Dragon Coldfire latest

[MskoDestny]

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.

[MskoDestny]

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.

[MskoDestny]

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.

[MskoDestny]

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.