Please don't even "speculate" things like scenario A because people take it as gospel truth :)

7447A and 7448 works fine on the Discovery II, at 133MHz bus speed which is the maximum the chip supports. This is fine in the Pegasos II.

Gerald has a 7448 card design already prototyped. When we get the CPUs in quantity we can make the CPU cards with them soldered to it. With the release of the 1.3 firmware (which is simply late.. feel free to throw small rocks and things at Sven to spur his progress :) you will be able to plug in your 7447A or 7448, and have it just plain work. Among a bunch of other features like *AHEM* and *COUGH* and *CENSORED*.

I don't think we fully decided what method we'll use to sell them, but one is that Free Workstation users can buy the 7448 card for $50 as part of their support package. The 7447A is part of the FW deal but also we didn't decide on whether to sell it seperately..

There is ample opportunity to bring up a new Pegasos board design based on a new Discovery chip, or the Tundra northbridge, or even some magic new chipset, but this requires substantial relayout of the board. Other upgrades might want to be performed (southbridge or so on) which requires further development and of course part sourcing. It may as well be considered a brand new board (but it would share a common CPU slot by nature).

The Tsi108A is still brand new. There is so much life left in it and lots of time to design a board around it. The Discovery V won't be out for almost a year. The same goes for the 8641D (not too sure about the single core variant).

Any product which has not been officially announced as a press release, technically does not exist. There is no Pegasos III based on any chipset, right now.

Right now development effort goes on the new CPU cards, the blade (nearing completion, pending some final tweaks), EFIKA and the announced OSW motherboard. Somewhere along the line, some other 32bit board may be announced. Since it hasn't..

By the way Bill said the OSW will be a microBTX-based board, this allows substantially easier cooling solutions to be built for low-profile cases and also will bring in the enhancements to the case and PSU spec which detail PCI-Express and the power requirements associated (remember PCI-Express 16-lane graphics cards are allowed to draw 150W from the *bus*).

@SoundSquare

Quote:

Well, I'm a bit far away from Paris, but if you post a bottle of wine by mail, I'll promise I will drink it while typing down my next speculation!



@Neko

Things are like I expected then!

Thanks!


(I *knew* it would be possible to provoke the release of some info )

@Neko

this sounds promising ! I can't wait for these new CPU cards and hope you'll be able to sell them separately. I'm sure they are plenty of Pegasos users willing to buy these cards, especially linux users.

@takemehomegrandma

it seems like your speculation cannot compare with Neko's news, he will have the bottle then

Hello Neko, Pleased to meet you.

Seems from your words, that even HPC I e II are not about to be launced *SOON* on the market.

At least they will be, but only for contractors (manufactured by Genesi and sold to third party with their brand name) and not as "Pegasi".

What a pity.


Any chance to see HPC I or HPC II on the market if tests will show that the hardware configuration works flawlessly?
Is there any market plan to sell them directly by Genesi?

Feel free to answer only if these informations are "not covered" by any NDA.

Ciao,

Raffaele


P.S. (1): "High Performance Computer" is a very messy name.
It is not the only problem!
Any people, any buyer, any contractor from outside, searching for your motherboards on search engines will be literally flooded with redundant information noise regarding any "high performance computer" topic.

Open Desktop Workstation is a very professional name but sounds void. Has no personality, and no appeal..

Open Server Workstation is a cool name. Is it? It jokes both with the term "Server" and also with the term "Workstation"...
But it could be misinterpreted (-is this computer a Server or is it a Workstation???-) and people could think at it as "not serious" or "not professional machine".

"Pegasos" is a cool name.
IMHO you must try to keep it for the entire line of products and leaving ODW, OSW and HPC as "second" names naming each of any PEGASOS models.

P.S. (2): Regarding Open Server workstation and its double MPC 970 features...
Have you heard of the announcing of new PPC G5 clone PWRFicient PA6T-1682M by P.A. Semi(conductors)???

Sounds promising.

Could it be (this is pure speculation) a valuable high performance and low consumption (5-13 watt) solution for the OSW motherboard???

Links:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1875302,00.asp
http://www.amiganews.de/de/news/AN-2005-10-00125-DE.html
http://www.pasemi.com/

[ Edited by Raf_MegaByte on 2005/10/26 18:29 ]

Quote:
You still don't grasp the fact that HPC I and II are *Freescale* designs, that runs bPlan's SmartFirmware, and have been debugged/tested by Gerald Carda. It's Freescale that uses/sells them as developer boards.
Quote:
I'd check Freescale instead for these boards.
Quote:
I guess it was not decided by bPlan/Genesi.
Quote:
Can't a Workstation be used as a Server, today? Those are names, not necessarily referring to different design. Just think about the so called Personal Computer, which is often used as a Workstation or as a Server.
Quote:
Of course he has:
https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=4098&forum=11

But anyway, I'd stop speculating. We'll have something to talk about when announcements will be made, or even better, when products appear. Right now, Neko has told quite a lot already. I'd be more interested in higher clocked processor boards for the Peg2 (both sold as upgrades of existing designs and as better specced PegasosII), newer designs (either based on DiscoveryIII, V, Tundra Tsi108 or MPC8641) are still some time from coming (also because some of the parts are sampling now, or are not even at this stage...). I don't think the Peg2 would show its age for another 9-12 months if the CPU was more up to date.

Kind regards,
Andrea

HPC-I and HPC-II are Freescale validation platforms for the Discovery III/7447A and Tundra Tsi108/7448 respectively. You can buy them from Freescale right now. There is scope for resale of the boards but not really in a market we are focussing on today.

Gerald and Thomas ported the firmware and used the platforms to validate the CPU and northbridge combinations for the blade design. They did this so that they could just boot Linux on them and run it like a Pegasos. The Blade has the same feature. So does EFIKA. The firmware is the central point to that endeavour.

Open Server Workstation is named for a reason, but I'm not going to give that information out. It wasn't our decision for a name, but a necessity, and a product tie-in with the success of the ODW. What it tries to convey, despite being a LITTLE confusing, is that it is oriented towards the under-desk server applications (Sun and SGI have had these available for years) and high-end clustering (like XServe).

Think of the Virginia Tech cluster that Apple helped with - it started out as Power Macs running as servers, and then they moved to XServes. We could provide the same thing on the same motherboard, just in different boxes, depending on the use (1 server or 40 in a rack..)

It's not really oriented to generic desktop use, like to buy a Dell to run a word processor on. Why would you need a 4-core multiprocessing paralellised beast like that in order to write letters to your bank manager and shop at Amazon? :)

To cut the speculation: 970MP chips are available *today*. PA Semi PWRFicient are not sampling until late next year.. and it's no G5 clone.

Well, all these news abouth new machine are very good, and demostate Genesi finally is become a serius firm.
Hoewer, I think all us Pegasos Users simply hope Genesi don't forget Amiga and Pegasos comunity, and they will develope and produce a good successor for Pegasos 2 line.

@artickfox

If we have a chance to have morphOS running on the new hardware it will be great but keep in mind that Genesi is no longer designing hardware to support the Amiga community or even MorphOS. The Amiga community needs for new hardware was a fantastic opportunity for Genesi to launch their products and get a serious user base but this is a niche market and Genesi don't really "need" us at the moment. They do focus on linux and professional market or embedded systems and i think they are doing right about it even if i still belong to the amiga community.

Thinking that Genesi is producing hardware for the Amiga community is a bit naive in my opinion.



[ Edited by SoundSquare on 2005/10/31 19:33 ]

Quote:

Well, the point is they still say "We continue support MorphOS"... so, who know... only time show us if is true.

Mr. Neko wrote:

>>>
HPC-I and HPC-II are Freescale validation platforms for the Discovery III/7447A and Tundra Tsi108/7448 respectively. You can buy them from Freescale right now.
>>>

BUY THE HPC-I and II RIGHT NOW?

Sounds veeeeeeery interesting!

Where to order them? At genesippc?

How much these boards cost each?
(considering the fact that evaluation boards are always high priced due to low quantities production).

[ Edited by Raf_MegaByte on 2005/11/2 9:10 ]

[ Edited by Raf_MegaByte on 2005/11/2 9:19 ]

Quote:

Did you miss the "You can buy them from Freescale right now" part?

Again (as said several times in this thread), these motherboards are not products from Genesi, and question is if these Freescale reference motherboards will be of any real use to you? I guess they aren't exactly supported as consumer-level products you know ...

You can find *Genesi's* products over at https://www.pegasosppc.com/store.php


Edit: If you go to Freescale.com and enter "hpc" in the "parts" search field at the top of the page, you will reach the following information after a few clicks:

Budgetary Price* QTY 1000+ ($US) = $2,494.00

This should give you a hunch, although you can probably negotiate this with Freescale depending on what you might propose to them (ie how interesting they will find your project to be)

*) Budgetary Price (1000+Qty, US Dollars) is the Manufacturers Suggested Resale Price per unit in US Dollars for a quantity purchase of more than 1000 units. All prices are provided for budgetary purpose only, shown in United States Dollars, and are subject to change without notice. For specific volume quotations, please contact your local Authorized Freescale Semiconductor Distributor or Freescale Semiconductor Sales office.

[ Edited by takemehomegrandma on 2005/11/2 10:45 ]