why are sams so expensive?

[kolla]

The Sam is not that much more powerful than Efika is

Nonsense - look, you cannot just look at the CPU alone to quantify "power". To me the efika is and always was useless, and it was never the CPU that was the problem. Too little RAM, borken IDE, dead slow USB and only one PCI slot (which can only be used for gfx card if you want to run MorphOS) - that's what kept me away. The SAM flex board fixes all that, at reasonable price - compared to anything else, the efika is still way overpriced with what little it offers.

I would say the SAM is perfectly priced, high enough to keep many people from buying it, so that the production can be kept in managably low numbers. If the price was lower, they would not be able to keep up with the demand, this is already a problem enough as it is. Also, more sold units means more annoying users etc. it makes perfect sense to grow the production and evolve the products slowly for a company like acube.

Anyways, if we want to stay on PowerPC, SoC is probably the only affordable way forward, the days of "pure" PowerPC CPUs are very much over.... I'll go as far as to say we're _lucky_ that we have PowerPC systems available at all, it's not something that's obvious to keep alive.

[kolla]

Of course you can, if your applications needs power, you will only get that from the CPU alone.

First... what application would that be?!

Secondly - I assume your answer to the above is "media playback", but what's the point of a fast CPU when the IO is so crap you cant feed the CPU fast enough, and the ammount of RAM is so low that there's harly anything left to use for buffering?

For example, any G3 CPU will be better than the Sam/Efika class "G2" CPU's with no L2 cache, especially when running older, 68k emulated Amiga applications.

Did I say otherwise? Sheesh, you're jumping to a completely different discussion here - my comment was on how _efika_ and _sam440_ compare - NOT anything else.

Well, the Efika isn't for anyone, *it is* rather limited in its specifications.

No shit!

But OTOH this is also its strength, the low price is perhaps its most prominent specification.

No it isnt, the Efika with all its glorious specs is _overprised_ - I never bought one, exactly because it's just way too crappy, even for the pricetag it has. I have ARM systems that I consider much more worthwhile, simply because IO is just so much better on them, oh and they come _with_ casing, PSU etc as well. For MorphOS fantasts it is nice though, but still just a toy - more show off than actual daily use.

How many MorphOS/efika users have the efika as "primary computer"?
How many OS4.1/SAM440 users have the SAM440 as "primary computer"?

And it was only supposed to be an evaluation/development platform for the next step in the plan, the 5121b based LimePC/"Cherrypal" devices (that unfortunately never happened).

What do you mean "unfortunatly"? Good riddance is more like it :-)

But what do we see if we look at the Sam? We see a motherboard that costs about as much as a PowerStation (another relatively low volume machine, one can suppose), with *four* G5 cores, 4MB L2 cache, 4 Altivec units, 8 FPU units, etc, etc.

ZOMFG WHY HAVENT I BOUGHT ONE ALREADY??!!!11

Hohum, it's a fully assembled SAM440 with preinstalled OS4.1 that costs as much as the equally fully assembled PowerStation with YDL (USD 1125,-)

Can one buy PowerStation mobo separate?

One of the nice features of the PowerStation is that it is buildt into an IBM case that also is rackable. Definetly a most wanted feature of OS4 and MorphOS users.

But yes, since you pull it in - why the heck is _neither_ OS4 nor MorphOS ported to this beast? Duh...

The Sam costs about as much, but is outperformed by *PDA's*!

I need to remember this thread when I argue against people who claim PDAs are dead :lol:

But again, you assume that CPU power is everything, which isnt the case. For what it's worth, I've had PDAs running as network servers for close to a decade now, so this is really, really old news.

I'm sorry, but this is as useless than an old Trabant sold at the price tag of a Ferrari; only the few die hard Trabant brand followers will even consider it, effectively making this a *none option* as a future platform. It's not an option. It's utterly useless from a future-building perspective.

Anything Amiga is the opposite of "future building" in the first place, so... moot point.