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Amiga News and Community Announcements => Amiga News and Community Announcements => Amiga Hardware News => Topic started by: Targhan on July 15, 2003, 10:23:51 PM
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Finally! The G4 upgrade has arrived. Check out the details at PegasosPPC.com (http://www.pegasosppc.com/g4card.php)!
There are even a few prepackaged Pegasos mainboards with the G4 upgrade available in limited quantities!
From PegasosPPC.com:
Now available is a processor card sporting the Motorola 7447 running at 1Ghz or more. The 7447 is the latest in the 4th generation (G4) PowerPC lineup from Motorola, offering an improved performance base over the previous generation (G3) series of processors. In addition to a larger cache, the 7447 offers more pipelines, an improved front side bus (FSB) and most of all, a SIMD unit called the Altivec. Altivec offers a dedicated on-chip vector engine, capable of delivering over a Gflops (billion floating point operations per second) while remaining affordable to the average user.
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Congratulations Genesi!
Its an accomplishment to get a nice G4 machine out the door! Looks great.
magnetic
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Nice 2.2mb picture also .. heh .. imagine beeing on 28k :-?
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:-o
Cool! :-D
Now available is a processor card sporting the Motorola 7447 running at 1Ghz or more.
So what is it, 1GHz or more? :-P
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That is a bit on the large size for a photo.... Brrr...
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Nice to have a more powerful chip available so soon before the release of Peg-2.
I'll be sticking to this G3 for a good while though - it runs cool and needs no fan, and I've had no serious need of CPU grunt yet - except for MAME that is.
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That is a bit on the large size for a photo...
Yeah, but it's a really nice picture. Maybe somebody needs one for a full-color glossy publication. ;-) Or was this a reaction to people's claims last time that the image was rendered? Anyway, a smaller file alternative would be nice, if anybody really cares to see it that much.
What's interesting to me is that so much effort was put into such a small-run product. There are only a few hundred potential boards for this card, and probably a big majority of Pegasos owners will want the the Pegasos II if they're going to upgrade.
[Update: There's a smaller image here (http://www.pegasosppc.com/images/g4/g4_bill_small2.jpg).]
-- gary_c
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That is a bit on the large size for a photo.... Brrr...
Silly slowdem user
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What's interesting to me is that so much effort was put into such a small-run product. There are only a few hundred potential boards for this card, and probably a big majority of Pegasos owners will want the the Pegasos II if they're going to upgrade.
Well, the Peg 2 is gonna use the same card IINM..
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Ah good to see they managed to get it working.
I don't want to spend money on my Peg I any more, so I'll just wait until the Peg II is out and then I'll switch to that + the G4 card. :-)
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Well, the Peg 2 is gonna use the same card IINM..
Oh yeah, that's right (now whacking myself on the side of head). :-P
-- gary_c
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"at 1GHz or more". Well, what frequency? And how "available" is "available"? I must say I actually considered it there for a moment, but considering that GGS-Data is closed for the holidays, and pegasos-france doesn't have a website anymore, browsing their "Purchase site" became just silly (try it yourself).
(btw: I have zero interest in MOS, but Debian is always fun :-) )
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No L3 cache, right? I take it this is because of the 3% speed increase Alan and a few others have claimed Motorola confirmed, but Pegasos supporters said was just a silly excuse? ;-)
Or is it that the cache is on the backside of the board?
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I always wondered about CPU slot architecture, if you actually get the same performance out of it as if it were surface mounted.
Anyone got a handle on this?
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considering that GGS-Data is closed for the holidays, and pegasos-france doesn't have a website anymore, browsing their "Purchase site" became just silly (try it yourself).
What is silly (apart from the expired pegasos-france domain--Genesi ought to take the link off the page since the domain is no longer used)? There are a number of sites in Europe on the pegasosppc purchase page -- more than the two you mention. In any case, on the Pegasos G4 page it says to contact bbrv directly if you're interested in the G4/Pegasos1 combination.
-- gary_c
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The increase in performance of L3 Cache is to the order of 3%, (depending on the size of code executed). It's not some dumb excuse made up by small players in the Amiga market.
The company I work for has to add L3 cache to its designs not for performance increase, but due to a "must have the box ticked on the data sheet" mentality the marketing give us.
Them that be in the management are leaning on Motorola to release a white paper concerning the L3 cache performance increase. Or lack of!!
Neil Thomas, AKA MiniBobF
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@ Olegil
The Pegasos G4 will use the Motorola 7447 (http://e-www.motorola.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=MPC7447&nodeId=03C1TR046708718653) CPU, which seems to be pretty much exactly the same CPU as the 7457 (http://e-www.motorola.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=MPC7457&nodeId=03C1TR046708718653) (click on the links for info), except from the fact that the 7447 doesn't support L3 cache. So I guess there will be no L3 cache on the backside!
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Well, spotted, Grandma :-)
Silly me for not spotting that...
I guess it comes down to price and availability, as well as the lack of speed gain. Apple are still hogging a lot of G4 CPUs, I guess...
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In any case, on the Pegasos G4 page it says to contact bbrv directly if you're interested in the G4/Pegasos1 combination.
Yes. The Peg1 and G4 are sold in "matched sets". The reason for this can be found in this thread (http://www.morphos-news.de/comments.php?lg=en&nid=368).
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Not quoting a price for a product that is "available now" is silly. Not quoting the MHz rating is also silly (yes, I know MHz isn't all, but a 1GHz 7447 compared to a 1.3GHz G4 can be compared pretty easily, imho ;-) )
I have since looked at a few more reseller-pages, but they all suck :-)
pegasosppc.com is a REALLY nice looking page, but when you keep getting referred to pages that look like crap (or even non-existant pages. Come on, a new website and it already has dead links?) the wow-factor doesn't last long :-)
I don't want to contact BB directly for purchasing something (do I have to email Alan to purchase an AmigaOne G4?), especially not since they have links to 20-odd webshops on their site.
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Ah, ok. That's a rather bit drawback for those who already own a Peg1, isn't it? There's like 50% chance it will work on their board, is it? ;-)
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Ah, ok. That's a rather bit drawback for those who already own a Peg1, isn't it? There's like 50% chance it will work on their board, is it?
Nah, since you trade in your entire motherboard and get a perfectly working "matched set" in return, there is a 100% chance that it will work! :-)
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Ah, ok. That's a rather bit drawback for those who already own a Peg1, isn't it? There's like 50% chance it will work on their board, is it?
I don't recall the exact details but I believe there will be a board trade-in offer for Pegasos1 owners that will make it a more attractive option than just getting the G4 cpu card. Anway, if you have been following Genesi's practices involving nonworking boards, etc., you will know that the company goes more than half-way to make the buyer happy.
-- gary_c
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Not quoting a price for a product that is "available now" is silly.
Yes, I agree. I'd expect to find the price somewhere on the site or linked to.
Not quoting the MHz rating is also silly
This article was actually written about a month ago and just revised in a few places, to say "available now" instead of "available in July." I also think that there should be more details if in fact the product is "available now." I'm not sure if I'd call it silly, but it's incomplete. "Now" shouldn't mean "more or less now" in view of people's sensitivity to product announcements in this market.
I have since looked at a few more reseller-pages, but they all suck
I'll pass your comments along to the Phoenix Resellers group. Constructive criticism is always appreciated. ;-)
Come on, a new website and it already has dead links?) the wow-factor doesn't last long
Well, some sites become outdated because the company is on life support or something. In this case the site has a dead link because the web team is extremely busy with a bunch of things all going on at once. I'll notify them about the dead link, though, if you didn't already.I don't want to contact BB directly for purchasing something (do I have to email Alan to purchase an AmigaOne G4?), especially not since they have links to 20-odd webshops on their site
The boards in question aren't regular products. I assume they were used in testing the G4 daughterboards with Pegasos motherboards. These aren't being distributed through the resellers for that reason. It does seem a little strange to have to contact the CEO himself, even in this special case, but, if so, what the heck? Why not enjoy being able to say you bought it from the company president? :-)
-- gary_c
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Oooookay. Now I'm confused. It IS being advertised as an upgrade card, not a trade-in-offer on www.pegasosppc.com ;-)
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Why not enjoy being able to say you bought it from the company president?
Because I find his communicative skills severly lacking in certain areas, and his business practice not excactly something anyone should be proud of?
Seriously, I got one of the first AmigaOnes at a good price directly from Alan, but I would prefer to buy from someone I can walk up to and grab hard if someone pulls a fast one over me ;-)
I prefer to buy over the counter from people with either beards or ties or both. Gives me quite a bit of an advantage in a complaint-situation :-)
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I always wondered about CPU slot architecture, if you actually get the same performance out of it as if it were surface mounted.
It was a widely used design before x86 became multi GHz and FSB speed exploded, so apparently no inherent problems with a slot CPU. Anyway, the PPC does not leave much choice: the CPU does not have pins. It can only be soldered to the board (cost-effective but rendering the board non-upgradable) or be installed on a CPU card. That pretty much decides it for me.
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>No L3 cache, right?
The 7447 does not have L3 support, 7457 has.
>Or is it that the cache is on the backside of the
>board?
Yes together with some nice stickers...
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I always wondered about CPU slot architecture, if you actually get the same performance out of it as if it were surface mounted.
I dont think the shape matters... apples current G5 uses CPU cards AFAIK...
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I always wondered about CPU slot architecture, if you actually get the same performance out of it as if it were surface mounted.
AFAIK, Slots tend to be more (electrically) noisy than sockets.
This means you have to run the memory slower to keep it reliable. The best option is to include DIMM slots on the CPU card.
How much of this applies to the current Peg design I do not know. I am unaware of any drawbacks in the Peg design. ;-)
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THere is one drawback to Peg design: USE OF ARTICIA CHIPS !!! Though that wasnt their fault... now we know though.. Peg2 will be great.
mag
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THere is one drawback to Peg design: USE OF ARTICIA CHIPS !!! Though that wasnt their fault... now we know though.. Peg2 will be great.
The only drawback of the Pegasos I design is... the DESIGN of the Pegasos I. The chipset incorporated into the Pegasos design works okay on other boards (and no, I'm not refering to AmigaOne/Teron - OTHER boards). The problem with the Pegasos is a layout, termination or signal integrity issue. That is an artwork issue, i.e the design of the Pegasos PCB. Granted though, perhaps the chipset is not so tollerant of poorly formed waveforms as perhaps more mainstream PC chipsets.
From the TECHNICAL standpoint, does anyone know what the April interposer does? Answers like "It makes it work", "it makes it work better than Teron", "there's no Mai without April" or "It doesn't matter because Pegasos II will replace it" are not considered concise or technical.
Neil Thomas, AKA MiniBobF
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only drawback of the Pegasos I design is... the DESIGN of the Pegasos
I have to admit I'm very impressed by your ability to diagnose systems you have not designed, out of your armchair, not even knowing what bplan's fix fixes. As to MAI's Arctica, it seems to work reasonably well in MAI's evaluation boards which should not surprise anybody. It also works well in designs derived from those boards. Big surprise. But it did not work well in the independendly designed Pegasos before fixes were added. There are at least two conclusions: Pegasos is poorly designed. Your conclusion. Or: the Arctica does not meet its specifications. I don't design boards (obviously) but, generally speaking, assume that boards are not designed by trial and error but based on the chips' specifications. If that is the case, the Arctica may very well be full of problems that just did not show up with MAI/Teron-derived boards. It will be interesting to see how the Marvell chipset works in a bplan design: it's better spec'ed and should require more design skills than an Arctica-based board.
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> AFAIK, Slots tend to be more (electrically) noisy than sockets. This means you have to run the memory slower to keep it reliable.
On the purely logical level, this statement makes no sense: noisy it may be, whatever that is, but if the memory has to be slowed down or not would depend on the tolerance of the design for "noise".
On a purely empirical level, this statement obviously makes no sense, too: slot boards were the dominating design for a while and those boards did not run memory slower to keep it reliable (as far as I can remember).
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I have to admit I'm very impressed by your ability to diagnose systems you have not designed, out of your armchair, not even knowing what bplan's fix fixes. As to MAI's Arctica, it seems to work reasonably well in MAI's evaluation boards which should not surprise anybody. It also works well in designs derived from those boards. Big surprise. But it did not work well in the independendly designed Pegasos before fixes were added.
Pegasos is not singularly the only independantly designed board, which is my point. Make a search on www.armada.ch and you will find their are other developers, independent of Mai, who produce marketable goods. What additional skills or information does that firm have that Genesi doesn't have? Probably no difference in access to information or skilled personnel. The difference is, they got it working, without blaming one of the few most important device in a system.
it's better spec'ed and should require more design skills than an Arctica-based board.
What do you mean by "more design skills"? I assumed also, that by Articia-based board, you refer specifically to Articia S? Articia P is of course similalry speced to Disco 2, but with the addition of AGP.
Neil Thomas, AKA MiniBobF
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What do you mean by "more design skills"?
Compared to the existing Pegasos, just about everything is higher spec'ed: PCI-X rather than PCI, the FSB will be faster (183 MHz?), the memory bus will be faster (and DDR vs SDR), etc. I was just assuming that faster components require more design skills.
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Make a search on www.armada.ch and you will find their are other developers, independent of Mai, who produce marketable goods
On a purely logical level, that does not mean that the Arctica is not the culprit. It is perfectly possibly that it does not meet its specs and that the designers you are referring to have run into the same brick wall. Maybe they just had more money and redesigned their boards to meet Artica's bugs instead of having a rather visible (and annoyingly expensive) kludge directly under MAI's chip? They would have ended up with the same result: a working mainboard.
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Point noted.
I wonder though, I doubt they'll make use of PCI-X, even though the chip has it. PCI is 133MHZ, and MUST be point-to-point. This means only one device, and the bus is limited to 3 inches in length. It's not as simple and to just not fit a card, as the bus is then shaped like a T, and reflections are set up.
In addition to that, are there any PCI cards available in PCI-X yet? Maybe there are, but more server orientated, not for the desktop user! There are plenty of PMC cards that do PCI-X, but it's a different ball game.
I would hope they make use DDR and Gigabit ethernet functions. Most important factor with DDR is to match the clock and signals tracks as closely as possible. Not tracking other busses above or below is important too, but on a 4 layer board, the scope is limited. Or has the defacto PC motherboard moved to 6 layer yet? Probably not.
Providing the Northbridge is located close to the CPU and tracks are matched, running the CPU bus at the higher speen shouldn't be a problem.
I wouldn't be supprised if the bus is not run at that higher rate. Genesi have problems with the socketed interface (hence the need to sell the latest G4 'upgrades' as matched sets, so you have to ssend you Peg back again). These problems will be exaserbated by the higher clock rate. Matching track length over the legth of a connector is much harder if that connector is long and thin, rather than square.
Ever wondered why Intel dropped those slot designs?
Depending on characteristic impedance of the motherboard, the skew in clocks over, lets say 3 inches is about 1ns - and at 533Mhz (or whatever the current fastes PIV FSB is) is about half that time!
Easy to make a bus not work then!
Neil Thomas, AKA MiniBobF
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>Ever wondered why Intel dropped those slot designs?
Maybe it's more interesting to ask why to start with a slot design? CPUs are flat. Going the extra mile and soldering a CPU to a vertically mounted card seems to defy reason. In the case of Intel, I recall problems with getting sufficient cache into the CPU. When that was fixed, they reverted back to cheaper sockets. In the case of Genesi, I suspect it is their inability to grow pins to the PPC, leaving them little choice: solder or slot. The latter obviously provides more flexibility.
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One can solder a BGA to a PCB, and mount the PCB is a socket.
Of course, to package on a ceramic plate, and add an array of pins to the bottom cost more than to produce a BGA. Additionally, it's easier to pack balls in tight and retain their stregth than it is to pack in a pin grid array.
The reasons for dumping slot form factor is more technical than that too. Imagine trying to mount 200g of aluminium to the side of a chip mounted in a slot - it's not going to work..
Neil Thomas, AKA MiniBobF
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> Imagine trying to mount 200g of aluminium to the side of a chip mounted in a slot - it's not going to work...
That puts the name of this passive "Eliminator" heatsink into a whole new perspective :-)
Eliminator 0.5kg heatsink (http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/heatsinks/OCZ+P4+Eliminator+%22Passive%22)
>One can solder a BGA to a PCB, and mount the PCB is a socket.
What would still speak for the slot design rather than an adaptor PCB is that it's easier to add the stuff needed in direct vincinity of the CPU (ie. L3 cache on the backside, the capacitors), while keeping the micro-atx form factor.
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A BGA can still be mounted on a PCB and be attached to a mother board in a way other than linear contacts along one edge.
Much like the AmigaOne XE/TeronPx.
(Maybe it's not the PX, I can't remember)
This way, A BGA chip can be mounted on a motherboard, can still be removable, is parallel to the motherboard (so no drastic increase in profile) and does not have a long thin line of connections (but a grid).
Neil Thomas, AKA MiniBobF
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A BGA can still be mounted on a PCB and be attached to a mother board in a way other than linear contacts along one edge.
With two CPUs? With L3 cache on the backside? While keeping the micro-atx form factor? I find it hard to imagine any other design but a slot to offer so much flexibility (but I haven't seen the mainboards you refer to).