Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: Boot_WB on September 26, 2005, 10:08:11 AM
-
For those interested, and with all caveats as to the reliability of release dates, etc here's the e-mail reply I got form Elbox last week regarding the Dragon Coldfire, questions and answers:
Hello,
> Have you decided yet the trade-up terms for mediator owners?
These terms will be send to all registered Mediator users
as soon as Dragon sales starts.
> Is there an update on the expected price of the Dragon?
Nothing changes. The suggested retail price will be 349 EUR + local VAT.
> How much longer before expected reelease to market?
Dragon 1200 boards should be in sales in October 2005.
The current info about DRAGON 1200 is being published at
http://www.elbox.com/news_04_12_17.html
Please do not hesitate to contact us if you need further assistance.
Thank you for using Elbox's online support services.
Best regards,
Support Department of ELBOX COMPUTER
Web site: http://www.elbox.com
Online Store: http://buy.elbox.com
>
> Thanks
>
>
>
> Richard
-
Don't like replying to my own thread but
:bump:
Elbox?
Nearly the middle of november now... did the coldfire chips arrive or not?
How come the website hasn't been updated since the end of september (the Elbox site says end of october, but damned if I can find anything which has changed).
I know Elbox has delivered in the past: mediator, powerflyer, USB..... I just want to know :-) :-? :-x :boohoo: Wahhhhhhh!!
-
it smells vapor...
________
UGGS (http://uggstoreshop.com/)
-
Perhaps they mistyped and meant to say October 2006.
Anyone tried to confirm the date given?
I have done this by mistake sometimes too. The date thing.
-
And even if they ship, how is it going to run the OS? Which version of the OS? I thought Coldfire was missing quite a few necessary 680x0 hardware registers. A co-processor perhaps??
-
I think Elbox are really starting to lose credibility now - SharkPPC, Dragon, MPEG-2 hardware decoder drivers for Mediator (been waiting 5 years for that one).
If you make an announcement, stick to it. If you aren't 100% sure that you can stick to it, keep quiet until you are. Look at Apple's example.
-
Lando wrote:
If you make an announcement, stick to it. If you aren't 100% sure that you can stick to it, keep quiet until you are. Look at Apple's example.
Agreed. Noone faults them for trying, but no updated pictures ever since the original carefully cropped ones appeared six months ago (or more). I sure hope this isn't vapor though it seems more so than the SharkPPC, which at least has precedent in the Mac world. Maybe it's just a ploy to sell their new 'Dragon-ready' D-Box tower. Who knows? On the software side, the USB Poseidon/Spider fiasco makes one wonder how they could be competent enought to code the OS to properly work on Coldfire; assuming they have a license to the source code.
-
I lost hope on the dragon long time ago.
Seems like vapor now...
-
Mythical hardware somehow reminds me of a Morrissey ditty from an old Smiths' song:
"I want the one I can't have and it's driving me mad..it's written all over my face."
-
In this case the problem is Freescale! Freescale is still shipping only samples, not production units yet.
The coldfire runs 680x0 code (less a couple of needed instructions)
-
metalman wrote:
In this case the problem is Freescale! Freescale is still shipping only samples, not production units yet.
I can buy the very chip they are using from Digi-Key. Freescale has been past shipping production units for a while.
Back in September, Elbox posted an update to their Dragon page saying they were going to be getting a batch in by the end of September and they hoped to put Dragons up for sale by the end of October. If the shipment of processors slipped you would think they would have said so (especially since someone asked about it on the Mediator list) and so far they have been silent.
It seems to me that they are stalling, the question is why.
-
You call DigiKey and see if you can *actually* get a ColdFire chip (now) that's the same type used in the Dragon.
What concerns me is the inability of the Dragon crew to respond to simple questions in a way that English-speakers can understand.
For example, they said they have 68060 compatibility, via emulation of instuctions not native to the ColdFire (addressing mdoes too I'd guess). The reason I don't have a 68060 card now, or a 68040 card for that matter, is that I want to keep broad compatibility with all Amiga software and that means that a 68030 was the chip for me. (I've seen too many things fail with a 68040 [I couldn't even find a patch to get arp.library and related ARP commmands to work reliably with a 68040]).
So I asked them about the 680x0 emulation they would be creating for their Dragon. Would it only emulate the 68060 with it's inherent incompatibilities and other issues? Or, since they're already using some emulation, would it offer fuller compatibility with the 68000 through 68030 and 040? Or would there be selectable modes for which processor type you could most closely emulate?
They never gave me an intelligible answer. Maybe they didn't understand me. If you want to support a machine you really ought to have a person on staff who can ttranslate English for you. I wish them the best and am eager to learn more about their Dragon. But they need to get their act together when it comes to dealing with the English speaking world and answering basic technical questions.
-
The Dragon is intendet for the poweruser, that is at least using an 68060 or 040/PPC now. Those kind of users don`t give a damn about software that doesn`t like the 68040/060, its too old / slow / obsolete anyway.
To make ist short the Dragon is not for you, as the compatibility even to an 68060 will be quite poor or, with an exact emulation, not much faster then the 68060.
This is all asumeing that the Dragon ever existed / will exist, what I highly doubt.
-
boing wrote:
You call DigiKey and see if you can *actually* get a ColdFire chip (now) that's the same type used in the Dragon.
They have them in stock. 76 of them to be precise. That's not a whole lot, but that number is typical for Digi-key. They only stock a whole bunch of a part if it's very popular.
They're probably using CF68KLIB which emulates all of the missing instructions. However, a few instructions have slightly different behaviors (the multiply instructions don't set flags for instance). CF68KLIB also does not emulate floating point (the floating point on coldfire is the standard 64-bit rather than the 80-bit provided by earlier 680X0 chips) because there's no way for an exception base emulation to account for the differences.
The people at Elbox probably can't answer the technical questions because they farmed out all of the design work.
-
The Dragon won't ever be released. It will be interesting, however, to see what excuse Elbox comes up with next.
-
Were there any rumors about Dragon 4000 lately? :-?
-
When I e-mailed them back in the beginning of March they said the following:
> I was also wondering if there was any estimated timeframe for the A3000/A4000 version that is mentioned in the FAQ.
There is not relaease date for A4000 version as yet.
This product is in the developement.
Of course, in that same e-mail they said the Dragon would be released on March 10th (which was just a week away when they wrote the e-mail) so I would take anything they said with a very large grain of salt.
-
boing wrote:
So I asked them about the 680x0 emulation they would be creating for their Dragon. Would it only emulate the 68060 with it's inherent incompatibilities and other issues? Or, since they're already using some emulation, would it offer fuller compatibility with the 68000 through 68030 and 040? Or would there be selectable modes for which processor type you could most closely emulate?
They never gave me an intelligible answer. Maybe they didn't understand me. If you want to support a machine you really ought to have a person on staff who can ttranslate English for you. I wish them the best and am eager to learn more about their Dragon. But they need to get their act together when it comes to dealing with the English speaking world and answering basic technical questions.
The Dragon FAQ states:
Recently, Motorola has developed and produced several series of the ColdFire processors but none of them were compatible enough with 68k processors to be able to run AmigaOS3.x. This changed with appearance of the MCF54xx processors family. These are the first ColdFire processors based on the V4e core.....The main ColdFire processor instruction set is a subset of the 68060 instruction set. It has been common practise in case of each new processor from the 68k family: some instructions are reduced in the new processor in order to gain better performance.
When only clock rate of the processor is taken into account, the ColdFire MCF5475 speed is comparable with 68060 clocked at 266MHz. Much higher performance of the DRAGON board compared with the fastest A1200 turbo cards is definitely affected also by: over 25 times faster speed of DDR SDRAM as compared with SIMMs used in A1200 turbo cards, bigger processor caches, and many times faster access to peripherals. For example access to the frame buffer of the graphic card in the DRAGON's AGP slot reaches up to 264MB/s, which is over 20 times faster then the access to the graphic card from any A1200 turbo card available so far.
Q: Is DRAGON able to execute 68k apps faster than G3 based boards?
A: Yes. Most of 68k Amiga applications run faster on DRAGON ColdFire then in the JIT emulation on currently available PowerPC G3-based boards.
I hope that helps. :-D
Before we all panic perhaps we should read the last update again:
Early this month our Freescale distributor informed us that the expected delivery date of the first production processor batch for us would be 27 September. If this is true, which we hope, the DRAGON 1200 boards sales will start by the end of October. In the meantime our developers work polishing software which will be bundled with DRAGONs.
MMM.needs a new update m'thinks, but if this was only vapour, what are the developers working with? Elbox have been late before, but they should try to keep us more informed. :roll:
-
Tripitaka wrote:
Before we all panic perhaps we should read the last update again:
Early this month our Freescale distributor informed us that the expected delivery date of the first production processor batch for us would be 27 September. If this is true, which we hope, the DRAGON 1200 boards sales will start by the end of October. In the meantime our developers work polishing software which will be bundled with DRAGONs.
Frankly I don't believe anything Elbox says anymore. On March 2nd they sent me an e-mail saying a batch would go on sale on March 10th. It takes longer than a week just to get the CPUs through most distributors let alone to have boards manufactured. Then in September they're saying they haven't even gotten the production CPUs from Freescale.
Either the guy answering their e-mail was lying through his teeth or the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing at Elbox.
MMM.needs a new update m'thinks, but if this was only vapour, what are the developers working with?
How do we know there are any developers working on it all? I don't remember ever seeing pictures of the developers working on the Dragon and all the announcements seem to have come from the public face of Elbox and not the developers themselves.
Who knows? Maybe they started the project, but ran out of money before they could do a production run. Maybe they were planning on getting venture capital. Maybe they are just really disorganized. However, things don't look promising to me.
-
MMM.needs a new update m'thinks, but if this was only vapour, what are the developers working with?
they are growing weed...
________
Www.chevy-wiki.com (http://www.chevy-wiki.com/wiki/Chevrolet_Chevelle)
-
when is the expected release date for the weed? :evilgrin:
-
Is it true the Dragon ColdFire will be bundled with Duke Nukem Forever (68K Version)? Just send this question to El-Box, just to check if they have a sense of humour, or at least, if there's still a pulse......
-
lol
That's a real "Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull humour" :lol: