PPC 970 Accelerator for A1?

[asian1]

Hello
There are rumors about PowerPC 970 2 GHz accelerator boards / cards for old Mac.
Is it possible to create such accelerator for AmigaOne?

IIRC Cyberstorm is actually PowerPC accelerator for Amiga 68K. AmigaOS 4 will run on Cyberstorm.

If such card / module is available, Is it possible to port AmigaOS 4 to 64 bit PowerPC 970 accelerator for AmigaOne?

[Samuar]

I think Amiga needs to move away from the idea of accelerator boards and concentrate on complete systems. The AmigaOne hasnt been released fully (i.e. with complete support from its OS, AmigaOS) and we're already talking about upgrading it.

That sounds like a major problem to me. Just how many people own an AmigaOne Earlybird system anyway?

[alx]

IMO accelerators often leave you with various bottlenecks - for instance, a A1200 fitted with a Blizzard PPC would still have the same old I/O speeds.  The 970 would need lots of technology such as DDR RAM, 8x AGP, PCI-X etc to take full advantage of the chip - in the end, what you'd get is a seperate motherboard on top of the A1; wouldn't it be just as easy to have an A2 or whatever?

I'd imagine that accelerators were so popular was as they allow far faster processors while keeping the custom chips and stuff resident on the mobo for apps that need them (ie the OS).  With the A1 having no custom components that need to be kept, I personally don't think an accelerator would be much sense.

BTW, I know very little about PC architecture, PPC etc - I could well be wrong, but it's just my opinion.

[Jose]

I don't hink accelerators are allways bad. If you look at PC motherboard they 've had the same PCI bus and I/O for too much time. The major stuff that has changed was the processor, and memory controler. So why do people have to allways buy a new PCI bus, etc... with every new board? But maybe it all goes down to production costs.

[Crumb]

I think that producing an entire motherboard is cheaper and easier than doing extrange accelerators.... for example look at our classic ppc accelerators, they require lots of layers to allow all that components to fit in such a small board... an entire motherboard would require less layers and would allow you to use standard northbridges, making an easier and cleaner design. In addition to that memory types change almost with each CPU generation so it makes more sense not to use accelerators. I like the idea of having the cpu in a slot or a simple cpu card like in the Pegasos, but if we are talking of such a big changes in memory types and cpu it's a far better idea to make a new motherboard.

[Hooligan_DCS]

I agree with Samuar. It's nice to have a good complete system rather than run "hacks" to provide more speed. It was ok on old Amigas when CPU horsepower really was too low to do anything worth mentioning, and it really worked. Some better some worse. Today, I think it should be avoided and stick with well designed complete systems.

[dammy]

by asian1 on 2003/6/25 14:17:06

If such card / module is available, Is it possible to port AmigaOS 4 to 64 bit PowerPC 970 accellerator for AmigaOne?

Question is just who is going to do that, MAI?  I highly doubt they would bother.  I mean all in all, why not spend the R&D on a new mobo design then spending all that time and money to only sell a few accelerators?

Dammy

[Elektro]

jose: memory controller is in northbridge which is soldered on the mobo... (except with new cpus like opteron, ppc970, etc...)

[takemehomegrandma]

asian1 wrote:
Hello
There are rumors about PowerPC 970 2 GHz accellerator boards / cards for old Mac.
Is it possible to create such accellerator for AmigaOne?

IIRC Cyberstorm is actually PowerPC accellerator for Amiga 68K. AmigaOS 4 will run on Cyberstorm.

If such card / module is available, Is it possible to port AmigaOS 4 to 64 bit PowerPC 970 accellerator for AmigaOne?

But what's the point with faster processors, if the CPU has to sit in it's ass and wait for the NB to shovel data through a narrow buses? IMO, there is too much emphasis on MHz and CPU performance, and too little on general system design. Perhaps we have all been so used to the x86 way of thinking, that we are simply stuck in it now?

The new Mac is a breath of fresh air in this sense!

[Tigger]

takemehomegrandma wrote:
Perhaps we have all been so used to the x86 way of thinking, that we are simply stuck in it now?

The new Mac is a breath of fresh air in this sense!

I think given the board is basically pieced together from x86 tech with IBM 970's on it, its pretty funny that you think its a breath of fresh air.   What exactly is innovative in the system to you??   Hypertransport, 400 Mhz DDR  SDRam, PCI-X??
     -Tig

[takemehomegrandma]

@ Tigger

Yes I know that it has been put together mainly from standard (but state of the art) "x86 technology". But they have really gone as far as possible in their efforts to remove bottle necks, don't you think? OK, I don't really know, but how common is 2x 1GHz FSB? Memory would perhaps be a bottleneck (would RAMBUS/RIMM perhaps be better?), but "this high-performance frontside bus architecture enables each PowerPC G5 processor to discover and access data in the other processor’s L1 and L2 caches for ultrafast performance" will benefit from this, as well as data shoveling to/from the hypertransport connected I/O, the PCI and PCI-X, AGP, etc. And what about the "Point to Point controller" which shovels data around without even bothering the CPU's and the processor bus? Isn't that even a little "Amiga-like"? Perhaps I am wrong, but I really think this is the most innovative design this far, and I have not seen this on any desktop x86 motherboard, but perhaps I have only missed it? OK, perhaps "innovation" is a too strong word, we are basically talking about removing bottle necks, but at least this focus on removing bottle necks and not *only* pumping up the CPU MHz is a (at least tiny) breath of fresh air?  ;-)

[Alkemyst]

There are rumors about PowerPC 970 2 GHz accellerator boards / cards for old Mac.
Is it possible to create such accellerator for AmigaOne?

Bad idear.

New mobo pls.

If the PPC mobo market is ever going to catch up in the very long run, then hacking on cpu's that get chocked by the mobo has to stop & i saying with this new PPC cpu that is out now then the time is right for all ppc mobo makers to make new mobos for it.

[Alkemyst]

[strobe]

The motherboards are already going to be here: Apple's G5 and IBM's PPC970 Blade.

The problem is licensing. You think the Amiga "market" is going to get a new motherboard when you just barely got an old motherboard with no OS? The only new motherboard on the horizon is the Pegasos II which still uses the MPX bus.

As for slapping on a PPC 970 on an A1, give me a freaking break. You may as well port AOS to MOL and run it on IBM's Blade running Linux. Seriously :roll:

[Hammer]

Jose wrote:
I don't hink accelerators are allways bad. If you look at PC motherboard they 've had the same PCI bus and I/O for too much time. The major stuff that has changed was the processor, and memory controler. So why do people have to allways buy a new PCI bus, etc... with every new board?
.

Reasons for the new motherboard, i.e. the Northbridge and Southbridge cores gets updated. Certain benchmarks prove speed disparity between the chipsets (i.e. efficiencies issues) e.g. nVidia’s nForce2 vs VIA KT400.  

With nForce2’s case, its 128bit bus****, 400Mhz DDR FSB, AGP 8X Pro, Hypertransport based Southbridge and Northbridge link, DASP (Dynamic Adaptive Speculative Pre-Processor)**, integrated DSP and 'etc'.

** "an intelligent agent that monitors CPU requests and looks for access patterns that it can
successfully predict. When it recognizes such access patterns, it exploits unused memory bandwidth to load its cache with data the CPU is expected to request later". This is built into the Northbridge chip.

****Useful for concurrent DSP, GPU and CPU main bus access.