amiga-news.de - Dutch team announced new PPC-board for Amiga 3000/4000

Dutch team announced new PPC-board for Amiga 3000/4000
Gideon Zweijtzer (among others involved in 1541 Ultimate) and Rutger Bevaart are working on a PPC-extension for Amiga 3000/4000 computers called "UltimatePPC" which also will provide USB-, SATA- and Ethernet ports as well as an integrated 2D graphic chip with DVI-port. In a duscussion on amiga.org Gideon "mousehouse" Zweijtzer has answered questions of users:

The board will have the same size as an A3640 and be equipped with a 68040 and a Freescale QorIQ P1013. Both processors will be equipped with Bus and RAM. In substance they are two completely independent systems.

The trick: The USB-, SATA- and Ethernet-controllers which are used in the P1013, which is a System on a Chip (SoC), canbe also accessed from outside and does not depend on what the processor is calculating.

Furthermore suitable operating systems will run on the Power-CPU - maybe contemporaneously with AmigaOS 3.

The detailed specifications:

68040 CPU with 33 MHz and 128 MB RAM (DDR3)
QorIQ P1013 CPU with 1.0 GHz and 2GB RAM (DDR3, SO-DIMM)
USB2-controller with integrated fourfold-Hub
SATA2-controller with two SATA-ports
Ethernet-controller (10/100/1000)
Integrated 2D video chip with DVI-port

An unfinished prototype of UltimatePPC is to be seen on the website. The developers suppose that already at the end of the year the first orders can be accepted.

It seems to be still not clear which software will be supported: According to the FAQ a SANA2-compatible Ethernet driver is developed. For other software sections like USB or graphic support the developers only confirmed that this is "also very important".

Which PPC operating systems will run on the board also is still not clear. Harry "Piru" Sintonen has rejected to port MorphOS for it. Concerning AmigaOS 4 the original website, which meanwhile was reworked, stated that the developers will try to contact Haage&Partner... (cg) (Translation: dr)

[News message: 23. May. 2012, 16:39] [Comments: 0]
[Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]

< Next message

Prior message >