> I have pretty much dismissed anything with a P suffix as dated

But you're still going to buy the P5-based X5000, right? :-)

> Surprising to see that *they are actually able* to cancel bad ideas!
> This is a skill they should practice a lot more often.

https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?forum=3&topic_id=7001&start=791 :-)

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Oddly enough, yes.
But then the replacement for that processor is a T series.
I should have given that more consideration, and mentioned the specific cores involved.
Since Freescale introduced the e5500 and e6500, I have seen no reason to utilize older designs.

Ah, you DO keep me on my toes, Andreas.
Believe it or not, I value that.
After all, who wants to be wrong?

[ Edited by Jim 29.06.2015 - 07:07 ]

Quote:

Ah yes, prefix, great another example of my "mastery" of my native tongue.

And yes, the X3500 was definately a mistake.
Not sure what the Varisys/A-eon crew was thinking when they planned a board around that cpu.

> the X3500 was definately a mistake. Not sure what the Varisys/A-eon crew
> was thinking when they planned a board around that cpu.

They did not plan a separate board for the P3041 but intended to benefit from the pin compatibility between the P3 and the P5. So they would have taken the same Cyrus (Plus) PCB and simply soldered the P3 there instead of the P5.

https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?forum=3&topic_id=7001&start=789

Most likely the too small price difference keeps also X5000/10 out of scope.
It seems a-eon mentioned that there is two project being worked on around lower cost system.
(I imagine it's the co-operation with ACube and that we might see a design that can hold T10xx or T2081. Can be also with extra co-operation with the ppc laptop team.)

Addendum:

> QorIQ P5040 and P5021 announced [...]: [...]
>
> http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=P5040
> http://www.freescale.com/files/graphic/block_diagram/P5040_BD_IMG.jpg
> http://www.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/fact_sheet/P50405021FS.pdf
> http://www.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/reports_presentations/P5040OVRVWPRES.pdf
> http://www.freescale.com/files/training/doc/dwf/DWF13_APF_NET_T0560.pdf
>
> SerDes lanes count has been upped to 20 (up from 18 on P5020/P5010) with 2 of them
> reserved for SATA [...].

There seems to be some ambiguity whether or not the number of SATA controllers of P5040/P5021 has been reduced since the announcement from 2 to 1. The text on the product website (link above) and the data sheet (May 2014) still say it's 2, whereas the block diagram (April 2014, link above) on the product website and the fact sheet (May 2014, link above) show only 1.
A-Eon's core Linux support team member Darren "Daz" Stevens says it's just 1 SATA controller on the P5040:

http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=40345&forum=16&start=80#763902

If so, it won't really be pin compatible. Maybe this will affect availability of a potential future 4-core version of the "X5000"? Not that it matters from an Amiga point of view...

> If so, it won't really be pin compatible.

There are more differences (e.g. number of SerDes lanes, number of PCIe controllers) as outlined by me in my original posting back then. http://www.freescale.com/files/training/doc/dwf/DWF13_APF_NET_T0560.pdf (also linked to back then) shows even more differences on page 11 (albeit that's still with 2 SATA controllers on P5040/P5021).
You are correct that pin compatibility is not 100% which means that while designing a common board for both is perfectly possible it would require some compromises to be made. (That's btw. similar to MPC7447(A) and MPC7448, which are also not 100% pin compatible.)
If one can live with the compromises, then a common board can be used for both P5020 and P5040. If not, the board design must be slightly altered for the P5040.

> Maybe this will affect availability of a potential future 4-core version of the "X5000"?

It may be that the Cyrus Plus boards will be slightly different for P5020 and P5040 in order to make the best of both SoCs and not restrict the capabilities of any of them.

Quote:

Like settling with the lowest common denominator in those areas, like only having 1 SATA, etc. However, AFAIK the "X5000" has 2, so they obviously didn't do that...

Quote:

Even if they don't have to start from scratch (far from it), it would still mean going back to the drawing table to design, prototype and test a de facto new/different motherboard. This could be time consuming and since they will pay a commercial company for doing all this and for all their "man-hours" put into the work, it will add cost that may very well be quite noticeable on the consumer end price for an extremely low volume piece of HW like this will be.

That was not the plan. The plan was to have one motherboard design, and then simply put one of the two pin compatible CPU chips in it, in order to create two "different" product options, with no extra cost other than for the other CPU.

Quote:

I think it may be quite probable that the 4-core gets cancelled altogether. The "X5000" is very expensive as it is, and upping the price tag even more just to gain two additional cores that will never be used in an Amiga context seems weird. So I don't think it will happen...

> Like settling with the lowest common denominator in those areas, like only having 1 SATA

In case of SATA you could route both interfaces where both work in case of the P5020 and only one works in case of the P5040. Whether this is possible depends on which signals are on the respective P5040 pins that are for the 2nd SATA on the P5020 and whether the function of these signals shall be used or can be switched off. I don't know these details in case of the P5 family, though.

> The plan was to have one motherboard design, and then simply put one of the two
> pin compatible CPU chips in it, in order to create two "different" product options

The original plan was with even 3 different CPUs (P3041, P5020, P5040).

> to gain two additional cores that will never be used in an Amiga context

...and 200 additional MHz ;-)

Quote:
really? what's the price?

-- eliyahu

> Then there are the new PPC476FP based products Andreas has mentioned.

Besides the Axxia series from LSI/Avago/Intel and the CCFC9000 from C*Core, there are apparently further PPC476FP-based SoCs, which somehow went under my radar for years. They have been made by none other than IBM. These SoCs are the PPC476FPE from 2011 and the PPC476GTR from 2013. Information is really sparse but that's what I could find out:

PPC476FPE:
1.6 GHz, dual-core, 3x PCIe, 1x I²C

PPC476GTR:
1.6 GHz, dual-core, 4x PCIe, 2x I²C, 1x SDHC, 1x SATA, 1x USB2, 2x USB1.1, Ethernet

Links:
http://lists.ozlabs.org/pipermail/linuxppc-dev/2011-November/094464.html
http://lists.ozlabs.org/pipermail/linuxppc-dev/2011-December/094542.html
http://lists.ozlabs.org/pipermail/linuxppc-dev/2011-December/094543.html
http://lists.ozlabs.org/pipermail/linuxppc-dev/2013-November/113051.html
http://lists.ozlabs.org/pipermail/linuxppc-dev/2014-March/115797.html
http://lists.ozlabs.org/pipermail/linuxppc-dev/2014-March/115801.html
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:lists.ozlabs.org+ppc476fpe+OR+476fpe+OR+currituck
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:lists.ozlabs.org+ppc476gtr+OR+476gtr+OR+akebono
http://www.lauterbach.com/pdf/debugger_ppc400.pdf (page 58)

PPC476GTR?
Wow, that IS a hard one to get info on.
I just contacted IBM tech support and got the equivalent of 'huh?'.
And a reference to a different support line.

IBM REALLY doesn't want to market components.

I really like Trevor Dickinson and Matthew Leaman of A-Eon, but I worry a little about the choices they have made for new system hardware. That, plus the snails pace that Hyperion is able to complete ports to new hardware is a recipe for failure, but perhaps there are still enough devoted AmigaOS4.x users to purchase X5000 and A1222 systems, to save A-Eon from losing so much money that Trevor gets discouraged to the point of giving up his dream to provide hardware that keeps AmigaOS4.x development alive.

If by some miracle A-Eon sells out all the X5000 and A1222 systems they have planned to produce over the next couple of years, and IF A-Eon decides to continue building custom PPC systems in the future, I would hope that they get better advice from someone outside of Varisys (someone like Andreas Wolf & Jim), who has done tons of research on what is available, but is also well aware of the needs and wants of our community.

[ Edited by amigadave 20.01.2016 - 13:36 ]

Quote:

No shit?




Quote:

I think the meaning of the word "insane" is finally starting to sink into you...




Quote:

I can't believe anyone is actually cheering for the corporate side that is actually making insane decisions at the expense of devoted (blind?) Amiga enthusiasts who will litterally buy anything they would offer, as long as someone say it's (well...cough...kind-of..) AMIIIIGAAA!!!!1!

They have made everything wrong. Everything! I (kind of) understand they fealt some need to shoulder some kind of responsibilit of OS4 development (HW side (*and* SW side as well, come to think of it)) given the fact that the OS4 project did litteraly crash and burn years ago (obvious to everyone but a few). But they have mislead a great number of people into buying into (with LOTS of dollars/euros) a future that is basically a dead-end. And the product they sold were excessively expensive to develop (by paying premium price to Varisys) given the low volume, and they had some really insane design decisions, like the whole Xorro/Xena/Whatever stuff that not even they themselves know what it's there for, and some very strange choices of CPU's! And they have done all this repeatedly! That's the definition of insane in my books!

And here you are hoping that *they* won't lose money, that "enthusiasts" will fill their pockets (at the expense of any alternatives, past present or future) so that they can do it all over again? When will you realise there is no plan? AeonKit are not even official decision makes on behalf of the OS4 platform! At this point, probably no-one is!

OS4 should have supported the same Mac models that MorphOS did. Then they should have strived for x64 move, with modern features like SMP and full 64-bit computing, ISA move, etc.

But it won't happen. Because then came the "Tabor", with *a whole new level* of stupid.

All this prevents a real future for the OS4 platform, the OS4 no-future dead-end direction is nurtured by the few misguided people with too much money at hand who actually buys what AeonKit eventually manage to get out the door.

> the product they sold were excessively expensive to develop [...] given the low volume

These two things are independently of each other, which is the very reason for the high sales price.

> they had [...] some very strange choices of CPU's!

The CPU choice for Tabor is a real mystery, yes, whereas I think the choices for Nemo and Cyrus were sensible at the time they were arrived at.

Quote:

@TMHG,

I won't bother even responding to your ridiculous rants, other than to say, you think you know it all and have the only valid perspective, but I assure you that you do not.

@A_Wolf,

I agree with you that the only CPU choice that is puzzling, given the time frame the choices were made, is the CPU in the Tabor A1222, and that I blame on Varisys probably giving Trevor and Matthew bad, or at least, uninformed advice. The people at Varisys don't have prior Amiga experience and probably don't keep up to date on the conversations in our community. Why the fact that the CPU used in the Tabor would be a problem, not having a supported FPU, escaped the notice of Trevor and Matthew could probably just be due to neither of them being hardware guys and under estimating the problem. I am pretty sure that the guys at Varisys would have dismissed it as even being a problem, and probably just told Trevor and Matthew that it was an easy software fix or work around.

Edit: Until the Tabor is actually released running AmigaOS4.1FE, no one can really say how much of a performance problem the FPU will be.

[ Edited by amigadave 20.01.2016 - 18:12 ]

Quote:

That seems likely.
I'm very fond of Paul and his team, but the market that most of their hardware faces is Linux (or embedded applications).

Amigoid OS do present more of a challenge.

As to the date of the decision, it would appear to have been made before the low cost e5500 cpus were available, so the e500 based cpu makes sense.

> As to the date of the decision, it would appear to have been made before
> the low cost e5500 cpus were available, so the e500 based cpu makes sense.

Before availability, but certainly after announcement, so they should have waited.

https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?forum=3&topic_id=11387&start=122

Quote:

I certainly wish they had waited.
But at the time they had no idea that the T10XX line would be priced so economically.

I fear if we don't go for this one ourselves, that we may not see it utilized.
I really don't understand Aeon's decision to use their first 32 bit processor.

But the X5000 still holds its appeal.

Addendum:

> Hyperion now claims this:
> "22 October 2007
> ACube's Sam440ep released for end users with a beta version of AmigaOS 4.0"
> http://www.amigaos.net/content/10/history-amigaos
>
> Does anybody remember this? I clearly don't. AFAIR there was never ever OS4.0 for any
> Sam board available (at least not for end users). What am I missing here?

Others getting curious years later:

http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=40882&forum=14&start=120#777771
http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=40882&forum=14&start=140#777773

Quote:

Can you clarify the above statement Jim? I don't know what you were trying to express with that sentence.

>> I certainly wish they had waited. But at the time they had no idea
>> that the T10XX line would be priced so economically. I fear if we
>> don't go for this one ourselves, that we may not see it utilized.

> Can you clarify the above statement Jim? I don't know what you were
> trying to express with that sentence.

I'm not Jim but I guess reading the following comments may shed some light:

http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=40882&forum=14&start=240#778132
http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=40882&forum=14&start=240#778134
http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=40882&forum=14&start=240#778163
http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=40691&forum=2&start=400#780141
http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=40691&forum=2&start=400#780185
http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=40691&forum=2&start=400#780191
http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=40691&forum=2&start=400#780204
http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=40691&forum=2&start=400#780212


Edit: added more links

[ Edited by Andreas_Wolf 20.03.2016 - 07:46 ]

Quote:

Well, that is a pretty concise group of posts to sum things up.
Looked into it, didn't get the response or encouragement I'd hoped for.
Shelved it.