No Zylesea, theMPC 5125 eval board wasn't even close to what I was thinking off, but you've got a point. There are a few low cost evaluation boards, they just don't include the kind of processor I like to use.

OK! jcmarcos! You did mean what I thought you meant. That's cool.
I'll let you in on something that's not really a secret, several of us have repeatedly examined this idea.
Well, not just examined, really more like established contacts with company reps, obtained price quotess, did at least some preliminary design work.
Andreas is more familiar with this than I am. I spent time on inquiries with I BM and Freescale and went so far as to start the design of an MPC8640 based system (with an ATI SB600 Southbridge).
One of the few people I quizzed for feedback was Andreas (which is why I threw the question at him in this thread).
Another MorphOS contributor (who can talk to you himself or Andreas can reference) still has regrets about not following through with an 8610 based design.
I myself still think it might be a good idea (a new PPC motherboard) and I can see two possible sources for the processor (Freescale and Applied Micro), but there are some qualifiers.
Price is the biggest one. I gave up my design when G4 Mac support was announced. An MPC8640 design would have some advantages, but the ultimate clock speed would be lower than the G4s. And how are you going to compete with the price of Macs that are practically being given away? Ultimately, once you crunch the numbers, you realize that the price of the X1000 and Acube's products aren't as overpriced as everyone complains.
Low scale production of custom boards like this is expensive.
The other qualifier (and I'm sure there are more) is performance. While a few PPC processor are now being introduced that again have started pushing performance up, its still hard to beat the performance of the G5 (and again these systems are dirt cheap).

Think carefully about this,. It would be great to have a new system and the new options that would offer us (like PCI-e 2.0), but in practical terms- does it make good economic sense to invest a fairly large amount of money to produce something that will cost several times what an older platform (that would competently perform about as well) would? What is your market? Is it larger enough that you're not going to take a bath (financially)?

Genesi and Acube have pursued other markets than just the MorphOS market when developing new hardware. Can you do that? Are there the resources and time necessary to pull this off?

And its going to be a lot of work. Are you willing to commit that much of your life to this as it will obviously take?
All thoughts that have gone through my mind and still I find the idea tempting.

Anyone elses input on this would be gladly accepted. I don't know what the answer is. It would be nice, but how to do it, where to find the financial resources and how to organize it are all questions that still vex me.

Anyone?

[ Edited by Jim on 2010/12/30 15:28 ]