Troika Website Launch

[JoannaK]

asian1: For Automotive/car use it's not recommendable/optimal, cause it does not have desired chips.. In those environments you'll need to have specially designed chips with extra wide temparature range.. (see Freescale MPC5200 for comparision).


BillT: Yes.. it's possible to Stack various busses one after another .. but you should consider couple facts..
- Price .. each bus-bus bridge costs money and nees board space, wiring and support components.
- Speed. No matter how you'll add Pci-express atop of OLD Pci it's limited by the PCI bus as long as data needs to pass through it..

You'll can do the maths yourself .. This Troika card has *SINGLE* PCI-controller running at 33Mhz/32bit.. thus offering about 133MB/s theorethical max bandwidth.. Real delivery is only about 50-70% of maximun, so we can take 80MB/s. (megabytes)

Now we need to add together 2D/3D GFX-update-feed, Hard disk IO, USB, Ethernet etcetc.. and you'll soon see that sum will far exceed capabilities of single PCI-bus. (maths left for excercise to reader.. all numbers can be deduced or found on Web)  :-)

PS: I know that in above i'll mention Maximum values, but it's proof enough ... It would be possible to analyze awerage needs, response time/real time conflicts (usually audio drivers) etc..

PS2: I'm not saying it would not work. I'm only trying to remind people not expecting miracle performance out of it.

PS3: Did some editing.. Hopefully i managed to fix more spelling mistakes than make a new ones.

[Troika]

[d]You are making an assumption thinking that this ISN'T Eyetech. You never really know?[/d]

No we aren't Eyetech, but Alan is welcome to our motherboard.  How about marketing some in China?

[asian1]

> Extended Temperatures.

AFAIK there are versions of PowerPC 750 and TSI107 with extended temperatures from -40 Degree C to 85 Degree C. IMO this specification is sufficient for automotive / car (inside the dashboard) applications. There is also a MIL STD 883 version, but it's rather expensive.

But first Troika should provide details of the company (address, fax, phone, history, reputation, warranty, availability etc).

[ppc4me]

@billt:

>Anything we're going to see in our market will
>either use Articia or have to use an FPGA chip
>to build a PCI to AGP bridge, which is then
>limited to PCI bandwidth.

PCI-X 1.0 has the bandwidth of AGP4x.
Ole-Egil's prefered PPC440SPe chip provides
PCI-X 2.0 with a bandwidth similar to AGP8x.

>Pegasos2 does this, and that may be acceptable.

Are you sure?

>If so, why not just use a PCI to PCI-Express
>bridge and have the even newer graphics cards
>available to you?

Sure - only who writes the drivers and will they
be available for all systems that can make use of
that particular PCI-PCIe bridge card?

>If anyone would start a new design today, I'd
>say he's crazy to put any effort into an FPGA
>AGP bridge, as AGP is already on its way out.

Just a moment please - can you point me to the
"FPGA" on the Pegasos II board that according to
your opinion bridges the PCI to AGP?
I am not entirely sure there actually is one,
but maybe you have more insight...

[CodeSmith]

@joannak

The PCI bus in the TSI107 is a 66MHz bus:

http://www.tundra.com/Products/PowerPC/Tsi107/index.cfm

[ppc4me]

@Codesmith:

This may be the case, but the Troika board uses
a 33MHz bus (e.g. the slots are 5V-keyed which
only allows 33MHz) just like Pegasos II uses a
33MHz bus instead of the 133MHz the Discovery II
chip may provide.