Pegasos2 Specifications at IBM

[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

[EDS.bod]

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

Guess that rules out me using my 3000M pixel/s and 70M polygon capable Radeon 9700pro then :-(

[zacman]

>Guess that rules out me using my 3000M pixel/s
>and 70M polygon capable Radeon 9700pro then

No, the fact that there are no drivers for the Radeon
9600+ rules you out.

PS: The currently supported graphics cards for
MorphOS have been tested in a AGP x1 environment
and are working.

[Warface]

PS: The currently supported graphics cards for
MorphOS have been tested in a AGP x1 environment
and are working.

Now that quite settles the question. Thanks for the clarification.

[Casper]

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.

This is only half the truth. You forget that you actually have to get the textures uploaded to the graphics card memory. As Hammer points out there are many games today that use many high-res textures in a scene. Add to that that many newer games use mulitexturing (i.e. several layers of textures on the same polygon to achive e.g lighting and bumpmapping effects). So there's a whole lot of texture data that needs to be transfered to the memory for a complex 3D-scene.

[cdfr]

So there's a whole lot of texture data that needs to be transfered to the memory for a complex 3D-scene.

And where are they loaded from ?
HD, CDROM ?
The best hard drives (SCSI Ultra 320 15000 RP) hardly support 80 MB/s. AGP * 1 is 256 MB/s.
Texture may be compressed so you could eventualy get higher speed than your CD/HD. Still 256 MB offers a good margin.

[Eric_Z]

If Genesi uses the MV64361 controller then why do the
only have one Gb ethernet port, and why no PCI-X slots?
Or does the MV64361 only have one PCI-X controller?
And wasn't it supposed to have a 200Mhz fsb and a DDR400 controller?

I'm guessing that this is due to  cost considerations,
which is nice in a way but it has put it off my list of desireable hardware.
The sad part (for me) is  that I was looking forward to buying it if
Genesi could get OS4 ported to it, now I guess that I'll
have to wait untill the A1-light is released to get a nice
speced and priced mobo
(or the peg-III if OS4 will be available and the price is right).

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: http://www.marvell.com/products/communication/discoveryII/MV64360.jsp

The Discovery II MV64361 controller offers a 72-bit DDR
memory controller with a 183 MHz clock rate (366 MHz data rate),
on-board 2 Megabits SRAM, dual 32-bit PCI/PCI-X interfaces,
PCI bridge and arbiter, two 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet controllers,
two multi-protocol serial channels, and TWSI and interrupt controllers.

Key Features
High-performance controller for PowerPC-based communications systems

* 64-bit 133 MHz 60X/MPC CPU bus interface
* 72-bit (64-bit with 8-bit ECC) 183 MHz DDR SDRAM controller
* Dual 64-bit 66 MHz PCI /133 MHz PCI-X interfaces (for MV64360)
= >* Dual 32-bit 66 Mhz PC/133 Mhz PCI-X Interfaces (for MV64361)
* Single 64-bit 66 Mhz PCI/133 MHz PCI-X interface (for MV64362)
* Advanced internal crossbar fabric
* 32-bit 133 MHz peripheral device bus interface

Integrated 2 Megabits SRAM (MV64360 and MV64361 only)
Advanced communications unit

* One 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet controllers with packet filtering and priority queuing (for MV64362)
= >* Two 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet controllers with packet filtering and priority queuing (for MV64361)
* Three 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet controllers with packet filtering and priority queuing (for MV64360)
* Two Multi-Protocol Serial Controllers (MPSC)

64-bit PowerPC CPU bus interface

* Motorola MPC750, 755, 74xx and IBM PPC750, 750CXe, 750FX processor support
* 60x and MPX bus protocol support
* 133 MHz CPU bus frequency (2.5v or 3.3v configuration)
* Configurable cache coherency
* Supports split-read transactions with out-of-order completion

[zacman]

>And wasn't it supposed to have a 200Mhz fsb and a
>DDR400 controller?

That's Díscovery III (MV6446x).

[System]

If Genesi uses the MV64361 controller then why do the only have one Gb ethernet port

There's only enough space on the back for a certain number of slots and sockets. There's the original VIA Rhine ethernet device there for compatibility with everything else.

and why no PCI-X slots?

Do you know where to buy any?

If the answer to any of those is "no", then this is why you do not need PCI-X slots, and why they are not provided. There is also the issue that PCI-X slots are longer than PCI slots, and there isn't enough space on the board. Anyway. You don't need them.

~~

As for other stuff: AGP 1x is fine.

There is no game on the planet that does a forced AGP transfer for texturing for every frame, unless it is starved of video memory. With a 64MB card, this doesn't happen very often.

The same can be said of vertex buffer objects, which means that certain transformable vertices (i.e. raw data to be manipulated by the tnl engine) can be stored in video memory anyway, saving transfers for whole swathes of vertex data.

A PCI Radeon or GeForce 4 card performs identically to the AGP versions, apart from initial texture loading (maybe at the beginning of a level.. that progress bar will stay for longer) and in starved situations.

Quite rare these days unless you're running 32bit 1600x1200, 32bit Z-Buffer, 8-bit Stencil buffer, 4xFSAA, and have 60MB of raw texture data.

There are texture compression techniques which can be employed, Z buffer compression techniques, and many other things, which means most AGP-capable cards rarely touch the AGP bus because in fact it is highly discouraged

AGP 8x and so on is a pandering to the onboard chip manufacturer, where video RAM *is* system RAM and is *always* transferred across the AGP bus. If you noticed, these chips allocate some pitiful 16MB (4, 8 are not uncommon either), and are also very common on most motherboards anyway.

With 133MHz DDR (i.e. DDR266, PC2100) memory you can saturate your AGP bus completely with those rates. Now that most PC motherboards come with DDR400 memory capability, dual channel options, AGP becomes a slow tortoise to the memory's rabbit.

Slowly but surely, it gets there. Since upping to 8x is easy and gives Intel and SiS and VIA something to increase the speed of their commodity internal graphics architectures, they did it.

That doesn't mean it makes a great deal of difference to your Radeon. As such, it makes barely a difference to the Pegasos.

[Eric_Z]

Do you know where to buy any?

Yes.

There is also the issue that PCI-X slots are longer than PCI slots, and there isn't enough space on the board. Anyway. You don't need them.

The space requirements I can understand and respect but why do you feel that you can tell me what I need and do not?

Anyway good luck to you with the sales of the peg-II
and the design work for the peg-III(please try and get OS4 ported to it). :-)

[dammy]

Poster: bbrv Date: 2003/10/9 4:45:10

Question for you BBRV:  If AGP 1x is good enough, why not have the gfx onboard?  I realize that your pressed for time and doing minimal differences between Peg1 and Peg2 for cost/time savings, but could future versions of the Peg2 have gfx onboard?  Atleast that would end the bitching coming from the Red Trolls for awhile.

Dammy

[Seehund]

@dammy:

If AGP 1x is good enough, why not have the gfx onboard?

I guess Neko's reply explained that. Onboard gfx would share the system RAM, making all GPU <-> RAM transfers happen across that "slow" AGP bus.
That's one reason, at least with regards to AGP speed.

Edit:
I understand there are onboard video chipsets that have built-in video RAM. How much built-in RAM is common?
Are there any mobos with onboard video that also have physically separate and fast onboard video RAM?

[MarkTime]

8x is faster than 1x....its the purpose of the whole numbering system, to give you a quick idea about the bus capacity.

but bbrv is correct, its not the issue.  there are few drivers for cards....there are few games to run on those cards....

people are going to run into many issues before they ever run into an issue about an agp bus bottleneck...

the most important thing, was having an AGP slot, because PCI cards are getting rare and limit your choices even more.

[dammy]

Poster: Seehund Date: 2003/10/9 10:28:42

I guess Neko's reply explained that. Onboard gfx would share the system RAM, making all GPU <-> RAM transfers happen across that "slow" AGP bus.
That's one reason, at least with regards to AGP speed.

But how many games are out there for MOS or Linux that actually run slow because of the shared bus?  I really don't see that as a big minus when it could be freeing up a slot.

Dammy

[Seehund]

@Dammy

I see what you mean.
Personally, in an either-or situation, I'd prefer an AGP slot over on-board graphics. That's just my personal preference, but since the PegII is supposed to be a "geek" mobo I guess it's also a general preference on its intended market. Pick and mix. It's got most things people need/expect onboard already, so 3 PCI slots on a micro-ATX mobo sounds OK to me.

[Casper]

@Neko

AGP 8x and so on is a pandering to the onboard chip manufacturer, where video RAM *is* system RAM and is *always* transferred across the AGP bus. If you noticed, these chips allocate some pitiful 16MB (4, 8 are not uncommon either), and are also very common on most motherboards anyway.

I'm no motherboard engineer but it seems to me that the nVidia nForce 2 motherboards with onboard GeForce 4 graphics don't work this way. It uses the systembus for graphics and uses separate memory controllers for the graphics subsystem and the CPU which both can use the bus at the same time. They're also not limited to 16Mb graphics memory. My AOpen board lets me set the amount of memory to reserve for graphics in the BIOS. The default setting is 64MB, but I can set it to 128Mb at least. I only have 256Mb in that machine, so I can't go higher because there would be no system memory left so I don't know what the actual upper limit is, if there is one.