Have a look at this presentation for the latest and greatest information on the future in store for the Freescale PowerPC from the good folks at Freescale:

http://www.freescale.com/files/ftf_2005 ... 3_BECK.pdf

It is an informative presentation.

Presentation UPDATE: We have since ported the Pegasos HAL/OF to the HPC II. Running out of Flash ROM, the Pegasos HAL/OF allows the HPC II to boot a GNU/Linux kernel off a SATA drive to make the HPC II look just like Pegasos II. When mounted with all the needed gear the HPC II does everything the ODW can do thanks to the Pegasos HAL/OF. There is a big valued added there that we are providing to a growing list of customers. It is about speed to market and bringing up new boards as quickly as possible. Plus, the software available to all Pegasos HAL/OF enabled PowerPC boards will progressively grow with time as more and more boards benefit and advance software development on compliant systems.

R&B

Nice!

So OF can read* SATA drives now? Great. Let's get it out!

As far as I know there have been problems with reading the boot-image
from SATA-drives. Could easily be handled with TFTP-booting though..

Nice, what about stuff like USB keyboard?

Any news about OpenSolaris? And *BSD family?

Maybe could be interesting if donating an ODW to www.dragonflybsd.org
This project in the future could be very interesting, it's founded by the famous Matthew Dillon (ex--developer of FreeBSD, fired by unknown reasons...).

I expect a new Pegasos computer (or any with OF on it) having on it the latest standards from the computing industry, PCI Express, SATA, latest DDR...

What about MorphOS? It will be supported all that new stuff? Any plans for it?

Hi timofonic, here are a few answers to your questions...

1. USB keyboard? Works now.

2. OpenSolaris - we continue to ship machines to OpenSolaris Developers. One goes out on Monday to Singapore. He came to us from Blastware:

http://www.blastwave.org/sponsors/index.html

We expect Sun to start more aggressively supporting the port too - and officially - as the new SunFire Opteron contains the "Sun Microsystems IPMI v2.0 Service Processor." It just so happens that this is an embedded PowerPC computer which handles control and management. Three guesses how Sun might feel about not having a Solaris kernel for PowerPC on that service processor? It is running Linux now...

3. BSD - basically until we make the next OF release we probably will not get much further on the BSD front. The kernel boots. The firmware release should be within the next few weeks.

4. DragonFly - we are in touch with Matt every six months or so since he announced the project. We have known him for over ten years, so eventually we are not worried about getting support from DragonFly. Matt is focused on bringing it up in an x86 environment first. He is a great developer and a nice person too.

5. A new Pegasos? Well, there is the EFIKA 5K2. We hope to be using that board configured as a number of thin clients hosted on a Pegasos Server and deployed to a number of remote locations before the end of the year. We also expect to have our dual 7448 with Tsi108 half-blade finally released by the end of the year. We been kicking around the idea of a new developer workstation based on that dual 7448 board. The catch is the Tsi108 only supports one PCI bus so what we may do is put in an EFIKA to handle the display and input functions, leaving the 7448s to crunch away as strictly a computational resource. After that, our best guess is that we would build a new board based on the 8641D. Of course, we will be releasing a 7448 Pegasos II CPU card. We have made 7447A cards and have people using them, but we decided to wait for the 7448. That will bring the Pegasos/ODW up to the 1.7/8 GHz range. We will develop a cool upgrade program for that.

6. MorphOS - we are very happy to see all the activity in the last week: the PowerUP release, KHTML (wow!), ValientVision, MorphVNC, Bladerunner's skins, 3D support, Poseidon drivers and even an update to MDC, which we monitor daily. We still approve all the new accounts there (it is up to 1026!). That is all super good news. Plus, the MorphZone Bounty program is starting to take some legs. We are planning to make a significant contribution to that. We just want to get the framework in place to manage the funds. We think the Bounty Committee needs to be directed by a combination of the MorphOS-Team (needs to lead it), some super-users/third party developers, and the MZ Staff (Targhan could be Secretary/Treasurer). We will continue to support MorphZone and MDC. We will even ship an ODW to a MorphOS developer Monday too. The progress is really tremendous. We want to help keep that going.

Finally, it is probably worth mentioning that we are also getting some good attention in China. Here is an example:

http://www.netcomm.net.cn/news/view.asp?id=750

You will note that Genesi, the ODW, this site and *even* MorphOS are mentioned or referenced (seen that slide before?). You can't say we don't keep MorphOS in mind!

Hope that answers your questions...

R&B
www.bbrv.blogspot.com

Is this still the plan? Not that I need the extra processing power, but I was interested in whether it would be possible to get by with passive cooling. Maybe by running the CPU at a lower clock.

That's really good news, but 7448 is not the 970MP, right? So you plan to release both a 8641D (74498) board and a dual 970MP?
And waht are going to be the differences, in terms of performance, between a 7448-upgraded Pegasos II and a new 8641D-based motherboard?
However, I'm looking forward to the upgrading program for Pegasos II since I don't think I could afford to buy an Open Server Workstation...

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RockmanX
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The OSW target price is under $1000. Not the INITIAL price, but eventually it will drop that far (like we did with the ODW, it used to be $1400 and now it is $799).

The difference in performance of a single 7448 Pegasos II with it's 133MHz FSB (this is dictated by the Marvell Discovery II) and the 8641D will be superficially;

* TWO CORES (not just one)
* faster RAM (DDR2-400)
* faster FSB (internal 667MHz bus)
* PCI Express support

As you can see it's in a different class which makes it worth the design effort. The OSW will be available FIRST though. The 8461D makes a lot of sense in areas where low power consumption but high compute density or space considerations (blades, laptops) are key factors in the design.

This 8641D sounds amazing... so it's low power? less power consumption than Pegasos II?
And what about the format of the motherboards?
I know there's been some trouble with EFIKA's non standard size...
Is the OSW's motherboard going to be eATX? And do you see the 8641D keeping on the microATX?

EDIT: Will the OSW be sold also as a barebone or motherboard+CPUs like Pegasos?

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RockmanX
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The OSW will be a BTX-style motherboard. No firm plans for what cases (note plural) etc. it will ship in.

The 8641D is basically two 7448 cores (e600) attached to a fast internal chip bus which is identical in protocol to the external MPX bus on the discrete 744x chips. It's just faster. If you have memory controller, ethernet and pci express in the chip you no longer need to provide a 2.5V or 3.3V link between them. They share parts of the DMA engine etc. and that reduces chip complexity. The values are in the presentation Bill linked; two 10W processor cores together plus all the integrated peripherals can be run at less than 75% of the power of discrete devices.

The 8641D isn't sampling in a reasonable form yet, but the beauty of it's design is that dual 7448 and Tundra northbridge "mimic" it's configuration and implementation enough (DDR2 memory, dual processor configuration off an MPX bus, und so weiter). With the Pegasos II and the blade design (watch this space) there is a very good approximation of what can be acheived with the 8641D on a discrete board. Since they are binary compatible and the Pegasos HAL/OF firmware does all the configuration legwork for Linux kernels etc. you can write software for it right now using the Pegasos II. If you don't use AltiVec (or do use it cleverly..) you can even run it on the EFIKA.

No firm products are announced but changing dual 7448/Tundra for an 8641D on the blade product is the.. obvious result of having the chip.

@Neko:

>faster RAM (DDR2-400)

Lowered expectations?
I thought the RAM was to be DDR2-667, fitting to the 667MHz FSB clock...

You were in the same presentation as I was when Glen Beck said *at least* DDR2-400 support.

There are two memory controllers too allowing dual-channel operation. Two DDR2-400 controllers interleaved gives you more than enough bandwidth for the CPUs and peripherals.

I am primarily making comparisons to existing designs (Pegasos II and the HDB) that we can confirm performances on.

Maybe we can agree on him saying *at least* DDR2-533.

I didn't really get any closer to an answer to my question... but maybe someone could tell me if it's possible to run the current 7447 CPU board at a lower speed to be able to remove the fan.

Yes. We do it here:

http://www.pegasosppc.com/homemedia.php

We do not run it at a lower speed, we just use a different cooling solution than we use in the ODW.

If you are interested and you are at CES starting later this week, you can see the Home System in the Freescale Booth.

R&B

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http://bbrv.blogspot.com

Yes, the home-system is nice.

What I was aiming at was of course a silent system, but also to save a few more watts.
I would like to avoid mods like this:
http://www.ppczone.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=378

Effective passive cooling systems can also be expensive, so an option to decrease the CPU speed would be nice.