So after the Pegasos II finally arrived, what do you want in Pegasos III?
Maybe we can give the developers some clues what we want.

A i am not a HW designer so i do not know what can be realised at an "affordable" pricepoint.
Maybe i expect to much in one board....

For my part:

Design it for PPC 97x (Maybe for a Dual configuration. I like Dual Procs)
Make the Memory bandwith high enough.
Dual Channel DDR or faster.
Firewire/ USB Ports, also for front output please.
I have a case in mind, that has these front ports
and i don´t want them to be useless.
Gigabit Ethernet
Digital audio out
Serial ATA (2 or 4 Ports) (RAID)
I have not seen any SATA DVD Drives, so we maybe need PATA too.
Standard ATX Formfactor.
AGP 8x
A fast PCI standard ( I think there a different ones
i don`t really know. Like PCI-X/PCI-Express)

For the processor modules: The PPC 970 seems
not to be cooled easily (look at the G5 PowerMac)
Make a big enough (quiet) heat sink for this.

Some of you might say that i should get a G5 Power MAC, maybe i will. But i dont like to pay
premium e.g. if i want a new GFX Card "Mac Edition".
And i like the idea behind the Pegasos, so if the new PEG is that what i want i will get one.
Is anybody out there that knows a slightly more accurate release date than "Early next year"?

Enough said, your Suggestions please.

My idea, taken some things from Donar...


- Designed for PPC97X (dual compatible)
- Up to 1Ghz processor bus (or more)
- PC3200 or faster
- Firewire 800 (or more)
- USB 2.0 (using the full speed of this)
- 3 GigE ports or more (very useful for networking)
- Digital Audio In
- Digital Audio Out ( Dolby Digital 5.1 to 7.1 compatible?)
- Fully IRDA compatible (and then you can use a remote controller and others things)
- Standard MicroATX Formfactor (MicroATX rulez!)
- AGP 8x (the higher standard of AGP available preferable)
- PCI-X/PCI Express

Yeah, I like this, but I think, that with that specs price will be ~2000-3000$ :)

> So after the Pegasos II finally arrived, what do you want in Pegasos III?
> Maybe we can give the developers some clues what we want.

Naaa,
it's useless: they don't hear about what we ask.

>by Miky060 on 2003/12/27 17:27:22
>
>Naaa,
>it's useless: they don't hear about what we ask.

Ok, then we won´t buy it

As for the Micro ATX. I can understand that People
like the idea, but i do not know if it is even possible to cram
all the things we like on an Standard ATX sized Board.

nah, not enough. by the time they make the board it will be low-end ;)

@Miky060
Well offcourse they won't listen to you and me ...

1st they have to see what chips they can actually get and use from Marvell,IBM
and VIA, than their options will be reduced to what these offer.

After that they will have to decide which market could take several 1000s of boards
at what price-point and with what requirements.

And finally they will have to design a board that is attractive to that market both
in price and features/performance.

Maybe and only maybe that board will also suit some of our wishes, but that would
be just coincedent.

i want a 2 gig g5 super board with all the bells and whisels........ya that would be nice....and mabey an actual bell and one or 2 whisles hehe

l>by Kronos on 2003/12/28 1:32:46

>1st they have to see what chips they can actually get and use from Marvell,IBM
>and VIA, than their options will be reduced to what these offer.

Good point. In the interview on GIGA TV one of the developers said that they will include Serial ATA IF it is succesfully introduced (or something like that). So they were not sure IF they should include it rather than HOW to include. And that is the reason i posted this in the Guest House and not Silicon Grill. Let them hear our suggestions. Most of the things mentioned here can be done. One thing that seems difficult to me is the Dual Proc option. Dual Proc Boards in the x86/AMD64 world are mostly E-ATX and Expensive. Maybe Genesi can make it better?

For the available options chip wise let`s have a look what Marvell can offer:

Marvell plans to extend its market-leading family of Discovery™ chipsets with new system controllers that include IBM's high-speed PowerPC 970 Elastic Interface technology.

Marvell's Discovery 970 system controller is intended to provide embedded customers with a comprehensive and cost effective 64 bit sub-system solution. In conjunction with Marvell's Gigabit PHY, Serial ATA and high-speed switching products

The Discovery 970 system controller integrates several I/O peripherals on-chip, including Gigabit Ethernet, PCI-X bridges, storage functions and DDR memory interface.

Marvell plans to make samples of its Discovery 970 chipsets available in the first quarter of 2004.

Marvell Press Release

So,
PPC 970
ElasticInterface
PCI-X
GigEthernet
DDR Memory

all possible, no mention that the DDR controller will be dual channel, but if not they would cripple the 970 (right?). No mention of AGP or Hypertransport. As a modern controller it should really handle AGP 8x in one or another way. In AMD 64 World they take a Hypertransport linked AGP subsystem "AMD-8151 HyperTransport AGP3.0 Graphics Tunnel" for that.

Post is long enough, (to all) your turn.


<edit>

Nothing to do in the morning, all are asleep except me. So i did a quick search and found out that Marvell is member of the Hypertransport Consortium.

Klick Me

So they could include Hypertransport links as well. From then Genesi could buy standard parts for eg. AGP.

</edit>

Hi everybody,

Xmas is over now and its of course time to make a new wishlish for next christmas - for a Pegasos III.

But instead of just building a collection of cool sounding features and buzz words we should think
about what Amiga and MorphOS actually can support.


Wish:
I would like to have a cool supercomputer.
With at least 8 processors each 64 bits.

Fact:
Amiga OS and all Amiga OS clones only
support one CPU.
64 bit doesn't give any advantage as all.



My personal opservation:

MorphOS runs much faster on a 1000Mhz G4
than MacOS X or Linux on a Dual 970.

If we consider that multiprocessor and 64 bits
is of no value for AmigaOS/MorhOS than the Pegasos II is maybe of one of the best possible Amiga designs ever !

And the Pegasos II has still much room to expand.
The G4 is available in high clockrates,
today up to 1.4 Ghz

Faster G4 and much faster IBM G3 are announced.
Both claim to reach 2 GHz at 2004.
Those CPUs can easily used to upgrade
the current Pegasos family.

The newt G3 750vx and the G4-RM will provide
better support for faster DDR ram.

My hope/wish for the Pegasos III is to provide
good support for those G3 or G4 chips with DDR.
IBM has announced that the will soon scale the G3 up to a speed 5 times faster then the Pegasos I was. I hope that Genesi will the next generation G4/G3 CPU to build fast and cool computers which
are cooler and cheaper than 970 based systems.


Cheers
Gunnar

Pegasos III will finds it's way into a TV-set imho.
The Dreambox 7000S is a settopbox running Linux with a
PPC 250 MHz processor and an ethernet connection
video in/out - audio in/out DVB etc.

Quote:

Hello!

I see your point and this is the right place for your suggestions let them be High-,Middle- or Low end.

Maybe talking about PPC 970 seems like: "Get as much cool buzzwords in one sentence as you can" competition to you. For me there are several reasons to do this:

Sorry source gives no source....

Soon after, Genesi inform the public that they have decided to press ahead with the PPC 970 instead of the G4 for the high end because of the increasing difference in performance and announce the Pegasos III for early 2004.

Click me.

Second i do not know how much life is in the G3vx what if IBM says in 2 years "EOL"? The PPc 97x is their new design. I think it is easier to go the 64 bit route now than in two years when all applications have to be rewritten.

Ok i heard that in "Classic Mode" (ABox right?) there is no support for real Dual Processing. But what about QBox. Is there a chance that this will be/is implemented there?

Quote:

Genesi somewhere stated that they will not go the G4 route, they produced the G4 cards because demand was there. Going with the G3 vx seems to be the better idea for me if we let the Peg 32 Bit only (reason below).

Motorola announced a new/much faster desktop CPU? Last that i heard was that they were going the embedded road. That´s why Apple changed their CPU supplier.

Quote:

Why should a say 20 GFLOP G3vx be (much) cooler than a 20 GFLOP PPC 970? They are both PPC Processors.

I would like that the Discovery III could be easily integrated in the Pegasos II design.
So we had a "Pegasos II+" with G3vx support for "medium" use and I could get my "G 5" Workstation.

> - USB 2.0 (using the full speed of this)

Well we already have usb 2.0 full speed in the PegII. What´s missing is the "fast" mode.
I guess you meant this and I agree the PegI & II are badly missing this mode and I hope we see it withthe PegIII (as well as some other usb improvements: 2 ports for the front panel, full current (500mA) on the bus).

usb is cheap and gets more and more importance...

I like the concept of "Cool Computing", that's why I bought a G3 CPU. I wouldn't by a G5 right now... I'd like to see a Pegasos inside a B5-sized mini-laptop, rather than a monster-sized-noise-making-room-heater G5 desktop.

But, of course, I would prefer a G5 rather than AMD/Intel alternatives in desktops

Better just proceed with little sensible steps. I bet no-one want more HW bugfix rounds.

Look at what northbridges are available and live with them.

I think things like AGP4x and dual CPU cards are more important than a 64bit CPU. But if the next northbridge already supports PPC970, then why not...

Some special favorites: a geek/custom (still low cost) expansion port would be nice ...and ... the AmigaOS dongle would also deliver a thousand or two more users...

I want the Holy Grail !

Since I don't have a Pegasos (yet) this is speculative. But..

Why not make the main board even smaller? The real hot spot for using PegII would be as tiny-and-quiet media boxes etc. The current mainboard is still too big for that.

This is where the PC industry is going:

http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS7748436273.html

Can we use the same (standard) ITX form factor, possibly inserting the CPU fixed on the motherboard.

There seems to be only one PCI slot available (small). Is this enough for the graphics card?

Personally, I can see a lot of use for these gadgets (with Linux) on the embedded arena. Anyone else focusing on that? ;)

-asko.kauppi@sci.fi

What I expect in the next generation Pegasos systems:

-FireWire 800 port
-Bluetooth technology
-S-ATA bus
-PCI-X slots
-AGP8X PRO or higher
-Latest version of DDR-SDRAM
-RAID SCSI on board
-USB 2.0 keyboard/mouse support
-1x Optical NIC
-1x Gigabit Ethernet NIC
-IBM Cell technology support
-Funless cooling technology
-LCD screen with POST(power-on self-test)

...only these at the moment.

Quote:

And you'd only pay €4000 for it...

It's nice to list everything as a goal but when you understand the process of putting these things together you realise there are many limitations in what you can do, trying to go outside these limitations rapidly becomes very expensive.

Quote:

There internal design is very different.
The 970 will get to that speed a lot sooner than any G3 variant, but will consume a lot more power doing so.

Quote:

G3s are primarily used in embedded systems, because of this they will be in production for many years to come.

Quote:

The 970 is already in it's second generation and as such should run cooler and will cost less. By the time we get the Pegasos III out I expect prices of the 970 will have fallen so prices shouldn't be too much above the current G4.

Quote:
Hello!

I dont know what you mean with "speed" (M)Flops or (G)Hz? I did the statement because some people prefered an say G3vx because it will be cooler than a G5. My best guess is that if you take a 20 MFlop G3 and a 20 GFlop G5 they should be comparable in heat dissipation as well.
You had to tweak the G3 to achieve the 20 GFlop, right? Cache Size, Branch prediction and so on...so Watts consumed might go up for it as well.

Quote:
Ok i did not find the right words to express my concerns. Here is another try:
You stated that the G3 will live as an embedded
processor for many years, no problem with that.
My guess is that the Pegasos 3 will be a "Desktop"
Mainboard. And i do not want an embedded (slow) processor for my "Flagship".

For the People who are interested in the 970 in general: I did pick up a nice link on Ars about an PPC 970 development board.

Klick me.

Cheers

Donar

let's address this in-order

Quote:Can't hurt to tryQuote: Not necessarily. There are alternative DDR concepts, including a *wider* DDR bus, 128-bits rather than 64-bits. (So you'd have to double-bank things) Dual-channel is one option popular in the x86 world, because a wider bus would not benefit them as much. But for PPC, wider is a serious option that gives full benefits. Not saying this is what they are doing, just saying it is another option other than dual-channel. There is also DDR-II technology as well, don't forget.

Frankly, this is an area where you can guess yourself around in circlesQuote:Why? AGP 8x is already a technology 2 gens behind, slower than PCI-X 2.0 as well as PCI-Express and Hypertransport. The key is not to support the speed, which is wasted 99% of the time, but to support the cards voltages. Combine the crossbar's bandwidth with the improved latency found in the backbone for the system, and even a slower AGP will actually do its job faster. Remember, those numbers (8x, 4x, etc) refer to *peak* performance, not total thuroughput. If your AGP 1x can maintain 1x speeds constantly, while your 8x is fluctuating wildly, guess which one will be faster in the end?Quote:
Ever checked out the latency there? With 4x the potential performance of the AGP 2x card I run on my Athlon, it gets only 5% higher performance. The latency of this arrangement is absolutely horrible, eating up any potential.Quote:If they include HT links, sure, but they're running PCI-X, which now has better bandwidth than HT (2 to 1 with the latest PCI-X spec) and doesn't require new components to work.

Remember, as of PCI-X 2.0 (the Peg 2's northbridge is 1.x before you get any ideas) the peak speed of PCI-X is now 533Mhz. 64-bit @ 533Mhz, you do the math.

Hello!

My post did address the concerns about price and
availability of technology/chips for assembling a
Pegasos with the specs i introduced earlier. I think i showed that it could be done with (cheap)standard parts.
And we would not lack behind "other" platforms. For the DDR II thing no known parts for me, so no mention of it. Maybe the DDRII controller will be integrated in the PPC?!?

Quote:

The double Bank thingy is Dual Channel DDR. Ok I know this under this name.
Got this in my Nforce 2.

Quote:
Why? Because i have not seen any consumer PCI-X/PCI Express or HT graphics card.

Quote:

"If" the 8x link is always fluctuating at over >1x speed then the 8x thingy.

Quote:
No i did not check the latency. AGP 8x is "standard" nowadays so i chosed it as a minimum
standard for a Board with a unknown release Date.
I don't know if i got your sentence right...First i thought your AGP 2x card did not take advantage of the 4x faster Bus of your computer...how should it? But then i formed the following out of it: You run your 2x card in a Pegasos 1x AGP and a PC 8x Bus?!
Maybe the slight (5%)speed increase is there because your Athlon is not fast enough to feed the GPU. (There is a nice read on Ars Technica about Playstation2 against PC that in some kind addresses your Phenomenon)
Maybe it is the latency, I don't know.

:-)

[hint]
Maybe bbrv can give us some hint how the Peg 3
will look like?
[/hint]

Quote: No, dual-channel DDR is just that, you have *2* DDR channels. I spoke of one double-wide channel.Quote:The Peg III is also not going to see the light of day till the middle of the year at the earliest. The first cards running PCI-Express are slated to be shipping around this timeQuote:Big IF, and most of time time it's not.Quote:No, my AGP 8x card in an AGP 2x bus is only 5% slower than it is on an AGP 8x bus.Quote:And why would an Athlon be feeding the video card at all? The whole point of AGP is so that the CPU doesn't have to feed the GPU.Quote:
*shrug*

Thanks for your reply.
Unfortunately i did not find anything about an 128 bit wide DDR bus which is not dual channel.
But who cares. I think we both agree that the "RAM technology" used should be fast enough, so that it wouldn't be a bottleneck for the system.

Didn`t know about the PCI-Express GFX cards.
So you are right, if medium priced cards are out when Peg 3 ships we wouldn`t need AGP anymore.

Quote:

It's not the whole point but part of, a second point is to give the GFX card *fast*access to (cheap) main memory because textures were to big for the little on board memory on the GFX card's back then. So having AGP 8x does not mean to have more FPS.

But if i'm honest i have to admit i had to do a quick search and read some stuff to realise this.

For the interested: Klick Me

I'm in no way deep in computer technologys, im interested in this but that's all. Because of that i have to rely on things i read. I got this from Ars Technica Ps2 against PC:
Quote:

For me this means no Display list no frames. Be it the CPU that can't do physics (how far would the player jump at given speed) and creating a Display list at the same time or large texture jamming the bus. Thats what i meant with "feeding the GPU".

(Re)Learned a lot today

@Domar

That test is against older-gen cards, which required the CPU to generate the display list.

Modern 3D cards carry with them a processing unit, called a GPU, which generates these display lists instead.