I still dont understand what is so special in Open Pegasos. I got an invitation mail to power.org when I can barely design a blinking led system with pspice.
There's nothing fundamentally exciting about Peg2. It's a MicroATX srandard computer moetherbard with a PowerPC instead of an x86. It's production quality instead of evaluation/development quality, if that means anything. At least it seems to cost less than eval/development implementations direct from Freescale or northbridge vendors, Momentum, etc. I saw an 8548 dev board going for around US$5000 as well somewhere, can't remember who it was from though.
The open/free aspect, hopefully coming soon, is somewhat interesting. You can get comparable reference designs from other vendors for free (beer) but those sometimes come with NDAs, so aren't truely free (dom/open) even if you can use the design yourself, you can't pass anything on to others outside the NDA. If you believe bbrv's statements, you can share the Peg2 with just about anyone, at least that's how their expressions of openness and freedom have spoken to me. If the stuff every actually is released, I may stand corrected on this though.
Another interesting aspect of Peg2 is that it has a PCI to AGP bridge in thre somewhere. I'm curious to see what degree of freedom the design of this thing sees. You're not going to see an AGP slot in other PowerPC ref designs other than from MAI.
Some reference designs are only schematics, no layout data. There's plenty of good stuff to learn from schematics, but seeing how things are implemented in a production layout can be quite educational as well. bbrv says you or I or anyone could take the stuff directly to jsut about any PCB fabricator and have the thing built to a functional Peg2 computer. It's not that quick with just a schematic. (And it's not exactly that simple if you go to a new PCB fab other than DCE, as a new fab may have different tolerances and such that need testing and proving compatibiility before going into real production)
I think a lot of us would have fun looking at the design and seeing what it looks like to do that kind of thing. Some of us may learn something new.
But I don't see it as something to go wild and crazy over. PCI is old. AGP is old. I'd like to buy something with newer features than those. I've got a neato Asus PC motherboard on its way with PCI-Express, dual-graphics card support, SATA2, all the new stuff. It's only DDR though, not DDR2. PowerPC with more of this stuff onboard would start to get exciting, for me anyway.
As for the email invitation, remember that they're trying to build support and community aroudn the PowerPC ISA. I'm nto really sure what to make of that statement myself, as many of us already are PowerPC fans regardless of this Peg2 design going open or not. We're already there... But they're trying to get anyone and everyone excited about it, and involved in some capacity they are capable of. It may be your problem to figure out how you fit into everything though, but bbrv does seem to enjoy having Genesi/Pegasos fans to spread the word and all that if nothing more. Just think of it, you could be a cog in the grassroots marketing machine! Or you might have a vague platform idea that bplan can benefit from, thus Genesi and power.org penefit from it, even if you can't bring it to implementation reality yourself. I don't plan to be so generous with my own vague ideas. :p
