@Hans
It looks like they're managing to do what Eyetech tried but failed to do
I don't read any signs of *success* out of the publicly available info, but at least it looks like they are *trying*, which is always a good sign to see at fresh entrepreneurs! :-)
their primary business is with industrial customers, so they don't rely on Amiga related sales for survival.
That leads to the follow up question whether there really are any of these mysterious and rather vague "industrial customers"? In true volume, enough to "rely on for survival"? And why they would buy this product rather than something else?
I must say I think this product is a bit better positioned than the previous one (which to a greater degree than this one was a full *desktop* when it came to on board features, with a high price as a result, albeit *lacking* the desktop performance).
GFX is now optional which I think is a good thing (especially if your customers are primarily "industrial"), while the motherboard is physically bigger and less complex (should have fewer layers, right?), meaning the base configuration should be *a lot* cheaper. At the same time it seems to be more flexible/expandable, which should increase the amount of possible "industrial customers".
However I still strongly question the FPGA. Why is it still there? I wonder if that has *ever* been used by *a single one* of acube's customers? And for what, exactly? I'm pretty convinced that it only adds cost and it won't ever be used by 99%+ of the customers, it being there may even prevent sales (due to the higher cost), so I think they should have made the FPGA *optional* by putting it on a PCI card (especially since the motherboard now has more than one slot) or giving the customers a possibility to simply "opt out" on it altogether like you can with the ZigBee module.
I also think they should have used a different CPU! I can't understand why they are so focused on that poor, old AMCC CPU?
If low power, low performance CPU's are in acube's focus (which seems to be the case), then my favorite would be the Freescale
MPC8377E. That would bring about the same performance, while bringing dual Gigabit Ethernets instead of the current 10/100 ones, it would bring PCI-Express (2 x1 or 1 x2, I would have gone for 2 x1) on top of the 32 bit 66MHz "standard" PCI, *eliminating* the need for the PCI bridge (thus reducing board complexity and overall BOM cost even more), *and* it would bring 2x SATA 2.0 controllers, *eliminating* the need for an external controller chip for this (thus reducing board complexity and overall BOM cost even more)! Cheaper, simpler, better connectivity and expandability!
Or the (for *many* reasons) *very* interesting
MPC5121e, which is a multicore SoC CPU that includes a 400MHz e300 controller, a GFX controller (up to 1280x720), a 3D GPU controller to go with that, and a 200 MHz AXE controller, which is a fully programmable 32-bit RISC core for real-time acceleration tasks (for example audio). It has USB2 and one 10/100 Ethernet controller. It has one PATA and one SATA. IMHO, it's a marvelous little thing, a one-chip solution with a 32-bit PCI interface for further feature expansions!
If even more power would be requested, then I would have suggested the Freescale
MPC8544E CPU instead. It's based on a full e500 core (the sequal to the "G3", and it's much more powerful than both the e300 and AMCC440) at up to 1.067GHz. It would bring a lot more computing power and ahelluvalot better expandability through PCI-Express, although it would require an external disc controller chip, USB controller, etc, or perhaps preferably a *southbridge* with a PCI-Express interface instead.
Or why not an *even more* powerful and expandable e500 CPU, like the
MPC8548E? This one coupled with a (for instance) AMD SB750 southbridge would give a two-chip(!) motherboard, offering traditional desktop specs:
- One 1.5GHz(!) e500 core, with 512KB L2-cache
- One PCI-Express x16 slot (with 8 lanes actually wired) for *modern* graphics cards
- Two 32-bit PCI slots
- Four(!) Gigabit Ethernets directly from the CPU chip
- Six(!) SATA 3.0 Gbit/s, with eSATA and RAID 0, 1, 5(!), 0+1
- Twelve(!) USB 2.0 ports, and 2x USB 1.1
- HD Audio
- DASH 1.0 support
Isn't this the wet dream of all "NG Amigans"?
No? It doesn't have Altivec you say?
Hmm, then simply replace the e500 CPU's above with a single core
MPC8641 (or the upcoming low power, low cost
MPC8640) and you will have pretty much the same specs but with an e600 core instead! Or perhaps the
MPC8610 which is using the very latest e600 @ 1.33GHz and fast controllers such as DDR2/1066 and a very capable GFX controller on the chip, which will reduce the total cost of a system where GFX is needed!
(Really performance-savvy *industrial* customers (or anyone using an OS not bound to be single core only) might be interested in the dual core versions of the 8641D/8640D CPU's, or the dual core e500 CPU
MPC8572E instead!)
Where does this leave us? Exactly where we were before. As long as they don't have a license for OS4, they don't have a product that I'm interested in.
Had they got a MorphOS license, then at least I *might* have been interested! :-)
To be honest, I was more interested in their Moana project than SAM.
OS4 for second hand Mac's won't happen any more than OS4 for SAM will.
And it won't happen for a MPC8610+SB750 machine either, but surely you agree that this would have been the most interesting option of them all? ;-)
