Hi all I see my post of last night generated some interest :-) So I'll explain a bit about the Pegasos, MAI logic's Teron boards etc. Here goes..
MAI Logic are the makers of the Articia S northbridge chip, this is the PowerPC equivalent of, roughly, a VIA KX133 chipset on a PC. That is, it will control the AGP bus at 2x, the PowerPC CPU interface to 133MHz SDRAM, and MAI's reference designs use a VIA 686B Southbridge chip to control PCI and other onboard peripherals. The Pegasos also uses this design. One important difference is that the MAI chip can do two PowerPC CPUs, whereas most PC chips can only do one CPU. The MAI chip is claimed to have other advantages in terms of memory interface logic etc. however these are untested by most people at this time. MAI has contracted with Yellow Dog Linux in order to ship a Linux platform based on the PowerPC CPU, and MAI's logic board reference design is very close to what YDL will be selling. It is also almost identical to what Hyperion, Inc. and Eyetech Ltd. out of Germany and Britain, respectively, are pitching as the 'Amiga One' in various flavors. Amiga Incorporated collects royalties from sales of the units because of the Amiga name and some (greatly diminishing) AmigaOS 3.x IP that they own a license to purvey. One disadvantage of Eyetech's offering is that it will be more expensive due to the hardware dongle which will be required of any PPC board in order for it to run Amiga OS 4.x. This is Amiga's copy protection scheme. The board is also claimed to be able to run Linux from YDL in addition to AmigaOS 4.x. This OS is not yet complete, it is claimed to be ready in Q1-03. I should point out that Amiga, Inc. has had nothing to do with development of this latest iteration of the 'Classic' Amiga OS which untill now relied heavily on the Amiga's custom chipset hardware. They just bank on the Amiga name, and collect royalties from Amiga IP licensees, and occasionally roll the Amiga community for money with various coupon schemes wherein the user sends them money, and Amiga sends them a coupon good for a discount of that amount on OS4 when it arrives. Strangeley, it works-people continue to send them money even though, 36 months after they started, they still have nothing to show for all that time and burn rate..Amiga are busy working on their Digital Environment, or DE. All hype from them aside, it will be far later than Q1-03 before that cluster-fsck of an OS is ready to do anything useful. So next is the Pegasos. This board, while utilizing the MAI chipset and VIA 686B southbridge, is otherwise different from the other boards above-its design isn't based on the TeronCX reference board from MAI. Its layout is unique. The board is a Micro-ATX form factor board with its CPU on a daughtercard, ala' Supermac. Its a different interface, I tried.. ;-) It has onboard firewire, USB, sound, PC style ser/par/joy ports and lecacy FDD controller. It also has an AGP 2x port, as well as three PCI slots with riser card being optional if you need more. The hardware is designed and manufactured by bPlan of Germany, and the software, MorphOS, originated as a PPC native OS which ran on aftermarket Cyberstorm PPC accellerators for the Amiga platform. Hence, the link between the two. However, the plot thickens-various developers including bPlan, makers of the Pegasos; as well as Eyetech, would-be Amiga One purveyors, have found some serious flaws in MAI's chip. Eyetech/hyperion are trying to patch them with software, whereas Bplan/Thendic have come out with a new 'April' chipset which is supposed to fix things up in hardware, also adding some new functionality. They are announcing the full specs of the chip, as well as, presumably, what flaws they found in the MAI chipset and how this new chip addresses those flaws. This announcement will come this weekend at the Amiga-Retro 2002 computer fair in Aachen, Germany. Thendic are claiming that the chipset's flaws are serious enough that the Linux community at large will be very upset with anyone who sells these somewhat expensive, PPC based motherboards with these flaws present. Folks seem to be keeping pretty quiet so far as to exactly what is wrong, but I hear rumblings of memory access problems. In fact I'm supposed to send my Pegasos BetatesterII board back to exchange it with one containing the new April chip. I'm consdering keeping it anyway-it works and will be kind of a collector's item if MorphOS gets big. :-) Pack rat that I am.. You can check things out here: www.morphos-news.de http://www.morphos-news.de/index.php?lg=en&nid=148&si=1 www.eyetech.co.uk and for some real bad web design and even worse marketing spew: www.amiga.com I haven't laid my hands on a Teron board or any of its derivatives from YDL or Eyetech. However I do have a Pegasos-right now its the only one you can actually buy. It is a very competent Linux box :-) But what is impressive, is running MorphOS on the box. from the time you get to the OF prompt, you type: boot ide0:0 boot.img <enter> and in less than ten seconds you are in Ambient, MOS' native GUI environment. Its not like the fakey Windows boot where the GUI comes up and the drives thrash for thirty seconds while the system is unresponsive either. No-it is a true, sub-ten second to GUI boot and at that time the system is completely ready to use! Try THAT with any other OS, except maybe BeOS :-) Currently MorphOS runs some Classic Amiga applications through its A-box emulation layer, which is a complete Motorola 68040 emulation environment based on a JIT engine. Its pretty snappy, beating a real Amiga with an 060 at pretty much everything, and for less money. However it isn't a perfect clone as it doesn't have the kickstart ROM image under it, as it did on a 'real' hardware Amiga. So some ingenuity is required from the user to get some things to run. However many apps are being ported to MorphOS native PPC code, which doesn't need the A-box emulation layer, hence, its much faster :-) MorphOS is based on the Quark microkernel environment from QNX, with its own 'Q-box' extensions which are still being developed. The Quark microkernel has, of course, pre-emptive multitasking and multithreading, as well as memory protection, optional V-mem, and context switching times that are an order of magnitude faster on the same hardware as, for example, Mac OS X. Its real snappy :-) I'd also like to see this OS running on Supermacs-the more PPC machines the merrier! So, as time permits, I will be getting together the stuff mentioned on this list and flogging my poor Supermac yet again. While I'm at it I will solder in that last PCI slot :-) Hope this clears things up some. Bolton -- SuperMacs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... 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