To explain for those not familar with the Amiga-market of the recent about two years why Genesi isn't going anymore to produce the Pegasos-I in volume but designs a successor with different northbridge instead:
The Pegasos-I uses the same northbridge from Mai as Mai's own reference design mainboard called Teron (also sold by Eyetech but labelled "AmigaOne" there). This northbridge is the Articia-S. Unfortunately this northbridge didn't work as advertized, it had bugs. (And maybe still has, so that this could be the or at least one reason why Terrasoft discontinues wanting to sell the Articia-based Teron.) Genesi did discover those bugs after building the first several dozens of Pegasos-mainboards for their developers and betatesters. Unfortunately Mai denied there would be bugs and said they wouldn't be able to reproduce them until Genesi got fed up and sent their chief engineer into the USA to Mai to demonstrate it to them personally.
Genesi then developed a small chip called April which they mounted on their boards below the Articia-northbridge to correct those bugs. Unfortunately, afterwards, whenb they had exchanged at no cost for their customers all original Pegasos-boards to new ones with an April-chip and also sold further new Pegasosses to new customers, including plain end-users, further bugs were discovered and a new revision of the April-chip, the April-2, had to be created. The next board-exchange has just taken place the last few days. Also some further hundred Pegasos-I-boards with April-2 haven been produced and sold either directly or via the remaining Amiga-dealers to end-users.
But because of the expensiveness and difficulty to mount the April-chips, as well as because of the possibility of even further bugs in the Articia-S, Genesi then decided early this year not to produce the Pegasos-I in the high volume originally planned but instead to develop a successor, the Pegasos-II. Of course this meant big losses and also disappointment at their customers for Genesi, but obviously they thought these losses to be smaller than the losses already generated by the Articia-bugs and the possibility of maybe even having to continue with an April-3. April-4...
Therefore the Pegasos-II will have a different northbridge and is aimed to be released about september 2003. The new northbridge most likely will be from Marvell, introducing also additional features compared to the Pegasos-I, for example DDR-RAM and two 1-Gb-ethernet-channels.
Anyway: There are still Pegasos-I-boards available, and for members of the Phoenix developers consortium (www.phinixi.com) there's even a very attractive offer: they can buy the Pegasos-I with CPU-module, MorphOS (PPC-native reimplementation of the AmigaOS-API including a JIT-68k-emulation for compatibility with the existing Amiga-software base), Debian and further stuff for only 299,- US-Dollar. Every interested developer can apply for membership at Phoenix (contact greenboy@phinixi.com). And, last but not least: anyone who buys a Pegasos-I, even at the mentioned Phoenix-discount of only $299, may trade in his G3-Pegasos-I-board later for only 200 Dollar additional cost for a G4-Pegasos-II-board once it will be ready.
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To explain for those not familar with the Amiga-market of the recent about two years why Genesi isn't going anymore to produce the Pegasos-I in volume but designs a successor with different northbridge instead:
The Pegasos-I uses the same northbridge from Mai as Mai's own reference design mainboard called Teron (also sold by Eyetech but labelled "AmigaOne" there). This northbridge is the Articia-S. Unfortunately this northbridge didn't work as advertized, it had bugs. (And maybe still has, so that this could be the or at least one reason why Terrasoft discontinues wanting to sell the Articia-based Teron.) Genesi did discover those bugs after building the first several dozens of Pegasos-mainboards for their developers and betatesters. Unfortunately Mai denied there would be bugs and said they wouldn't be able to reproduce them until Genesi got fed up and sent their chief engineer into the USA to Mai to demonstrate it to them personally.
Genesi then developed a small chip called April which they mounted on their boards below the Articia-northbridge to correct those bugs. Unfortunately, afterwards, whenb they had exchanged at no cost for their customers all original Pegasos-boards to new ones with an April-chip and also sold further new Pegasosses to new customers, including plain end-users, further bugs were discovered and a new revision of the April-chip, the April-2, had to be created. The next board-exchange has just taken place the last few days. Also some further hundred Pegasos-I-boards with April-2 haven been produced and sold either directly or via the remaining Amiga-dealers to end-users.
But because of the expensiveness and difficulty to mount the April-chips, as well as because of the possibility of even further bugs in the Articia-S, Genesi then decided early this year not to produce the Pegasos-I in the high volume originally planned but instead to develop a successor, the Pegasos-II. Of course this meant big losses and also disappointment at their customers for Genesi, but obviously they thought these losses to be smaller than the losses already generated by the Articia-bugs and the possibility of maybe even having to continue with an April-3. April-4...
Therefore the Pegasos-II will have a different northbridge and is aimed to be released about september 2003. The new northbridge most likely will be from Marvell, introducing also additional features compared to the Pegasos-I, for example DDR-RAM and two 1-Gb-ethernet-channels.
Anyway: There are still Pegasos-I-boards available, and for members of the Phoenix developers consortium (www.phinixi.com) there's even a very attractive offer: they can buy the Pegasos-I with CPU-module, MorphOS (PPC-native reimplementation of the AmigaOS-API including a JIT-68k-emulation for compatibility with the existing Amiga-software base), Debian and further stuff for only 299,- US-Dollar. Every interested developer can apply for membership at Phoenix (contact greenboy@phinixi.com). And, last but not least: anyone who buys a Pegasos-I, even at the mentioned Phoenix-discount of only $299, may trade in his G3-Pegasos-I-board later for only 200 Dollar additional cost for a G4-Pegasos-II-board once it will be ready.