ACube Systems

[mordock]

Bassano del Grappa (Italy) 10/01/2007 - Alternative Holding Group, Soft 3 and Virtual Works created today ACube Systems Srl, a company born to take care of the production and commercialisation of the Sam440ep product line.

Sam440ep will be the first manufactured motherboard. The heart of Sam is the PowerPC 440, a System On Chip (SoC) made by AMCC under a licence from IBM.
The main characteristic of a SoC system is the presence, together with the CPU, of a number of integrated peripherals which allow to build a complete system with a huge savings of both development and debug time, with less components and space used on the PCB. This also results in a significant cost reduction for the customer.
As a consequence, the board doesn't need the classical northbridge / southbridge combination because a part of their functionalities are implemented in the CPU, and the balance is provided by other components and devices.
The availability is planned for the first quarter of 2007.
The new company will continue to do research and development for current projects for the embedded and desktop markets.
More news will be made available in the next weeks through the company website www.acube-systems.biz.

[Louis Dias]

GPU?  How will it handle a GPU and sound card?  Will is support PCI & AGP or PCIe?

Otherwise, I can get more out of a Gamecube...

[AmiKit]

Otherwise, I can get more out of a Gamecube...

OS4 on Gamecube?  :lol:

[AlbyVai]

GPU? How will it handle a GPU and sound card? Will is support PCI & AGP or PCIe?

Need some info?  :-D
GPU (info from Bitplane magazine):
onboard chip ATI Radeon Mobility M9 (9000 family) with 64MB RAM DDR onchip.
Clock: GPU 250MHz, RAM 200MHz, RAM DAC 400MHz.
Max res 2D/3D 2048x1536 pixel.
Connectors: DVI, S-Video and VGA, LVDS (50 pins) on internal header.

Audio:
onboard chip Cirrus Logic CS4281. Codec AC'97 Cirrus Logic CS4299, DA 20 bit AD 18 bit.

Other:
one PCI connector (only 3,3V) and one mini-PCI (124pin type3)

Otherwise, I can get more out of a Gamecube...

LOL  :lol:

[Methanoid]

I think the price of the board needs to be LOW if they expect to make any success of it. Efika is £140/200€ - that is quite expensive. If this is LESS and includes graphics which it does then it might be a worthwhile buy, IMHO of course!  :-)

[weirdami]

so this is an amigaone, then?

[redrumloa]

so this is an amigaone, then?

It does not meet Zico specifications.

[itix]

so this is an amigaone, then?

Allegedly ACube stands for A^3 == AAA == Advanced Amiga Architecture.

[Louis Dias]

Poster: AmiKit  Posted: 2007/1/11 7:22:53

Quote:
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Otherwise, I can get more out of a Gamecube...

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OS4 on Gamecube?

The announcement said nothing of OS4.  For a standalone compiled application, no OS involved, I could get as much or more processing power out of a Gamecube running a homebrew app vs. the same for this ACube.  So if it costs anything over $200 with memory included, it's not worth it.

[Tomas]

I could get as much or more processing power out of a Gamecube running a homebrew app vs. the same for this ACube. So if it costs anything over $200 with memory included, it's not worth it.

But can you connect a hard drive and a keyboard+mouse to that gamecube? Will even nitendo let anyone run lets say a OS or a software application on it? I highly doubt so....
The gamecube is just a console, so no wonder why it is cheaper.
It hardly even has any ram, so how can you expect to run anything useful on it?

[Louis Dias]

http://www.gcdev.com/smf/
www.gc-linux.org

It doesn't matter what Nintendo "lets" you run on it.  You run what you want to run on it.

There is a 3rd party "Nintendo"-approved keyboard for Phantasy Star Online 1 & 2, also ps/2 adapters are available for the controller ports.  SD card adapters for the memory card ports.

There are already libraries that expose the entirety of the GC hardware for programming software...including an SDL library and using a filesystem from the DVD drive or SD card(FAT32).

Oh and with a $12 drive-chip you can boot straight from disc with no other additional hardware.  So for $12, an AROS Live CD could be booted.  A Wii version of the same chip is supposedly in development.

Homebrew GC software is already running on the Wii via Action Replay and an SD card adapter.

[Hans_]

Processing power wise the Sam440ep is actually slightly faster than the gamecube (if the specs/benchmarks are correct). No idea how the 3D graphics capabilities compare. It's a Radeon 9000 vs whatever the gamecube uses.

Hans

[Louis Dias]

Don't just look at clock speed.  The GC's main memory is accessed much faster and has programmable cache and a fair amount of it.  I also don't know the architectual differences between the IBM Gecko and the Freescale chip.  The Freescale being an embedded chip, I'd give the internal cpu architecture edge to the GC as well.

As for gpu's, we know the GC had done 15 million polygons/second in real time (Star Wars:RG2) and can do 8 texture operations per pass.  For 480p resolutions, it can hold it's own.

It's just a stepping stone to running on Wii hardware which offers a 50%-100% processing advantage to the GC.

[neon32]

@lou_dias

Well stick with your Gamecube then? lol

[sicky]

@neon32

Well stick with your Gamecube then

I was just gonna say where to stick his Gamecube, but you kinda beat me ;-)