Transcript of Alan Redhouse's AmiGBG speech

[xeron]

I have transcribed Alan's AmiGBG speech. It can be viewed here.

[Hattig]

Nice to get some new information, and it sounds like OS4 is really getting there now.

I hope that the new boards for later this year will be using the Artica-P though, and not the old Artica-S ... if only because the former is more up to date and has more features that are suitable for a modern computer system, especially servers (64-bit PCI for example).

[olegil]

I have made 4 comments where I fill in blanks over at ann.lu already. I don't want to repost those here. Maybe you could add them in parantheses inside the transcript later on? They're not word for word what was said, but not too far from it...

[olegil]

@Hattig:

Well, first MAI has to actually release the P. And then it would have to be bugtested like we have just done for a year on the S...

Of course, one could hope they manage to fix any errors that was done the same in both chips from the fixes done to the S, but there might be new ones.

[tonyw]

Well done, Tickly. I know how much work you did there.

tony

[elendil]

I'm with Tony here. That's a lot of work and very nicely done too.

Sincerely,

-Kenneth Straarup.

[Hammer]

IBM have actually been quite good, but Motorola and VIA have been keeping the best kept secrets to themselves and its
been really really quite difficult to do that,
...
To give you an example of the sort of problems that we've had, it turns out that when
we've been struggling with the level 3 cache on the Motorola board, all the
chips are in place, the cache is there, we're only getting 3% performance
increases, over the level 2 and level 1 caches. Motorola said "Oh yeah, didn't
you know that? We know thats the case". So thats a few weeks of struggling
that we could have found out if the documentation had been correct.
...
We have other issues. There had been a few stability problems initially with
the 7451 module, until somebody very kindly at Motorola eventually pointed out
that yes, it is designed to run at less than 40° centigrade, so it does need
a reasonable sized fan on it.

Is Motorola 'serious' about PowerPC?

[olegil]

Well, they're serious about using it for embedded systems (compactpci etc) because that's where the HUGE sales are. IBM has desktop and linux on their roadmap, which is why they want Eyetechs help in selling their CPUs.

Motorola concentrate on embedded...

[ikir]

Thx Tickly :-)

[Flasheart]

This must have taken you ages, I for one am very grateful for your effort.

Thanks


Alan

 (no not that Alan:-) )

[Darth_X]

I would like to see an UNCUT transcript with all of the british cursing & swearing that was [muffled]? :-D