Sonnet PPC PCI Card

[motorollin]

mike- wrote:
Who'd pay 449 euros for a 400 mhz ppc card today?

Probably the same people who are prepared to prepared to pay €1000 for a 233MHz card...

--
moto

[mike-]

Yes and there appears to be alot of them

[alexh]

freqmax wrote:
do you remember which part? (useful for future soundcard programming

Fraid not. I am sure it had something to do with DMA transfers and bus mastering but exactly what... dunno. Michael Boehmer of E3B will know as he reportedly came up with a firmware fix that was never released.

Might be worth checking here:

http://www.yahoogroups.com/group/Amiga-Prometheus

I also read that the G-Rex PCI had a bug in it too

pega-1 wrote:
Unfortunately, USB PCI card drivers only have limited use with G-REX. This is basically due to a bug in the CSPPC/BPPC DMA interface which fails on small data transfers (which are required for certain kind of usb transfers). I have a fixed CSPPC which has an updated firmware that fixes this bug but this version never made it into public and would require an in-circuit reprogramming of some components. DCE bought out phase5's CSPCC/BPPC business and they stopped supporting any Amiga stuff quite a while a go afaik, so there is not even a chance to get boards updated. So to make a long story short: USB PCI card drivers won't work with G-REX.

How accurate this is, again I dunno.

But I believe it shows how mature & compatible (or rather incompatible) the Amiga PCI solutions really were and what Elbox were facing with a SharkPPC.

Take a look here:

http://www.acube-systems.biz/compatibility/

ACube wrote:
A1200 turbo cards do not allow DMA to their memory from the CPU expansion slot.

So no access to FastRAM from PCI on A1200 that is going to be quite a limitation. Perhaps not in the case of using a SharkPPC but certainly for overall Mediator1200 compatibility! Cannot support PCI SCSI cards, USB cards, Most PCI sound cards and RTL8139 PCI network card.

However some of this seems contradictory. The Mediator compatibility says that USB and RTL8139 was supported under OS3.x! Perhaps switching off the 680x0 in OS4 lowers compatibility? Or maybe the OS4 compatibility list is bollox and what they really meant was "couldnt be arsed to port driver!"

http://www.elbox.com/mdg.html#FASTETHERNET

[mike-]

btw
(*) Production of SharkPPC+ cards will start as soon as the final version of AmigaOS4.0 for A1 is released.

That would be riiiight about

[jj]

My memory is not the best, But I am pretty sure that the sonnet cards are electrically incompatible with the old mediators.  Thats why I think elbox recently released the new version of the mediator.  Something to do with a missing voltage on the older mediators I belive.

Somebody correct me If I am wrong here, but it sounds familiar in my head at least. :-)

[mboehmer_e3b]

JJ wrote:
My memory is not the best, But I am pretty sure that the sonnet cards are electrically incompatible with the old mediators.

In particular, the Sonnet needs 3.3V on PCI bus for operation of its bridge. With 3.3V supplied it was possible to initiate the PCI booting sequence of the PPC on a modified Prometheus board, but due to lack of software (which is needed to startup the Sonnet) I stopped my tests here.

As long as direct PCI-to-Amiga DMA does not work on PCI boards  it doesn't make any sense to work with the Sonnet, as all motherboard and Zorro resources are not useable (so you could setup a second independent PCI computer system based on the Sonnet, but no more).

Michael

Michael

[mschulz]

da9000 wrote:
@mschulz:

I will ignore the apparent attitude in your reply

Sorry for that, I was in a really bad mood.

(how did you get access to said engineer, if I may ask?)

I have sent an email addressed at their support team. Since the support person was not able to answer my questions, he was so kind to forward my email to the screcendo/7200 engineer.

I've never been involved in those failed projects so I didn't know. Glad to know though. Could you provide pointers to the Freescale/Tundra docs?

They are *almost* in a non existing state anymore. The Freescale website forwards to the tundra.com. But there are no manuals for Tsi106 there anymore. I have found the MPC106UM file on some archive: link

Furthermore, if said information is all that's needed, what are you speculations as to why nobody has jumped the gun already?

because it would be pointless? First of all, you need a special sequence to start the CPU on the crescendo card. At least You need to feed the card with startup code and issue a #RESET signal on the PCI bus. The second, crescendo will see only the PCI bus. There would be no way to access all the Amiga hardware directly. It means, no direct input from kbd and mouse, no direct access to the Gfx chipset, no direct access to harddrive and floppy on the motherboard... Only the PCI bus. Moreover, indirect access to this hardware would be quite complex, like eg.:

1. The software on crescendo prepares some kind of request to the main CPU in it's own memory
2. The software on crescendo issues the interrupt on PCI bus
3. The main CPU (eg. the old mc68020) receves an interrupt and checks the crescendo's memory for request
4. The main CPU performs request (it may be slow since the snail CPU)
5. Upon completion of the request CPU sends a report to crescendo's main memory and issues interrupt on it by means of the doorbell register
6. The crescendo CPU analyses the mc68020's response....
...
n. The whole story begins again.

In short: it would be pain in ass. As someone said in this thread already, you could build a complete PCI system with crescendo... On x86 architecture life would be easier to some degree since almost any peripherial there is a PCI-compilant device visible on the PCI bus.

[Plaz]

Maybe this link is of some use?

Tundra Tsi107 with 106/107 device difference doc.

The 106 was retired, replaced with the 107?
You have to register to get the docs though.

Plaz

[cynkronyze]

May be this is of no relevance but there is a Sonnet link on this page

[alexh]

Which is dead.

[tokyoracer]

It would be good to hear is anyone has even attempted this on an Amiga PCI busboard.

[jj]

I really think you should check with reagrds to these sonnet cards and if they they are electrically comptaible with the vast majority of the mediators out there.

Cause if they are not, then this idea is even more dead ( if thats actually possible) than it already is

[mboehmer_e3b]

tokyoracer wrote:
It would be good to hear is anyone has even attempted this on an Amiga PCI busboard.

I tried on a modified Prometheus with 3.3V supply on PCI slots.
Without 3.3V you can't do anything.

With 3.3V supplied and the correct initialization steps on the PCI bus done you can get the PPC starting to fetch its boot strap from some PCI memory (like the gfx card).

As someone else here explained in rather nice detail (seems to have also played with :-) ) it doesn't make real sense, as you can't get over the PCI bus to the Classic hardware at all, and even if you try it will be a pain.

The bridge used (at least on my Sonnets) is a Tsi107.

Michael

[Argus]

@mboehmer

Any update on the Prometheus firmware upgrade?  I take it that is the modification you reference??

Even assuming the Sonnet could not recognize the rest of the classic hardware; it would presumably work with the other pci cards on the bus.  Therefore, this would make for an interesting bridge system, similar to putting one of those stand alone x86 cpu cards in one of the Amiga's ISA slots.  The Sonnet+Prometheus would potentially anyway allow users to boot into their classics for nostalgia, etc. sake or choosing to boot from the Sonnet and into OS4.0+ (assuming some form of special UBoot was made for it).

[arnljot]

I've been following this thread now and read with interest what mboehmer_e3b and mschulz have written.

To mee it seems like the case against a Sonnet card on the classic amiga is 100% water tight...

But I can't that it can be electrical limitations on the Mediator boards (might be for others), but rather with DMA and what else it can access of the classic hardware.

I'm a bit stumped that it really can be so, but I'm no hardware man, and must trust what the forementioned gentlemen have said, including also alexh.

[Piru]

@Argus

or choosing to boot from the Sonnet and into OS4.0+ (assuming some form of special UBoot was made for it).

Since there is no way to access the amiga HW from the Sonnet and OS4 shuts down the 680x0 CPU, there is no way it could work. No UBoot can fix this.

The only option would be to have special build of OS4 that would not access amiga HW at all (no one really wants to use this 680x0 bridging stuff, it would be too painful).

Regardless, the Elbox claim that "SharkPPC" (read: sonnet crescendo 7200) would have worked out of the box with the Classic OS4 is clearly a lie. Basically it was used as a marketing ploy: Sell new "SharkPPC" compatible Mediator boards, with "SharkPPC" becoming available "as soon as OS4 is ready".