Hi Folks, pull that CPU card out of your ODW or PegasosPPC and make sure that the CPU heatsink is firmly seated. Please make sure the heatsink holder is in place and the fan (if included) is CLEAN and WORKING! 8) Those machines are mostly a couple of years old now. We do not make the CPU cards any longer, so please maintain your machines! We don't want to respond to your repair requests negatively, but we cannot replace a CPU that has been fried.

ADDED LATER: THIS DOES NOT MEAN WE DO NOT HAVE REPLACEMENT CPU CARDS FOR THOSE REPAIRS THAT QUALIFY FOR WARRANTY WORK.

Best regards,
R&B :)

[ Edited by Genesi on 2007/2/19 17:42 ]

You should support PegasosII instead of betting everything on that Efika will be the saviour. I would love to see a 2GHz G4 card for PegasosII or PegasosIII.

If MorphOS users want to watch HDTV stuff for instance, EFIKA isnt power. EFIKA can become a nice morphos learning, multimedia machine.. but as a HDTV machine it has no chance.

Support PegasosII and make it compliant in anyway its possible!.. My big wish..

thats bad news. i always wanted a g4 module in my peg, hope maybe a faster one than 1ghz, but it seems to be never happen... so basicaly, if a cpu card is broken, then the peg can go to the trashcan? in that case im in a bit safer position as my cpu card has passive cooling:)

maybe if enough ppl request it, then bplan or any 3rd party company can make faster g4 cards to the pegII - couple hundred units perhaps...

a couple of months ago Genesi (bbrv) asked if there was enough interest for a small batch of faster CPU cards, all you had to do is to send an email to show your interest. As far as i have heard there were not enough interest for it, not enough emails. So the project didn't go further.
I was expecting so much from this upgrade, and i had to get used to the sad ending of it. Now for those who haven't answered when it was still possible, please don't complain here and take care of your machine.

Wish I would have checked mine.

My heatsink failed and fried my cpu today!

Hope R&B might find a way out of this...

matt

Sorry about that :(

Everyone should probably REPLACE their G4 fan/heatsink combo with a good Vantec or other name brand VGA fan. Those fans are kind of cheap on the second gen peg2s imho.

magnetic

bbrv: Are you saying that there is no more repairs of Peg2 or cpus?

I've recently replaced the fan with another having blue light emitting leds, but still thinking about a passive solution. A fan may stop unexpectedly.

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When bplan cannot help you and you are sure it is 'only' the cpu which is fried, then you may contact some weird hobby electronic engineer (professionals will be too expensive) who might be able to do some bga soldering (threre are ppl who do this successful whith irons or driers or some other strange constructions) and try to replace the 7447. The 7447 are a bit difficult to obtain though, but they are to get.
If it is not the 7447 but some other component it may of course also be possible to replace that particular part (as long as it doesn't hold any programmed logic).

***Note of course that is only a viable solution if you do not have anything to lose. ***

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Well it seems like the Pegasos has reached the end of line (for many reasons), while the Efika (and derivates and offsprings) is only at the beginning!

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Then go ahead and make it happen!

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A few days ago I got a message from BBRV saying that the Pegasos8641D is now officially under development:

http://www.powerdeveloper.org/8641d.php

The specs and performance of that one ought to please anyone with interest in 32-bit PPC desktop machines!

Hi Folks, the whole situation is pretty complicated. Where to begin...

Perhaps, the biggest dilemma was that Freescale closed the Computer Platform Division in August/September of 2005. About three weeks after that we met with David Perkins, the head of Network Computer and Systems Group at Freescale (now SVP, Sales and Marketing). Basically, Freescale decided in the Apple-departure aftermath to significantly decrease their emphasis on general purpose host processing. You may remember we had just won FTF and had the HDB Server development underway. In 2005, Freescale was our biggest customer. It was a tough moment for us. Without Freescale interest and support we had to completely re-evaluate our corporate existence.

Without going onto the whole IBM development that started as the Freescale situation trailed off, the biggest issue we then had to confront was RoHS compliance. Thomas did a LOT of work to get the Pegasos ready for the transition and to upgrade the offering to the 7447A. Unfortunately, at the end of the day it was not even our decision, but the decision of some critical component suppliers to NOT provide a RoHS compliant part with the same specification. In the end, we would have to completely redesign the board. The alternative would be to ship non-compliant parts and risk a $50,000 fine (per instance). It should also be mentioned that we did not get the 7448 announced in September 2004 at EuroSNDF for the HDB from Freescale until February 2006! This processor was NOT RoHS. Can you see the problem?

As a side note, we had less than 50 people ask for upgrade cards from the thousands of PegasosPPC boards sold. Most of our corporate customers want a Pegasos8641D, which we are interested in making. In December 2006, we received the FIRST 8641D v2.0 chips. Unfortunately, there were some changes from v1.0 that worked and some that made the development more difficult. All this has created some frustration for us and we are now looking at other architectures. We will produce the EFIKA for some time, but we may also produce and release something completely different in 2008. We have not decided yet. We will let you know.

In the meanwhile, here is what we will do:

1. Press ahead with the EFIKA.
2. Do our best to make MorphOS successful.

We appreciate our customers and all the loyal use of our platforms. We continue to repair CPU cards that can be repaired. Look at this one:

395286114_db93eb118a.jpg

We fixed that one!

R&B

[ Edited by Genesi on 2007/2/19 12:47 ]

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What does other architecture in this context mean? I guess you mean another Power architecture?

Have you already abandonned the 8641 completely? Or are you still trying with it? I somehow hope the latter is true.

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Well, the Efika will find its way, I am quite sure. But we also need some powerhorse. Of course you can achieve power by parallelizing, but this won't fit to every situation (and of course it doesn't help MOS too much). Thus, a high poer device is needed (but whom am I telling that..?).

We are completly lost....PegasosII is discontinued, no upgrade cards, Pegasos8641D is uncertain, EFIKA has no MorphOS (yet?), doesn't fit in standard cases and is even not strong enough for a desktop machine as Pegasos replacement....oh well, what should I say...

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I already wanted to ask this, didn't you took a look at the P.A. Semi chips? They look promising at least, according to the specs, and sound exactly something what we (you) are looking for. Or am i missing the point?

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Remember: 1.5 more weeks... :)

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It was a half-hour job, a piece of carton, some screws and 8 holes, to make my Efika fit into a standard mini-ITX case... So it's a no-issue. Compare this to A1200 tower hacks... :)

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Actually, my Pegasos runs well as a desktop, so i'm using the Efika as a silent (yet powerful) Linux server. It's more than twice as fast with Linux than a 600Mhz ARM/XScale-powered box...

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Buy an x86 for the desktop, and keep playing with ppc/68k systems as a hobby for fun...?

Yikes! Don't go so fast Matthias!

The Pegasos II has been discontinued since last November. There was a Press Release and a blog about it. The Pegasos8641D is taking longer than expected. The EFIKA will have MorphOS. And, we are looking for other options on this list:

395385595_673dba825e.jpg

So, let's discuss it and not worry too much!

R&B

@Genesi

thanks for the explanations

I have 2 questions here:

- What about the OSW ? (cancelled ?)
- what about Pegasos firmware upgrades ? (cancelled?)

We posted this on Power Developer a couple of days ago. The discussion was about the OSW Developer Program.

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Question #2: The new Firmware is certainly coming!

R&B

I hope you get the Pegasos8641D out asap and i think this P.A. Semi chips are pretty cool and would do well as CPU for the Pegasos!
And now i will take a look at my CPU Card.

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indeed.
I've been playing yesterday with Parallels on my MacBookPro core2duo and got really impressed by running Vista and Debian with it on top of OSX. The "Coherence" mode in Parallels which allows to run apps from another OS inside OSX (hidding the host OS) is truly amazing.
Waiting for VMware Fusion now.

I wish we could have something similar on a dual core Pegasos. MorphOS on a virtual machine ? it would be so nice.

I'd love to see a V2 of the EFIKA with at least 256Mo RAM, an FPGA and an integrated videochip....it will be more exiting infact.
On the hand, there is plenty of powerful PowerPC processors, like the ones in the Xbox360, so it is possible to make a board with these, isn't it ?

But good luck with the "PEG3" and i hope to see genesi make it big soon!

Go ahead bbrv !!

Another thing worth keeping your eye on is gfx card.

I have had TWO of them break on me. In both cases, the board had become totally black at some points (which hints at extremely high temperatures) and spread smoke around the entire case. In first case, only gfx card became totally dead, even PSU still worked. Only had to clean lots of "that black stuff" from the inside of the case.

The second case, however, (which happened just now) was much worse. Maybe 1/4 of both sides of the card were totally black, and various components had jumped around the case. The VGA ribbon cable was totally black, and kind of melted at places. Many parts of the Pegasos 2 mother board are all black, but I can't see any obvious "this component is broken" -damage - they're just black. Also the PCI connectors have melted a bit. CPU card looked mostly fine.

Honestly I don't (yet) know if it still works, as I haven't had time or equipment to try it (don't want to risk having 2 broken custom-sized PSU's, as neither of my cases use the "normal cheap size")

But if it turns out to be broken, can some of the non-CPU faults still be fixed?

I might post pictures of it some day.

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Your explanation was a very impressive case of business transparecy, which I thank you for very much indeed. Worth reading a couple of times.
You say things like "we did not get the 7448 announced in September 2004 until February 2006", "this processor was NOT RoHS" (amazing! from what junkyard did it came from?). The final nail in the coffin might be "In December 2006, we received the FIRST 8641D v2.0 chips. Unfortunately, there were some changes from v1.0 that worked and some that made the development more difficult".
In all, you say "all this has created some frustration for us and we are now looking at other architectures". I wholeheartedly agree with Genesi and its hard working engineers, fighting against all kind of odds with you suppliers: The MAI nightmare was only a little bad dream compared to these later experiences.
So, by looking at the graph, and after seing "we are now looking at other architectures", I guess Genesi leaves POWER architecture, and goes for AMD:

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Am I completely wrong?

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The POWER architecture doesn't have a future on the desktop. The earlier Genesi realizes that by shifting to another architecture, the better it is for their economic viability and the continuity of their business.

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Though the million dollar question is whether Genesi wants to target the desktop or other markets.
For embedded there are still nice candidates around, the 5200B is nice. Maybe Freescale will improve it further. And what about the 8641 now? genesi says they are frustrated about it, but keep on tellin about a Peg3 (i.e. will that be with or without 8641(D)?).
On the other hand there might come something out of PA Semi. Well, we do not know yet if they keep there promises, but maybe we are lucky and that company keeps its promises.

Leaving the Power architecture has IMO one particular issue: That is, what will MorphOS do? A transition to another architecture? Well, I doubt this is what Ralph is heading for... But if it turns out that there will be no alternative maybe it will happen.

We'll see and first we should do our best to make the Efika a big success (maybe some wake up then).

One big wish for a new revision of the Efika: put atx power supply logic onto the board and change power input to just a plain 12V DC input.

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That's just a simple trick. You can hack together something similiar for UAE with a few kbytes of code:

uae.avi