The Natami is not dead yet, and reports of it's death are greatly exaggerated.

I think that it has rather come back to reality, instead of the wishful thinking of several over zealous supporters, that did not have a grasp of the amount of work required to complete the project. Yet another revision, or alteration to the Natami main board is just one more cause for further delay, but is not unexpected from a project that encompasses such a large amount of goals and work to reach those goals.

Maybe those goals will never be completely realized, but work on them continues by Thomas and others, separately now, but I believe that Thomas for the most part has always worked on this project alone, or with minimal contact with the other people involved with Natami.

I never expect anything, but I do always hope for the best.

Can it be connected in a towered 1200?

xyphoid,
Quote:

Not to be a pessimist, xyphoid, but I doubt it really exists.

xyphoid,
Quote:

No. It connects using the A4000/A3000 CPU board connector. A1200 lack this..

The cpu is incompatible.
It cannot run MorphOS or AmigaOS4 PPC software.

Tom01,
Quote:

That is what I thought. This thing is completely useless if all it can run is WarpOS software or PowerUP software. Can it even run those?

Maybe it is just an exercise to see if the two guys working on it can make it even run anything, then maybe they can change the PPC CPU to used 1.42GHz, or 1.5GHz G4's, or 2.5GHz to 2.7GHz G5 CPU's. That would make it a little bit interesting if they could do that. Can you imagine someone making something similar to the Phase5 Cyberstorm boards, but with a 2.0GHz or faster G5 in place of the 604e? That I would look at and consider, but it would also have to use a 68060 @60MHz or faster in combination with the G5.

Wouldn't that be something that could raise some eyebrows and make people sit up and take notice? Of course it will never happen, but if it ever did, and if any software were ever written to run on such a monster, I would have my A4000 sitting right next to my most used computers in a place of honor.

[ Edited by amigadave 27.05.2012 - 14:47 ]

amigadave,
Quote:

I'd have my doubt about those two packages as well.
Honestly, does anyone think two hobbyists can out do Phase5?

@jim

Didn't the two steve's out do several companys?
Don't we use the two steve's products in a not intended?

I (as a classic amiga user) would buy this card just for the extras.
The ppc would be a plus.

Not really. One Steve strip mined ideas from Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center.
And I don't even know if Woz was involved with the company when the G4 Macs were produced.

That said, it still took an Army of engineers to produce everything Apple has designed since the early Apple IIs.

So what's your point?

My point is that:
two hobbyists can and do out do companies.

and that the proposed hardware has some really good points with buyers at the ready.

Maybe I'm to hopeful...but I have two phase5 cards that died yrs ago

still waiting

M

In the early '90s when my company was still fielding 68K based computers I might have agreed with you.
These days, the only individual I can think of who can pull off this kind of thing is Jens Schönfeld.

Great exsample!

M

Jim,
Quote:

Funny how one of the guys involved with the UltimatePPC managed to produce and sell a 1541-emulator for the C64, when Jens wouldn't... ;)

@stephen_robinson:

Quote:

...except when equipped with one of these babies.

The project is announced at too early stage to take it as a commercially viable one (even at hobby level). Well, it is for sure entertaining and educating for its developers. To say more, I guess they have a sincere intention to finish it. But, in my opinion, it will turn into a neverending story similar to NatAmi.

[ Edited by Krashan 28.05.2012 - 06:25 ]

> maybe they can change the PPC CPU to [...] G4's, or [...] G5 CPU's.

That would require a complete redesign of the board, which is further complicated by the fact that both (non-SoC) G4 and G5 need a northbridge chip to make them work. That aside, the QorIQ chip has been chosen due to its on-chip I/O capabilities (SATA, USB, Ethernet), effectively turning it into some kind of southbridge chip to the m68k chip. Neither G4 nor G5 can provide that.

Great point Andreas,
Many of Freescale's products built after the G4 offer this functionality.
Still not sure why they pick the SoC they intend to use when there are better products.

And I can't see how they'd make this work with the old libraries (like Warp3d).

> Still not sure why they pick the SoC they intend to use when there are better products.

Maybe those "better products" are more expensive, that may be a valid concern. My guess is that the UltimatePPC developers have just not been aware of the FPU compatibility issue between e500v2 and "standard" Power Architecture. Reading MorphZone would have helped them here as we have been discussing the issue since January 2009 ;-) One of the board's developers even confirmed that e500v2 had an FPU (which isn't a false statement per se, but "an FPU" may simply not be enough when it can't execute "standard" FP code):

http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&u=http://www.a1k.org/forum/showpost.php?p=519941

> I can't see how they'd make this work with the old libraries (like Warp3d).

Warp3D wouldn't make sense anyway as the P1013's DIU has no 3D capabilities.


Edit: Btw, Troika once had plans for a standalone PPC board for the Amiga market based on e500v2 (PowerQUICC III, MPC85xx):

"In parallel with my work on Athena, I have been looking at cost effective higher performance system, codenamed Hercules. [...] The Hercules design is centred around an E500 core PowerPC running at a minimum of 1 GHz. [...] At this time the Hercules platform is in early development, i.e. schematics are in progress."
http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=28102&forum=33&start=240#477216

And 2.5 years later:

"The Hercules design was little more than an early concept."
http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=23127&forum=2&start=120#621485

[ Edited by Andreas_Wolf 30.05.2012 - 09:09 ]

It will be interesting to see what comes out of this.

P10xx and PPC460ex are affordable PPC chips, others are not.

But if 2x CPU price is not an issue then chips like MPC8610 and P2041 become alternative.

IIRC, some P10xx and P20xx are pin compatible. P2041 has e500mc core (compatible FPU), but not sure how easily it fits in place of 1013.

Any specs around of T1xxx chips yet? Do they have DIU?

amigadave,
Quote:
There are several reasons why it can not:
1) Both WarpOS and PowerUP are proprietary. Much of WOS is in powerpc assembly, making it harder to work with it even if they could obtain the source code
2) The FPU issue isn't specific to the OS or kernel being run. The CPU just doesn't implement the Power ISA category FPU. You cannot execute any regular PowerPC FPU code on it.

> P10xx and PPC460ex are affordable PPC chips, others are not.

Compared to the PPC460EX (PPC440 core), the newer Applied Micro chips with PPC464FP or PPC465 core are much cheaper.

> IIRC, some P10xx and P20xx are pin compatible.

Yes, P2010 and P2020 are pin compatible with P1011, P1012, P1013, P1020, P1021 and P1022. They all have e500v2 core.

http://www.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/brochure/PWRARCHQIQSG.pdf

> P2041 has e500mc core (compatible FPU), but not sure how easily
> it fits in place of 1013.

P1013 and P2041 are not pin compatible.

> Any specs around of T1xxx chips yet?

I'm not aware of any.

> I don't even know if Woz was involved with the company when the
> G4 Macs were produced.

12 years passed between :-)

Andreas_Wolf,

Thank you for the pin compatibility info.

Untill someone does some Book-E spec FPU emulator for P10xx series.... or untill T1xx chips appear...

"newer Applied Micro chips with PPC464FP or PPC465 core are much cheaper."

Meaning APM86290 and APM86190? http://www.apm.com/products/embedded/multicore460/apm86290/
I once read very low price estimates on some early press info. (below 30 eur in high volume, IIRC)
But are those available yet?
I have not seen those being sold yet.
Perhaps you have a link to the price & availability info?


[ Edited by KimmoK 29.05.2012 - 16:13 ]

> Untill someone does some Book-E spec FPU emulator for P10xx series

Emulating standard Book-E/PowerISA FPU on e500v2 might be hard (or impossible even?) as this is not simply about missing instructions here but about instruction overlappings, i.e. same instructions doing different things on different cores. This seems similar to m68k vs. ColdFire. For an exhaustive and detailed comparison of the programming models of e500v2 vs. e600, refer to:

http://www.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/app_note/AN3531.pdf

Btw, even the (ex-)maintainer of Debian for PowerPCSPE calls it a "braindead FPU design":

http://lists.debian.org/debian-powerpc/2012/05/msg00025.html

>> newer Applied Micro chips with PPC464FP or PPC465 core are much cheaper

> Meaning APM86290 and APM86190?

Yes, my statement was mainly about the Mamba chips (PPC465 core), but also APM82181 (PPC464FP core, although with only one single PCIe x1 interface and no PCI that SoC would probably not be satisfying).

> I once read very low price estimates on some early press info.
> (below 30 eur in high volume, IIRC)

I guess you might be confusing this with the APM821xx announcement from some months before:

"Limited sample quantities of the APM821xx family are available at less than $20 for quantities of 10,000 pieces."
http://investor.apm.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=78121&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1414268

AFAIR, nothing of that kind was ever announced for the APM86x90 chips.

> are those available yet? I have not seen those being sold yet.
> Perhaps you have a link to the price & availability info?

"Avnet is quoting $77 for the single-core APM86190-1200 and $120 for the dual-core APM86290-1200 for qty 120."
http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=31667&forum=33&start=260#619403

I just had a look at Avnet and saw that APM86x90 chips (still only available up to 1.2 GHz) became cheaper since that statement quoted above was made:

1.2 GHz APM86190 at qty of 120: 58...64 USD
1.2 GHz APM86290 at qty of 120: 87...96 USD