Velcro_SP, google for N270 and northbridge. The nettop boxes don't use the N270 Atom. Plus the Northbridge 945GSE *when* running under full load is a powerhog. It sucks up to 22W. But Intel put powermangement to their chips. When on battery the clock is lowered and the powerconsumption is drastically reduced. Look, my Eee uses 10W when on battery, but about 25W when on 230V (battery not connected to avoid battery loading currents).
The 5121 does 760MIPS for its ppc core and is L2 less. It is a low end chip. Anyway, those 400MHz are sufficient for a lot of things and my Efika handles youtube better than the Eee. but this is, most likely, due to some weird JS/Flash container crap on the youtube site which Firefox is not able to do very good. But Tubexx just replays youtube vids fine. So it really is about what to achieve with teh maschine...
But the Eee handles *all* video partals, while the Efika only handles youtube. So, which system is superior now..?

Nobody yet has confirmed that the AXE core is speeding up things in real life applications. I guess it does, but still there are some cahche coherence issues reported which don't help to benefit from the AXE. Also note that the Atom comes with some MMX and SSE.

As for calculation: a netbook based on Atom and on a 5121 requires more or less the same parts. But where the Atom platform requires a chipset, the 5121 has everything on board. The 5121 is about 40 US $ IIRC (could bequite some less if ordered in real quantities), a N270+chipset is sold by Intel for 65 US$ (IIRC that is, I am too lazy to google around thera are other certain ppl who will provide links if I am wrong ).
The battery, screen, Ram, case are more or less the same compounds. If you assume you get a 5121 based device for 15- 20 % less in production and give those 15% to the customer, well. The Eee 900A is sold for about 300, maybe a 9" 5121 with decent battery will go for 250. The difference is not that huge.Also cost is not only cost of electronic parts, but also software support., If you build you netbook around some Intel reference design, you don't have to spend a single buck to get software support - it is already there. But if you chose some "obscure PPC", well....
Plus, the Atom *can* run Windows. It is very hard to strech the advantages of a 5121 based netbook. Still, I see some:
The power consumption is less and more constant (teh N270+chipset peaks at quite high values, the 5121 doesn't hav esuch a peak). A design can be cheaper, maybe the 5121 in conjunction with other really cheap, cheap compaounds could yield to a significantly lower price, which might attract ppl in not so developed countries (I guess that's teh approach THTF is trying to follow).
But still, competition by Intel is hard.

Hi Velcro, did you ever see this?

Read All About It!

Unscrupulous business practices are what any company working with these folks can expect. We wasted time and money supporting them. They never had any intention of fulfilling their written agreement which followed the referenced letter. You probably did not know that the LimePC was originally defined with MorphOS.

From February until June 2008, we did develop a considerable amount of 5121e specific software directly for Freescale. We developed graphic drivers, AXE code and validated a number of load balancing techniques. We supported openSUSE on the 5121eADS. The lack of cache-coherency made the 5121e less than an optimal solution, but it was the number of chip and board revisions that made this situation a development nightmare.

From June until August, we supported Cherrypal. They proved as reliable as THTF. Our invoices remain unpaid.

Finally, the Freescale manager responsible for IMTD (Infotainment Multimedia and Telematics Division) was fired in November. The Division was dissolved. The 5121e has solid managers now that are focused on the business that the chip was designed to match (Automotive and Industrial). It is not a LimePC.

Freescale's consumer focus is with ARM. The focus for PowerPC as far as Freescale is concerned is industrial and networking. The 8610 is the end-of-the-line for the e600 core. We have not been able to get them to change their thinking on this. Perhaps some success with the i.MX51 and we might try again. We wrote a blog about this today if you are interested: Genetic Recombination.

We also discuss some of Atom's longer term implications for Intel.

R&B

|||








[ Edited by Velcro_SP 19.04.2011 - 16:24 ]

|||

[ Edited by Velcro_SP 19.04.2011 - 16:17 ]

...and the last word we had from Freescale was that THTF still had not paid for the parts that had been delivered.

Here are a few more images. This is the cover of a 48 page document:



And, here is a LimePC at the office next to a EFIKA Open Client last summer. We still have 15-20 of them:



Velco, if the current LimePC management is replaced and THTF honors our agreement, we will work on this platform. Until then, we won't waste another second.

R&B

> Is that guy Jack Campbell still there?

http://www.aboutjack.com/limepc.shtml

At least doesn't sound as if he's involved full time anymore.


Edit:

Original find of Campbell's website URL:
http://bbrv.blogspot.com/2008/07/smaller-pcs-cause-worry-for-industry.html (comment 1)

And more evidence he isn't at THTF anymore:

"Did you work for a China company?
Yes... I was Vice President/Strategic Development for Tsinghua Tongfang for one-year, a US$20 billion market cap China tier-one consumer electronics manufacturer. During my time there I designed and brought to market five category defining new hit product lines, including the LimePC brand of PowerPC based miniaturized consumer personal computers at CES 2008."
http://www.aboutjack.com/faq.shtml

"In mid-2007 I accepted a job as Vice President of Strategic Business Development for Tsinghua Tongfang Co., Ltd., a $20 billion market cap public company in China. Working from their Shenzhen R&D facilty I steered a group of exciting new products through the design, development, and go-to-market process, including an all-new line of miniature PowerPC-based personal computer products under the company's new LimePC brand name, shown at CES 2008 in Las Vegas to a terrific response from both media and the market. I left THTF to return to full-time consulting in Spring 2008."
http://www.aboutjack.com/bio.html

[ Edited by Andreas_Wolf on 2009/1/19 19:03 ]

|||

[ Edited by Velcro_SP 27.04.2011 - 07:00 ]

> The 8610 is the end-of-the-line for the e600 core.

So can we look forward to the e700 eventually? ;-)

@ Andreas Wolf

http://moobunny.dreamhosters.com/cgi/mbmessage.pl/amiga/160792.shtml

> http://moobunny.dreamhosters.com/cgi/mbmessage.pl/amiga/160792.shtml

Yes, I know the e700 route isn't pursued by Freescale anymore for a long time. My question wasn't really meant seriously :-) Also power.org's Power Architecture Silicon Roadmap doesn't mention it anymore.

From your moobunny posting:

> the e600 as current top edge Freescale ppc core just handles its
> tasks well

Then why are Freescale going to put the e600 EOL (according to BBRV)?

> to me the most [...] promising way freescale will continue with ppc
> is the QorIQ network processor route - IIRC there the e500 core s used.

Right, it's e500. And that's as well the reason the QorIQ is not the least promising for me as a desktop Power Architecture (i.e. MorphOS) user. The e500's (and e200's) FPU implementation is incompatible with the one of the e300 and e600 (and the PPC4xx, the PPC7xx and the PPC970 for that matter).

Interesting comment on LimePC and CherryPal by Mr. Campbell dating January 4th:

http://greentechgirl.com/green-computing/cherrypal-limepc-architecture/

Jack Campbell has a vivid imagination and lots of energy, but Matt and Andre contributed more to what the LimePC was supposed to be than Jack. Here is a an image that should help substantiate the interaction. MorphOS was supposed to have been featured on the device.



The MyMate became what was later known as the LimePC. One other thing...

Jack also has a big problem with the whole truth, but that never seems to get in his way.

R&B

he didnt even mention genesi at all...

anyway, is he talkin about morphos in this?

"We had a radically unique new user interface/desktop OS version sculpted for this project, one that would have minimized the UI load on the little MPC5121e CPU, and that had a super high level of optimization work done to make the graphics/framebuffer/display subsystems use as few clock ticks as possible"

> is he talkin about morphos in this?

I'd rather say he's talking SymphonyOS/Mezzo things there. Or is he? BBRV?

It is hard to say what Jack is talking about now. Originally, it was all about MorphOS. We also considered a dual boot option with GNU/Linux+Qtopia. After the cache-coherency issues surfaced at the end of October and the complexities of completing a port of any EFIKA-working software became more apparent, the switch was made to SymphonyOS. Of course, the other reason was that THTF did not want to pay for any of the software development. Read this...



In the end, the Investment Banking Firm was able to get commitments for the $20 million, but THTF did not deliver from their side *and* tried to steal the whole package to themselves. There is more, but that ought to convince most folks the opportunity was real.

Looking ahead, the i.MX515 is going to end up much better though not PowerPC based. The same Investment Banking Firm remains interested and we will see what happens over the next few months. There have been considerable changes in the financial markets since September when that letter was written. In the meanwhile, you can be sure Gerald is up to his eyeballs in technical documentation for the new chip already, while the rest of the team has alpha level access to all the general details. We post more about all this on PowerDeveloper when we can.

R&B

|||

[ Edited by Velcro_SP 27.04.2011 - 06:59 ]

@ Velcro_SP

As efficient as the Atom N270 is (at 1.3-1.6Ghz the specs say 2W-4W) it is always coupled with the Intel 945GC/945GM northbridge, which has specs topping 25W in use.

You cannot use the Atom without that bridge, and Intel are not moving Atom to the "integrated northbridge" model they are pushing for their new high end quad-core chips (possibly because it would increase the die size way past their target, and die size directly impacts cost).

Then of course on any design, you have to add RAM power costs; this can be anything from 3W to 10W depending on how much you have.


Compare an equivalent PowerPC - the MPC8610 or MPC8640D at the lower clock rates - and you are looking at chips which do all the Atom and 945 combination do, in a single chip package. This makes layout easier, which makes PCBs easier to design and smaller, and of course even the dual-core PowerPC chip uses less power with zero power management than the Atom and 945.

Of course the MPC5121e does better, but it's nowhere near as good as CherryPal say it is. Not by a long shot.


To contrast the i.MX515 uses a lot less than the MPC5121e plus it has highly aggressive power management as all ARM chips do.

[ Edited by Neko on 2009/1/25 19:02 ]

Some additions to my own posting:

> it's e500. And that's as well the reason the QorIQ is not the least
> promising for me as a desktop Power Architecture (i.e. MorphOS) user.
> The e500's (and e200's) FPU implementation is incompatible with the
> one of the e300 and e600

The above is only true for the QorIQ P1 and P2 platforms, which use the e500v2 core, but not for the eight-core P4 platform, which uses the new e500mc. Up to now I wrongly assumed the e500mc to be just the multi-core (with "multi" greater than 2) enabled variant of the e500v2. As a look into this nice document revealed, that's not the case.
Obviously and to my surprise, the e500mc got the pre-e500mc's embedded FPU implementation replaced by an e300/e600 compatible FPU implementation. Furthermore, the pre-e500mc's SPE SIMD (not to be confused with Cell's SPEs) is gone in the e500mc. But unfortunately, it didn't get replaced by AltiVec SIMD.
In summary, as a MorphOS user I have mixed feelings about the QorIQ. The variants matching an OS that is not SMP capable are of no use due to the incompatible FPU implementation, and the variant matching the way FPU support is implemented in the OS is an overkill eight-core beast. And AltiVec is missing generally. A single-core e500mc based CPU (as suggested as an implementation possibility in the linked document) would be nice, though.


Edit:
Link to video because PDF document seems to be taken down.

[ Edited by Andreas_Wolf on 2009/9/24 5:41 ]

Quote:
Unfortunately the FPU is halfclocked only. The QorIO is rather for I/O ops and not that much for mathematical stuff like media processing.
Quote:
I don't see the QorIO as a primary MorphOS target, but from Freescale's view I see there the biggest potential for the Power architecture. One thing which might be cool for MorphOS though is the guest OS handling provided by the chip. Maybe this could be useful somehow. Though I don't know a (at least not ad hoc) scenario where MorphOS would be beneficial to have as guest OS (except making MorphOS lovers happy).

Quote:
Oh really ? I'm surprised you couldn't do that :p

Btw showing here screenshots of your incoming box, and scans of confidential docs: how serious is it for your company ?

|||

[ Edited by Velcro_SP 19.04.2011 - 16:38 ]

|||

[ Edited by Velcro_SP 19.04.2011 - 16:22 ]

> there is some proprietary issue with the Linux display drivers so
> they plan to ship fit-PC2 with a previous Ubuntu version that has
> drivers

...which *is* the proprietary one, incompatible with latest Ubuntu.

Quote:

Intel Atom netbook platform with the 945GSE Express chipset has a specified maximum TDP of 11.8 Watts.

ASUS Eee PC 901 uses 945GSE (Calistoga) Express chipset.
ASUS Eee PC 4G Surf (701) uses Intel 910GML (Alviso-GM) chipset and it has 10.5 Watt max TDP.


The problem here is between the keyboard and the chair.

[ Edited by rvalencia on 2009/4/5 7:49 ]

[ Edited by rvalencia on 2009/4/5 8:03 ]

|||

[ Edited by Velcro_SP 19.04.2011 - 16:16 ]