A PPC PCI Card.

[ACE]

What exactly is stopping a PPC G3 accelerator being plugged into an Amiga PCI Bus Board.  Sonnet do one Crescendo/7200 G3 that would be perfect, for about £135.

Is it just drivers or is there something more mechanical preventing it? What would be needed so that it could access Voodoo 3 and other card at full speed (instead of having to go through the Amiga Bus speeds), i.e. Bus Mastering...

Basically why hasn't someone done it already.  It seems a lot easier than getting a custom Coldfire board or some other Next Gen System!  And unless I'm very much mistaken there must be a market for such a device.

BTW.  I do know about the Shark PPC Cards I'm just don't think holding breath until you turn blue will help (even sharks need to move in order to breath!)

[guest1955]

I wouldn't be at all surprised if it is the Crescendo that is released by Elbox, repackaged.

[-BobW-]

I thought the AmigaOne had Socketed circuit boards for the PPC chips.  It seems it would be more likely that they would just sell replacement circuit boards with faster processors in the future.

[B00tDisk]

-BobW- wrote:
I thought the AmigaOne had Socketed circuit boards for the PPC chips.  It seems it would be more likely that they would just sell replacement circuit boards with faster processors in the future.

I think Ace was asking about classic Amigas sporting a PCI backplane (the one from Matay or others).

I think it's far more than just an issue of drivers, though, as this particular device has been discussed previously.  Still if that's all it was, and I were a "classic" amiga user, I'd grab one and start developing.

[mboehmer_e3b]

What exactly is stopping a PPC G3 accelerator being plugged into an Amiga PCI Bus Board. Sonnet do one Crescendo/7200 G3 that would be perfect, for about £135.

Maybe the fact that this card (compare the picture between "SharkPPC" and the Crescendo, they are identical, only the cooling part is different) doesn't know anything about the system it runs in.

So, the Amiga Classic part has to initialize it and give it access to mass storage for booting. Unfortunately, the Mediator (in the configuration it has been sold) doesn't support the needed PCI configuration method which is mandatory for PCI bridges like the ones used on Crescendo.
You can use two different mechanisms for selecting PCI slots during "autoconfiguration" on the PCI bus; one is limited to a single PCI segment and uses memory mapped decoding for the slot, the other one is based on special cycles to route accesses through PCI bridges.

So, Mediator is one segment, but all the hardware on the Crescendo on another one, including the PPC CPU.

So, you may plug it in, but you cannot access it.

Michael