Yokemate of Keyboards
Posts: 4977 from 2009/1/28
From: Delaware, USA
Personally, I'm surprised that they went with a company that is producing a processor that will not continue to be developed. While I was really excited by the announcement of PA Semi's PPC processor, once they were bought by Apple and announced that their processor would continue to be supplied for existing designs but not further developed, I figured it wouldn't make sense to develop new hardware based on that product.
Just yesterday I contact a UK company that builds PPC boards (mainly because the head of the company had designed an XMOS based PCIe sound card). He basically discouraged me from looking into the PA Semi based board he had designed because he was having trouble obtaining the processors. I don't understand how A-EON is able to secure these. The last time I heard a statement from PA Semi, they were only assuring a supply of processors to important contacts (like military applications).
That's why I assumed that the processor would be Titan based. Applied Micro has finally gotten these into production and intends to continue to develop the line. While the PA Semi processor is pretty powerful, the Titan's no slouch and it is low power and able to be passively cooled.
While Applied Micro's not promoting their processor for PC application, they seem well suited to our use and they're being produced by one of the few companies still developing lower end PPC processors. I'm also really impressed with the new gating technology AMs licensed for these products. It's allowed them to build a low draw product on a cheap, mature 90nm process. As 65 and 45nm processes mature, AM should be able to allow Titan scale the processor's speed up.
If I had my say, any new MorphOS board would be based on these processors (not PA Semi's).
I willing to bet that many of the readers on this site feel the same way. Probably due to the fact that MorphOS users have more common sense the AOS users.
"Never attribute to malice what can more readily explained by incompetence"