#1 By reading bbrv's blog I have had the feeling that they are flirting with SUN for some time..

#2 I think that Efika needs desperately a way to fit in standard mini-itx cases.

#3 Just ordered an Efika board from Genesi

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That's widely understood.

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There lies the evidence: Genesi has problems with a suplier, and doesn't change supplier, but architecture instead.
I'm not suggesting at all that it's a wrong movement, things are way easier when your suppliers are from the x86 world. What makes me sad is that POWER related suppliers can't do a decent job.
And we complain that this world is almost entirely x86. Go figure...

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Apple did the move, it was their flagship, so why not anyone else? But it's a big shame that being different is incompatible with business economies.

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Nobody can target the desktop market, at least without the same weapons as the rest. A company wants to do business, not advocate resistance to the obvious.

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If you can really live off embedded market. Which, by the way, is progressively being swamped by x86. It's only natural, the desktop market is so saturated, that it's a rule of thumb to enter different markets. The sad thing about it is that it's best to be second, and not pioneer: When a market matures, thanks to the hard work of others, you and your monopoly stumble in.
By the way, we have the console market as an example of the exact opposite. Interesting. Every console now is POWER based, something in the realms of the wildest dreams just two years ago.

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freescale already announced a 5200B sucessor, with integrated graphics and other goodies. Now, recall the amount of months that they took to deliver the first 7448 without ROHS compliance...

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Go figure. Meanwhile, perhaps a dozen of x86 processors get to market, targetted exactly to the spot of the 5200. Anyone would get to the point of thinking that staying with a single, alternative supplier, is commiting commercial suicide.
freescale closed computer division (due to Apple leaving POWER), and surely went through horrible internal reorganization due to this dramatic business change. That must have yielded enormous harm to their engineering force.

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You, as a company, would never destroy your business plans in public. But customers, like us, should be aware of hard situations.

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Brilliant chips these. If they can supply decently, and adapting designs is easy, you can still win.

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If I remember correctly, MorphOS once was specifically optimized for PowerPC, so moving to a different processor should be specially difficult. Also, the fathers of this lovable creature are said to be firmly convinced about PowerPC. Finally, MorphOS on, say, x86, would have huge benefits but... Who wants yet another alternative operating system on their PC?

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It depends if the programmers' ethics leans towards hardware or software. If they have the modern conception of "everything is software", then they would not care about compiling for POWER or any other architecture. MorphOS is a labour of love.

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That's thinking in positive, a very good thing to do. There's the risk that, even after accomplishing something outstanding with the Efika, nobody cares about it. Or worse, that no more Efikas can be built.

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That's exactly the same thing that I dropped a couple of times over here and "powerdeveloper.org". I thought it would raise an answer from Neko, but it didin't.

Phew! I didn't expect such a lengty post, and being so negative was even less expected. I firmly love my Pegasos and MorphOS. Even if it becomes yet another instance of Amiga curse. Huy, perhaps its because that!

Hi,
you all should think about the identity of the Peg/Efika and why you bought it.

If it's just MorphOS, try to convince Ralph to port to X86, get a cheap x86-board and you're fine.

If it's just about PPC, there are enough old Mac around to play with linux and even MacOS.

If it's the combination, you're doomed ... just like most of us. Enjoying the pure speed of MorphOS in combination with minority_plattform linux is the real feeling of being different, beeing eLiTe, beeing c00l.
.. that'S what a Peg is about

Listen guys

Porting MOS to x86 is absolutely absurd to discuss here. Lets not turn this into Amigaworld.net please....

magnetic

@ jcmarcos

You misquoted me, the first three quotes by you weren't from me.

@ magnetic

x86 is no issue. MOS needs big endian and the x86 (i.e. IA-32) is little endian. No way.
Thus, nobody's talking about an x86 transition.

Sparcs would do the trick and IIRC Itaniums (IA-64) can do so, too.

i apologize for my ignorance, but what is the problem with IBM and their CPUs ? They are selling them to Microsoft just to give an example and they are really powerful arent they ? So, why can't Genesi buy some of them ? Is it because of the low quantity ?

On the other hand, i think that the new CPUs from PA semi are really a good Desktop solution for us

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bbrv just told, that they had some problems doing business with IBM, read back... On the other hand, for anyone outside M$, it is probably impossible to buy Xenons (the CPU inside XBox 360), and even if you could, there won't be much use, because it's a design which is highly tuned for the 360's internals, so you probably can't build your own design easily on it. (We've a few XBox 360's at work (i work for a game dev. company), and i looked through the dev specs... It's a fine machine, but trust me, it's not suited for the desktop as you expect it, not even CPU-wise.)

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I agree, their specs are impressive at least, but they still have to prove themselves on the long run. I think that's too big risk for such a small company as bPlan/Genesi. I'd love to be wrong on this though.

Well, I want PegasosII back in production. Why cant bplan produce them and Genesi funding it? PegasosII is way better for desktop marked. So making it SohS compliant .. do that .. and come on and create better cpu cards Genesi.

EFIKA is just a mimick to get people over to morphos, but once they want to use it for more than what an 400MHz cpu can do, they will feel betrayed somehow. Sure that EFIKA is small and nice, but there is no altivec or possibilities to play HD movies. If EFIKA had an MPEG2 or MPEG4 hardware chip, then EFIKA would be much more attractive.

Genesi is a great company, but abandoning PegasosII is something that I never will forgive them about. PegasosII is an example on how PPC desktop marked should have evolved and now Genesi is struggling with small card called EFIKA.

I hope that Genesi rethinks and goes for Pegasos, marketing it and starts beeing serious about all of its PPC OS projects.


Regards,
Michal



[ Edited by MorphDelf on 2007/2/21 10:02 ]

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I want... is way better... make it RoHS compliant... do that... create better...

You make it all sound so easy, so why don't YOU do it all? There's so much information about Pegasos 2 publicly available, that almost anyone capable of doing any bit bigger hardware could probably start Pegasos 2 based product production.

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And how would Pegasos II solve that problem? As neither can play HD resolution movies. And no, Altivec support wouldn't magically cure the problem of slow memory bus, which is the bottleneck (or one of them) for HD sized video playback.

And in the case you mean HD-DVD (and not HDTV rips) there's no way we would be getting any official support. Just see how crippled Microsoft had to make Vista to make it "allowed platform". Of course there likely will be "non-official" players (as there now is for normal DVD's) as some people managed to crack the protection already.

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Might have been better if they hadn't made it in the first place, right? Or at least that's how you make it sound.

Oh yea, PegasosII is fully capable of playing HD movies in its screenmode. Saw it at PUSH 2005. CISC showed it can be done with altivec support.

I`ve seen mos 1.5 in action, and yes it can.

I don't know what to think about this news...
I'm a bit disappointed....
Because I want to support MorphOS, it's sure, but the Efika is not a good platform for my devs like Blender. This type of application consumes to much memory to be usable on Efika.
Remains Python... but I'm waiting for the day that it will be massively used on MorphOS.
I understand that this type of app are not so waited than a browser, this last is more "end user". But having MorphOS in the list of supported platform for this app are a good and free advertisement.

But how to do that without platform (= users) to run that?

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Well, that's not entirely accurate though, first of all you need a gfxcard that's capable of a 1920x1080 overlay (if we're talking full HD), and for some reason (only ATI knows why they crippled all the other chips) that only includes Radeon8500/9100 (and maybe 9000, don't remember) of the ones currently supported by MorphOS...

Secondly, when you're playing 1920x1080 at 24fps or more (as well as the audio) quite a lot of CPU time gets wasted shuffling the fairly large amounts of data around, and the slow "AGP" bus does not help in this regard, therefore I must resort to a few simple tricks to get this done; like the libavcodec skipframe=nonref (or other speedup options), which depending on the clip drops decoding of more or less frames (which can result in quite choppy playback on some clips, but in general it's ok).

However if you disregard full HD, up to 720p plays back just fine without any tricks whatsoever (atleast with MPEG2 .. for H264 you need another speedup option; skiploopfilter=all, which disables post-filtering (which is quite slow, and mostly useless on high quality encodings anyway))...


- CISC

> freescale already announced a 5200B sucessor, with
> integrated graphics and other goodies.

AFAIK Freescale didn't announce anything alike; BBRV did, as a block diagram in their blog. But maybe I'm plain wrong and you have a revealing link to a Freescale announcement for me :-)

> Now, recall the amount of months that they took to
> deliver the first 7448 without ROHS compliance...

"The MPC7448 has been sampling since February 2005..."
http://media.freescale.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=196520&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=831787

BBRV told when Genesi was supplied, not when Freescale was generally able to deliver samples (to whomever). I have no idea why they had to wait a full year for supply though.

> what is the problem with IBM and their CPUs ? They are
> selling them to Microsoft just to give an example and
> they are really powerful arent they ? So, why can't Genesi
> buy some of them ? Is it because of the low quantity ?

Xenon is designed and produced exclusively for Microsoft, nobody else can purchase it. And so is Broadway, which is far from being powerful enough for our purposes anyway, for Nintendo. Solely Cell is for anyone to buy. So far BBRV have gone through alternating phases of bashing and praising the Cell, depending on their respective relationship with IBM. Admittedly, the latter phases have been much shorter ;-)
So much for the gaming console's CPUs. Of course there is still the PPC970s series, and Genesi announced plans in regard to that (OSW, TetraPower, PAPR etc.). An update on that would be appreciated.

> 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.

I wonder what parts that would be. Last time I looked both the northbridge and southbridge, which IMHO are the only critical components apart from the CPU, were listed as RoHS compliant variants.

Perhaps, we need to write more carefully and maybe we should. On the other hand, this Community is not likely to extend too far beyond those that know the platform and have for some time. Is suggesting we feel comfortable being open on MZ are bad thing? We don't think so. In today's world transparency is a competitive advantage.

We are doing some great work with IBM. This is a positive statement. There are many different people and divisions in IBM. Some people and divisions we work well with and some we do not. Please do not read too much into that. There is nothing negative there. Think of positive and negative numbers. Some relationships are positive and others we rate at ZERO, but there are no negative numbers.

We have discussed the Pegasos decision many times. Andreas, there were other components that were not to become RoHS compliant and some that were became much more expensive. In any case, this would have required a board design. This did not make business sense. There was not enough demand. The decision was made.

We had 7448 samples as soon as others in 2004, but these samples were not within the target performance ranges, nor were the first samples of the 8641D. It took some time to deliver performance reality against the marketing claims.

We never bashed CELL. We bashed the hype of CELL in Urgh CELLulite. CELL is very much a different thing than "Power" even though it is founded on a 970 core. The SPE is where the emphasis is. We expect a whole new community to be built around CELL completely separate from Power.

At the Telematics Update Show last May Freescale freely discussed all the details included in the SoC diagram found in our blog. This was again presented at FTF 2006. This is *not* the same thing as the 4U2.

We are working on an offering of a PCI card with a configurable Field Programmable Object Array (FOPA) on it. The company we are discussing this with has a 1GHz FOPA that can do 400 16 bit multiplies every nanosecond. It could make for a neat developer program if linked to the EFIKA. It may or may not happen. PCI itself creates some issues. We will see...

Back to work!

R&B

I think that focusing on EFIKA VS PegasosII is so viewable in this thread. You would gain a lot more supporting PegasosII now as thats a name people all arround the globe is starting to get hold of as morphos users promotes for them to their friends and co-workers.

EFIKA is a step backward instead of forward bbrv. Sure it can bring lots of new users to morphos etc, but as morphos needs developers which can do 3D stuff. I guess and think that EFIKA might not be the solution.

So giving up PegasosII is wrong I think. Why cant you move the PegasosII production to outside of EU? You`ve got Russia, Norway, Iceland etc.. China? Japan? PegasosII should be available until EFIKA got its morphos port atleast! Maybe produce it in less quantities.. but atleast keep the platform alive, rather than dead.


Regards,
Michal

Silly but OT: cleaned the card/fan (good thing too; quite some dirt there) and checked the screws and checked the plugs. I feel better now . Mobo is more than 4 years old now but has still a long way to go looking at my 12 year old a1200 mobo

Hi Stevo:

If you are using the stock heatsink/fan, I would higly recommend that you replace it with better one. Magnetic recommended one earlier.

I recently lost my peg 2 cpu, the plastic holders for the heatsink melted and fell off the cpu.

Regards,

Matt

@MorphDelf

It doesn't matter where the Pegs are produced, if the aren't ROHS they can't be sold into the EU.

Genesis did make the right desicion, when the Peg became unsellable they made sure that dealer could restock (Vesalia seems to still have some), and instead of trying to fix a 4 year old piece of tech they concentrated on creating uptodate replacements. Wether they will be able to deliver these on time and at a reasonable price is yet to seen, but it was the risk they just had to take.

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You still don't get it, do you?
Do some research on RoHS implications, then come back.

I have been very luck with heat and changed the fan a few times. (Seen too many PC people blow up CPUs) My biggest problem seems to be ports. Currently the main ethernet port is dead and just recently the ps/2 ports gave up. Is this a common situation? It's annoying as the USB don't behave the same as the ps/2 :P

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Okay, to be honest you can't fit every gfx card that fits Pegasos 2 (in high profile case) in Efika. However, even if those high profile cards indeed are faster, the difference isn't really THAT big. And as much of the work in "anything 3D (accelerated)" is done on the gfx card, I fail to see that as an absolute proof why Genesi should have continued the outdated Pegasos 2 production, instead of concentrating on newer designs, such as Efika, and whatever else there might be in development. And yes, that "whatever else" is likely a lot faster than Pegasos 2.

Would you have wanted Pegasos 1 to be continued instead of concentrating on the design of Pegasos 2? It took a while before the design was ready for consumers, they could have kept on manufacturing & selling Pegasos 1's untill now! (OK, there might have been some problems continuing its production, I don't know, but that's not the point anyway)

In any case, congratulations for making the right decision of dropping old platform instead of wasting more money on making it RoHS compliant (which ANYONE else can do anyway), and concentrating on the new designs.

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I love my Peg1. Just see its advantages: No fan which can fail.
SCNR.

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And how exactly does that differ from ANY G3 Pegasos 2 out there? Except that it has Articia & all the problems it provides...