Hey Pegasos fans!!!...

How about a PegasosII PPC Laptop? How much would you give for such beast? What name should it have? What should the specs be etc?

Since MorphOS allready have ATI support, there shouldn't be any problem in getting some great deals with ATI etc.

Wouldnt it be nice to show of MorphOS in a more portable way? Show how fast and flexible it is?

I would happy pay 15000,- for a G4 1GHz PegasosII laptop. No problem at all.

Any comments, any ideas? Let them come now! Let us show that we as the consumers want it!...


Regards,
Michal, Amitopia editor

Hi Morphdelf,

it's not as easy. To be able to do a pegasos laptop first Genesi needs to built a new board with CPU and GFX integrated. This will happen but not in the near futur.

T

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A laptop would be nice. But there are other more important things to do, like new MOS-Features, full usage of the existing hardware...

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15000,- sloty, turkish lira, or what?

This is NOT official Genesi or bPlan word :)

"Great deals with ATI" are nothing to do with driver support. You just need to buy lots and lots and lots of chips.

Pricing on the MOBILITY 9200 is around the same as the 7000 chip used in the A1-Lite - so that pretty much secures that :)

For a laptop it would be intriguing, due to the lack of need for a pluggable processor, to design a board which used a System on Chip rather than a "desktop" processor. Freescale (8520) offer lots of choices with integrated DDR controllers, gigabit ethernet etc. All you need on top of that in the basic other ports - a PCI USB controller (NEC is a good bet), a PCI Firewire controller (Via VT6306), a PCI SerialATA controller (Marvell or Promise) and a Cardbus controller (everyone uses Texas Instruments..) you get the picture. No need for an integrated southbridge since the CPU contains all the peripheral buses etc.

Once PCI-Express comes along it reduces the size of boards significantly due to the serial bus. Also this would be implementable;

http://www.expresscard.org/

The more likely process is to create a small low-profile totally integrated board (much smaller than mini-ITX or nano-ITX) with LVDS port, which just-so-happens to be able to fit into a laptop-style chassis with a commonly available LCD panel. Or a tablet chassis. Or in a kiosk. Or in a car..

I wouldn't count on a specific Genesi laptop since it requires designing elaborate cooling solutions, casing (both mechanical and artistic design) and so on. bPlan are a hardware shop, not an arthouse.

Neko

>For a laptop it would be intriguing, due to the lack of need for a pluggable processor, to design a board
>which used a System on Chip rather than a "desktop" processor. Freescale (8520) offer lots of choices

Yes, but I'd rather have a 86xx with decent Altivec instead of some cripple CPU core.
Also please use DDR2 Ram because it needs less power than DDR1

Btw, does anyone else think Freescale's website is a horrible POS where you cannot find anything and have to register/login to even see their products?

Hi MorphDelf, a peggy laptop could be very interesting, but with all the problems listed by the guys, you know that a 2.5" HD gets 4200 rpm, so quite slow to multimedia apps (animation, video editing and HDrecording).

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Nano-ITX or pc104 isn´t small enough?
I say it´s small enough for most things except PDAs.

The 8540 isn't "crippled", SPE is a specific OTHER vector engine designed for specific (Signal Processing) applications. It's less complex and less power-hungry than AltiVec.

http://www.simdtech.org/home

While "signal processing" for you might entail crap like GSM phones or accepting weird-data from a logging application, the term "signal processing" DOES also include MPEG decoding, encoding and multiplexing. Anything you can buy a specific external DSP for nowadays (mpeg, whatever), SPE is designed to replace and therefore cost-reduce systems.

In fact SPE is just like an easier to program version of Intel's MMX and original SSE (integer and single-precision respectively). Many many Pentium systems get by fine with SSE, and many many G3 systems get by fine without ANY form of SIMD processing.

Freescale's site works fine, it's actually better than Motorola's used to be :D

Neko

Nano-ITX is 12cm by 12cm. That is quite a large board! 12cm would be QUITE deep for a modern laptop keyboard.

You're closer with pc104 though. It's 3/4 of the size of the Nano-ITX specification by default. However.. imagine if we made something smaller (remember in a laptop or tablet, or on the back of a monitor (hello Steve!) you need to leave room for the hard disks etc.).

Remember not all the chips have to be on the top of the board in an embedded system (some PC manufacturers do this too but that's them being CHEAP rather than space-conserving ;)

[ Edited by Neko on 2004/9/17 14:37 ]

Fine, let's say the 8540 is not crippled, still the embedded Book E designs seem to operate in a different manner compared to the PPCs we are used to work with and I am not so sure they will suffice for every task you now use an iBook/Powerbook for (plus they seem to be limited to 833MHz atm).
Motorola writes that SPE insctructions will not be supported in devices subsequent to PowerQUICC III while Altivec scales from G4 over G4+ to G5 already.
As for power-hungriness, the "typical" specs for a current G4 seem to be 5.2-5.5W at 600MHz, your 8540 comes down to 5.3-5.9W at this clock and if I am not mistaken the current Pegasos 750CXe-600 Chip also needs 6W.

What are you talking about now tarbos.. like you've known any of that for more than 12 hours.

I had to teach you what Book E was on IRC last night, and you know it.

Anyway, I said SoC.. not necessarily the 8540 (which is top of the line right now, which is why I said it..). If you want to pick a SoC that's available now, and pick one that is better than the 8540, you will have a hard time finding it.

Newer, better, in-development designs would be a better focus. But we're not allowed to talk about them.

How about we drag the conversation along by the skin of our NDAs, and discuss why using desktop processors in laptops with huge northbridges and southbridges is a bad idea?

Neko

>Anyway, I said SoC.. not necessarily the 8540 (which is top of the line right now, which is why I said it..).
>If you want to pick a SoC that's available now, and pick one that is better than the 8540, you will have a hard time finding it.

What about that IBM 440SP Chip with DDR2-667 memory controller, 3 PCI-X 266 busses, XOR engine for RAID5 and Gigabit?
Throw in a dual-FPU like IBM did for their Blue Gene and off you go with a very high performance embedded SoC.

Regarding the 8540...at Arrow those at 667MHz cost 80% (!) more than a 7447A at 600MHz which is indisputably too much.
That Motorola can do cheap SoCs they have proven with the Coldfire MCF5475 which integrates a 266MHz Processor with 32Bit 33/66MHz PCI, DDR266 Ramcontroller, 480MBit USB2, several programmable serial controllers, 2x 100Mbit Ethernet and an encryption engine - for a mere 23USD.

It's an alternative.

The 440SP is now actually made by another company. To IBM it's merely a "legacy product".

The simple fact about pricing is, tarbos, you don't know crap about microprocessor pricing.

If you remove the Via southbridge, Marvell northbridge and the other things the 8540 replaces on the Pegasos, don't you think the price looks more reasonable even at first glance?

By the way, we don't make Coldfire systems. PowerPC. PowerPC. PowerPC.

Neko

Neko, don't you understand everything wrong by intention!

If you know so much about pricing why don't you share your precious wisdom with us? I just followed the "buy from distributor" links which were next to the products in question.
Removing the VIA leaves you without a masstorage controller, USB or sound chip which are conveniently integrated into the southbridge atm (but I admit it sucks for its age).

>By the way, we don't make Coldfire systems. PowerPC. PowerPC. PowerPC.

I guess the 8540 must be something in between.