Paladin of the Pegasos
Posts: 1178 from 2003/3/13
From: Pinto, Madrid ...
Quote:feanor wrote:
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jcmarcos wrote:
just clone that MPC8610 evaluation board in you have at the smallest possible cost, that's all.
Unfortunately that's not possible, for both copyright issues but also in terms of cost. Evaluation boards have lots of stuff that isn't really useful in an end product (like JTAG for example). Also they are quite big in size.
I explained myself badly: Desing a completely new Mini-ITX (for example) board, taking all the knowledge from the evaluation board. Of course, those connectors for development purposes should be gone.
By the way, it's just a shame that you have to repeat the work that NEC already did with its Redtail board. Has anybody here seen one, ever?
I know you prefer having answers in your e-mail, but I prefer having this discussion in public, it's much more lively.
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I'm definitely not doing it for fun
I assume you no longer work for Genesi.
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This is a market in itself. Not big, but I believe it's self sustainable
I agree. The fact that every other player has left this market looks scary, but things can be done right.
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I don't know if a 500EUR MPC8610 board would be a right choice
I think that's reasonable for a new MPC8610 computer, with a reasonable amount of expansion options - Yes, a single PCI slot is too little. But you have a problem: I won't buy it because my Pegasos is not broken yet. And many people will think the same: If you aren't rich, why would you buy another computer to do the same (enjoy MorphOS). Well, it's faster, but can you mention smething that us Morhers do, that needs a lot of processing power?
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the QorIQ series are the focus of Freescale right now
Putting "freescale" and "focus" in the same sentence scares me. If I were you, I'd go for the most stablished solution, and leave others battle with freescale for newish things.
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bPlan like the idea, and I already started discussions with them about the board. I don't think I'll have a second chance in this however so I'll have to make sure it succeeds the first time.
That looks like the start of an exciting ride!
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That's why I wouldn't like wasting their time with constant discussions and constant specs changes.
Even if you have an exact specification in mind, things change during hardware development. Hardware usually has funny undocumented behaviours, it's a whole different world to software. With bPlan by your side, and all their expertise, many of those traps can be avoided.
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I'll have to make a decision about the hardware specs
Use the same as your MPC8610 evaluation board.
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the project's viability and then things will start rolling.
I guess you have a perfectly complete idea about viability, at least MorphOS wise. As for different markets, you could use again the idea of the "CrabFire", years ago: A Pegasos based firewall (running Linux, of course) that could be labelled as more secure because it used a weird (PowerPC) processor, and thus malware for it was unexistant. Sure you remember the project, it came from Gunne Steen, if I remember correctly.
For other markets... I guess a bloody PC with Windows gets the job done easier and cheaper.
Give us a computer for having fun! (that's why we were so grateful to Genesi anyway).
