Priest of the Order of the Butterfly
Posts: 874 from 2003/3/4
From: #AmigaZeux, Gu...
Quote:
Andreas_Wolf wrote:
> Unresolved problems with the PCI and memory controller chip. Also known as "PPC is dead".
No, rather known as "Martin Schüler overestimated his skills when he decided to design his own northbridge chip instead of using a commercially available one". According to Alan Redhouse, the reason for this decision was one of economy (not of general availability or even reliability):
Indeed just reinforces my none-too-subtle message. If you can't even lift parts off the shelf and press out a board for a PPC CPU except by years of hardware hacking or paying stupid amounts of money to design custom parts, then PPC is dead.
Quote:
As you said yourself, the Teron-based AmigaOne came out significantly more expensive than the Escena AmigaOne was planned to be. So in hindsight, Escena could as well have designed their AmigaOne around a commercially available and reliable (but expensive in small quantities) northbridge chip instead and arrived at a more reliable but probably still cheaper (or equally expensive) board than the Teron was.
Schuler hadn't put
any chips on his board. Legend has it he went around Amiga shows with a bare PCB in his hands to show off ("9 layers!" screamed Amiga Inc, as if it mattered), hoping to put such functionality later. By the time he even started looking, he would have had to completely redesign the logic of his board or design his own chips to accommodate it.
That was when he was quietly dumped.
TL;DR: Schuler encountered the same issue everyone else has in using it. Because PPC is dead.
Quote:> But reducing the power and effectiveness far beneath what a desktop
> would require, and hence making them unsuitable for an Amiga role.
Amiga was never about high CPU performance
It was never about running a kiosk, LED signage, NAS, a washing machine frontpanel logic or such other embedded devices either. The Efika and Sam were at the absolute limit of CPU power required to run a desktop system. Freescale's later SoCs were even less than that.
