apple. Take them away - take away the vertical integration by doing clones - and what you get is cheaper boxes and much rejoicing...and a dead/dying platform within 2 years because it has lost that which made it valuable to begin with.
Bonus point: Why should anyone care? Certainly Mac users should care, but others should, too. Apple has an influence on the personal computer industry that is vastly disproportionate to its marketshare. They innovate. Others follow. Therefore, a healthy Apple is good for the industry. Mac clones = bad for Apple = bad for the pc industry.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
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."
You are so blindsided by the fact that Apple uses PowerPC chips that you are ignoring the fact that Apple's operating systems simply would not work at all on these boards, and Apple would never support these motherboards. The boot system on these motherboards is not even OpenFirmware as on most (PCI and later) Apple PPC computers - they used the new and open PPCBoot. Apple cared about them using PPC-based computers about as much as they cared about any embedded manufacturer using PPC-based systems. The processors TerraSoft planned to use were not even close to competing with the latest G4 1GHz and faster, and especially the dual G4 processors Apple is using in their desktop computers.
The processor speed was in fact much of the problem. The motherboards were expected to start at $500 for a a board that was less than spectacular, with a PPC750 (G3) processor running at 600MHz. Total system cost was not successfully reduced enough to make it worthwhile to many systems integrators, operating systems porters, etc.
They were in a catch-22. The systems needed to come down in price to gain wide spread acceptance, and they needed wide spread acceptance to come down in price. The competition is so stiff for servers and clusters that it was hard to compete. It is indeed sad.
Come on now mods, interesting? This guy is ignorant at best, and a blatant troll at worst.
It makes one wonder if the legendary Apple legal department made some kind of threat or crackdown on their effort.
How in any way could Apple make a legal threat against a company attempting to produce a generic PPC computer to run Linux that would NOT be able to boot into Mac OS or OS X? Just because Apple is the most prominent user of the PPC arch doesn't mean that they control the market.
As for Apple actually caring about what TerraSoft is doing, that's about as equally preposterous as your first point. Very few people buy Apple hardware solely to run Linux. Of those few that do, the vast majority are laptop users. So in the end you have a minority of Apple hardware using Linux users (which are already a minority to begin with) that TerraSoft would legitimately be competing with Apple for. Do you honestly think Apple is going to lose any sleep over that? I think not.
Most likely, there were unexpected delays and/or the mobos just simply weren't a quality product. In that case, I would expect TerraSoft to be as vague as possible. No company wants to go out and advertise the fact that they couldn't deliver like they had earlier said; it's embarassing.
There's no way Apple would allow it, because God forbid they'd actually have to do something competitive.
You have to be kidding me! Apple was what, about a 3-5% market share in a field dominated by a convicted monopoly? They are in one of the most cut-throat industries out there.
Apple competes daily against people like Dell and Gateway. When you are selling your product at $1200 (iMac) against other products that are about $600 for basically the same hardware feature, you better believe you are competing with something. Otherwise you are going to go out of business really quickly.
And I doubt we'll see any increase in their marketshare, no matter how deserved it may be, until they get off their freaking high horse and start actually trying to compete in the open market.
Yeah, maybe if they would build a better laptop or get a 1U product out there they would be doing better. Oh wait...
Like I said - Apple is competing. They are not competing against other PPC manufacturers, they are competing against the Wintel monopoly.
Apple stopped the clone business for a reason - Apple ended up trying to compete with the clone makers. As a result, they were ignoring their real competitors (the ones that could drive them out of business) - Dell, Compaq, Gateway, and others.
The clone business did not expand their 5%, it just split up that 5% among the clone manufacturers and Apple, meaning that Apple was not getting near as much revenue.
You will not see a major increase in Apple marketshare because it is competing against a monopoly in software and a very cut-throat industry in hardware.
So Apple is happy with billions sitting around in cash, making machines for people that are willing to pay a premium.
(Disclaimer: I own three Macs and one clone)
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman