Pegasos2 Specifications at IBM

[Kees]

The specs of the Pegasos 2 have been made public at IBM's Site.

"Genesi's new hardware platform is called Pegasos. Genesi's engineers have created an open hardware platform based on the CHRP motherboard standard for the PowerPC and selected Open Firmware so that many operating systems can work easily on the Pegasos platform. "

Click on 'functional discription' to see the specs or read below.

MicroATX motherboard
Marvell Discovery II System Controller (MV64361)
VIA peripheral controller (VT8231)
CPU on daughter card
Supports PowerPC CPUs from IBM and Motorola
DDR RAM PC 2100 / DDR266
2X Ethernet ports (1x1Gbit and 1x10/100Mb)
3 X Firewire USB 1.1
2 X ATA 100
AC97 Audio (Line In / Line Out / Headphone Out)
SPDIF Out
AGP x1 port
3 X PCI slots
Riser connector for 1st PCI slot

[Wilse]

Excellent bit of publicity.

:pint:

[angrybrit]

What I wanna know is what speed is the AGP port? :-?

[Argo]

Um, looks like 1x speed. I assume we'll have a clarification or comment (ie. damage control) soon from BBRV.

USB 2.0 would have been nice.

[whabang]

I'd ssume that it is at least a 2x-port. ( I doubt that P2 will have worse specifications than it's predecessor)

[KennyR]

It's 1x speed. (Edit: or at least looks very like it)

Some interesting statements on Ann. BBRV puts a nice point across that 1x is good enough and that the bus doesn't really matter any more. However, somebody also says that ATI's cards only work on 2x...

Whabang, the reason Peg-1 had AGP 2x was Articia. However, bPlan dropped this chip, labelling it with the nice title "a piece of buggy crap" and went for Marvell instead. This has no AGP and so it had to be added with logic. This would be why the AGP in Peg-2 is 1x.

[minator]

As posted on ANN:


Unless there has been some horrible miss-communication yes it's a x1 (speed) AGP slot.
   
However there is always a twist in the tail...

This AGP x1 is no slower than the AGP x2 in the Pegasos 1 for the simple fact that the Articia cannot read from memory at AGP x2 speeds, in fact the fastest we've measured is lower than AGP x1, The G4 is faster but not significantly so.
   
However if you know anything about graphics or the history of AGP slots you'll also know it's unlikely to make any difference whatsoever.
   
AGP was originally invented because video memory at the time was highly expensive and the card firms couldn't more than 4MB on a card as a result.  As games became more complex they needed more textures and these would not fit into 4MB so AGP was added as a fast path to main memory to fetch textures.  Fast forward to now and video memory is dirt cheap in comparison and the textures are held on the card with essentially no need for AGP.
   
I doubt it makes any difference in FPS at all as the most intensive part of the graphics pipeline, rasterisation (i.e. drawing) is done on the card itself, this doesn't go anywhere near the AGP bus.
   
   
The only application I know of which actually requires huge bandwidth to a graphics card is Raw HDTV playback at 140MB / Second, AGP x1 can handle that but I doubt many Pegasos owners have the large SCSI array required to play it...
   
--
   
Regarding the other specs there's nothing anyone should be surprised about, changing anything else other than the NorthBridge would have delayed the Pegasos II by months and probably put the cost up.
   
--
   

   
   
Nicholas Blachford
Genesi France.

[KennyR]

From ATI's site:

RAGE 128 PRO, RADEON, and newer products are keyed "Universal AGP" and may operate in AGP 1.0 and AGP 2.0 compliant motherboards. RAGE 128 PRO, RADEON, and newer products are keyed "Universal AGP" and may operate in AGP 1.0 and AGP 2.0 compliant motherboards.

That can be found here.

Remember that AGP2.0 is not 2x. I can't find anywhere that says Radeon won't work on 1x.

Radeons will continue to work on Pegasos-2, and the bus will be faster on Peg-2 than it was on Peg-1, despite the stated 2x bus.

[Dr_Bombcrater]

There are a couple of things regarding the AGP port that no-one seems to have picked up on:

First, what is the signalling voltage used on the AGP port? Real AGP 1x/v1.0 ports use 3.3v, which is incompatible with most new video cards as they need 1.5v. (this is the opposite of the voltage issue that stops AGP 2x cards working in 8x slots).

Second, is it really an AGP port or just a 66MHz PCI bus slot modified with a AGP connector and some kludged logic to cope with AGP cards? If it is then AGP features like DMA, Sidebanding and FastWrites will not work, or will be shaky. Anyone who remembers the AGP problems on the old MVP3 and Aladdin 5 PC chipsets will know what kludged AGP port logic can do to a system's stability.

If both of these issues affect the Peg2's AGP port then it'll never run anything more advanced than a Voodoo 3 reliably :-(

I hope Genesi can offer some reassurance than the Peg2 can run AGP 4x and 8x cards. If they can (and if OS4 gets ported to it) I'd buy one like a shot.  :-)

[Warface]

Um, looks like 1x speed. I assume we'll have a clarification or comment (ie. damage control) soon from BBRV.

As "damage control" it'd be sufficient to say what can we expect compared to a Pegasos I. What is better (and if there is anything) what is worse.

The news item appeared pretty unexpectedly, and quite late in the night (european time), and that gave place to the wildest speculations.

[Hammer]

AGP was originally invented because video memory at the time was highly expensive and the card firms couldn't more than 4MB on a card as a result. As games became more complex they needed more textures and these would not fit into 4MB so AGP was added as a fast path to main memory to fetch textures. Fast forward to now and video memory is dirt cheap in comparison and the textures are held on the card with essentially no need for AGP.

It does make a difference when the game exceeds the Video card’s memory i.e. UT2003 (details at least @ 1024x768 + “holy $hit” mode + 16 players) with 2019 custom map (very detailed Blade Runner style city map). This scenario exceeds NV25’s 64MB @DDR512 ram. AGP Graphic Aperture was set to 256MB (from 128MB). Main memory was PC3200 1GB(dual channel) with DDR400 FSB.

With Amiga’s games market, this issue may not be as important (due to the game titles with that kind of requirements does not exist). It would be a completely waste of time and money IF the AGP8X doesn’t boost some aspects of the heavy games titles.

[bbrv]

Well, speed and the number of ports are two different things, but anyway the performance comes out of the GFX card.  It would be the absolutely technical overkill from a component requirement (and cost) to have more.  Today's graphics cards do not use the AGP bus to move texture data to the graphics core. The textures are stored inside the graphics card RAM. The only data that is transferred to the card are the coordinates for the graphic core. For this task the current bus speed (AGPx1 = PCI66) is ok. This bus can transfer 266MB/s, that is about 40M coordinates for textured triangles. With a estimated size of 20 pixel per triangle you can draw 800M pixel/s on the screen. With a resolution of 1600x1200 this is about 400 frames per second. You will NOT find a monitor that is capable of doing this.
   
The initial idea of the AGP bus was using the main memory as graphics RAM to save some cost. As today's performance expectations are going much behind the limit of this approach, the cards are using their own local memory.
   
More fun news coming from IBM soon...;-)

R&B  :-)

[Warface]

Will it have the same Graphic Card compatibility as the Pegasos I? I suppose a simple YES wil settle half of the worrying.

EDIT

By the way, out of interest:
1) Does Peg2 allow me to use various Radeon's as in Peg1, or will there be problems?
2) Will drivers for more modern Radeon's be implemented, or are we stuck to 9000 and less?

As Hooligan summarized nicely the uncertain issues raised on ANN.

[Hammer]

Today's graphics cards do not use the AGP bus to move texture data to the graphics core.

The need for "AGP Graphics Aperure Size" indicates otherwise...

References
http://www.tweak3d.net/articles/aperture-size/
http://support.gateway.com/s/MOTHERBD/shared/agpadap.shtml

With a estimated size of 20 pixel per triangle you can draw 800M pixel/s on the screen

That’s about Geforce 2 GTS level i.e. +1G pixel/s claim to fame.

[selco]

After a first look to the Specs I am a bit disappointed by the external interfaces...

"AC97 Audio (Line In / Line Out / Headphone Out)"
 Not even a  Microphone-In? Thats strange!  There must be more input-possibilities!

"SPDIF Out "
No SPDIF In? Why?

regards selco, http://Selco.da.ru