Sonnet PPC PCI Card

[alexh]

I think you'll find they are not technically compatible with any PCI controller (G-Rex, Prometheus, Mediator).

This product was to be the Shark PPC from Elbox (rebranded by Elbox of course) that in the end never came out, almost certainly because of a technical limitation they could not overcome.

I am surprised they are back in stock, last time this subject was brought up, some Amiga user bought Sonnet's entire back stock!

[alexh]

arnljot wrote:
1) What can make the card incompatible with Classic amiga PCI boards

I am making an assumption that there was a technical problem Elbox couldn't overcome without a new Mediator. The economics if they could have made it work speak for themselves, the markup was to have been from $59 to $400! It would have been enormous for Elbox, they will have done everything they could to make it work!

I am not 100% "au fait de" with PCI topology, but I think the Mediator is a Zorro III to PCI bridge and in order for there to be another CPU on a PCI bridge, the Mediator has to be a Zorro III DMA master to allow the PPC to be able to initiate access to Amiga RAM. I am 99% sure that no Amiga PCI bridge cards are DMA masters. Even if they were I doubt very much if the PPC could access anything else other than RAM, I doubt it could access the registers in the custom chips for example.

But why would this matter? Surely it could work the other way around? The PPC could run happily just transferring data between other PCI cards? I can see that might work. But to interact with the host Amiga it would need some shared memory in the PPC's PCI space that the 680x0 could post to, to give commands etc.

Well I bet such a scenario, while perhaps possible under the PCI specification, was never tried before Elbox released Mediator. Asynchronous DMA transfers between two PCI "masters"? Maybe that did not work? Collisions etc.

All pure speculation, unless we get someone in Elbox to talk to us... just pure speculation, and probably bad technology on my part.

Michael Boehmer of E3B would be the best man to consult, he knows this stuff inside out having played with both Zorro III DMA and the Prometheus DMA.

[alexh]

da9000 wrote:
because if the the Amiga PCI boards are PCI compliant (how can they not be, they are PCI bus boards afterall)

But that is just it, I doubt they were fully tested to the ends of the PCI spec. They worked with the cards that they needed to. Lets ship it. I mean look at Prometheus PCI bridge. It turned out that it didn't work with the vast majority of sound cards because of some unimplemented portion of the PCI specification.

da9000 wrote:
A possibility is also that Sonnet supplied a binary-only library that Mac programmers had to use to access the card. If that library doesn't abide by any ABI [Application Binary Interface](other than Mac), then you're in a world of hell.

Do you not think that if they had dangled money (or at least the promise of money) on a stick Sonnet would have not supplied the source code if they could? Especially so many years after the "end of life" of this product? An opportunity for them to shift all their unsold stock and make a healthy profit?

The licensing issue is a possibility, after all Amiga Inc. initially wanted to sell AmigaOnes. But after the death of the AmigaOne, Hyperion needed as many PPC enabled Amiga platforms as they could to help boost AOS4 sales, you'd think they'd have done everything in their power to help Elbox... no?

[alexh]

arnljot wrote:
I remember once reading that the SharkPPC needed a hardware upgrade to the Mediator. But can¨t seem to find the source now.

I cannot say I ever remember seeing that.

arnljot wrote:
Also, I think that the Shark PPC was a OS4 only product, maybe they didn´t see it viable to market it for Classic WarpUP customers.

I did read that Elbox said they did not want to release the Shark PPC until OS4 was shipping. But when I read that... I immediately thought "they cannot get it to work". Otherwise why hold off? It's not like they were manufacturing them.

[alexh]

Interesting stuff.

The Dragon is another thing where I am sure Elbox just couldn't get the technology right. Again pure speculation, but you just get they feel that it was a product that the masses would have wanted and would have paid for. The only reason not to release must have been the performance of the coldfire (with it's associated emulation) being well below that of a 50MHz 060 for unmodified code and so it was not worth going into production (also I think the particular coldfire chip they chose for the prototype went out of production before they could start!)

Again pure speculation, but I do remember Elbox posting performance stats which were considerably less than stellar.

When you consider how much money they must have invested in that program, something very strange must have happened.

[alexh]

I doubt it very much. Just look at what has happened to OpenPCI.

Porting open source linux drivers to AmigaOS for hardware we know works (to an extent) should be easier than something like this and yet the project lies stagnating :-(

[alexh]

Not much, it was a very interesting project at the start, lots of interest, several drivers written... and then the support dried up and the core author seems to have got a bit bored too.

http://bvernoux.free.fr/DevPCI.php

Only four or five drivers were ever written for this interesting core library.

[alexh]

freqmax wrote:
do you remember which part? (useful for future soundcard programming

Fraid not. I am sure it had something to do with DMA transfers and bus mastering but exactly what... dunno. Michael Boehmer of E3B will know as he reportedly came up with a firmware fix that was never released.

Might be worth checking here:

http://www.yahoogroups.com/group/Amiga-Prometheus

I also read that the G-Rex PCI had a bug in it too

pega-1 wrote:
Unfortunately, USB PCI card drivers only have limited use with G-REX. This is basically due to a bug in the CSPPC/BPPC DMA interface which fails on small data transfers (which are required for certain kind of usb transfers). I have a fixed CSPPC which has an updated firmware that fixes this bug but this version never made it into public and would require an in-circuit reprogramming of some components. DCE bought out phase5's CSPCC/BPPC business and they stopped supporting any Amiga stuff quite a while a go afaik, so there is not even a chance to get boards updated. So to make a long story short: USB PCI card drivers won't work with G-REX.

How accurate this is, again I dunno.

But I believe it shows how mature & compatible (or rather incompatible) the Amiga PCI solutions really were and what Elbox were facing with a SharkPPC.

Take a look here:

http://www.acube-systems.biz/compatibility/

ACube wrote:
A1200 turbo cards do not allow DMA to their memory from the CPU expansion slot.

So no access to FastRAM from PCI on A1200 that is going to be quite a limitation. Perhaps not in the case of using a SharkPPC but certainly for overall Mediator1200 compatibility! Cannot support PCI SCSI cards, USB cards, Most PCI sound cards and RTL8139 PCI network card.

However some of this seems contradictory. The Mediator compatibility says that USB and RTL8139 was supported under OS3.x! Perhaps switching off the 680x0 in OS4 lowers compatibility? Or maybe the OS4 compatibility list is bollox and what they really meant was "couldnt be arsed to port driver!"

http://www.elbox.com/mdg.html#FASTETHERNET

[alexh]

Which is dead.

[alexh]

5v DIMMS?

What pinout? 168-pin?
What technology? DDR SDRAM, SDR SDRAM, FPM or EDO?

I am 80% sure you need 168-pin 5v FPM DIMM for Sonnet Crescendo/7200 (though EDO might work)

I got some 168-pin EDO DIMM's from a Dell PowerEdge server here somewhere... dunno if they are 5v