Good News: we have some new hardware coming.

1. MPC5121e board in the same vein as the EFIKA.
2. MPC512x board that will primarily be a reference design.
3. An MPC8610 board that we be a replacement for the PegasosPPC/ODW.

and...

Something very cool that will surprise many as it will offer something more to people that are no just PowerPC enthusiasts. 8)

R&B :)

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http://bbrv.blogspot.com

Whau! This is VERY good news! I'm looking forward to new MPC8610 board, it's time to more powerfull and efficient PegasosPPC II successor :-)
Please keep us posted, I will keep posted czech and slovak users ;-)

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Czech PowerPC User Group - http://powerpc.lukysoft.cz
MorphOS Software database - http://morphos.lukysoft.cz/en

Indeed cool news! :-)

And the thing everyone wants to know - do you have a plan or estimate about the ETA on these things?

BTW - Have you asked the MorphOS team how they feel about the 5121e's lack of cache coherency? Can/will MorphOS handle it?

Great!
I am quite curious how the 8610 will perform in the end. I guess with the 8610 *and* the 5121/5200 together some momentum can be initiated.
Keep rocking!

While I'm happy that there is going to be new hardware, it seems like the new Pegasos boards are going to fall into the same trap as the old ones. Genesi has a market of two groups of people:

1) People who want cheap evaluation boards.

The new ARM thing and EFIKA-like hardware are perfect for this.

2) Hardware enthusiasts

These are single users like me who want to play with hardware they would otherwise not get a chance to use. The above (especially the EFIKA) also cater to this group. They are interesting, affordable, and there is nothing else like them.

But the new Pegasos replacement is nearly the same hardware as a 3-year old Mac mini that I can get from eBay for $200. The old Pegasos had this problem too: it was more expensive and worse performing than equivalent hardware from Apple.

If you were to produce something different (e.g. a $1000 range single-socket G5 or PA Semi board) that I can use as a desktop, I would buy one. An EFIKA like thing is useful for random appliances. But a 1 GHz G4 board is competing with used Apple products that are half the price.

you forgot:

3) People who want very good performance at the fraction of the consumption a normal PC would take. Believe it or not, the concept of the eco-computer (ie the computer that does not require the power of a fridge to do common stuff like read email or watch a movie) is becoming much more important lately. And it's not just users, it's companies, people who want the job done and who depend on low-power environments. Personally, I refuse to buy a 500-Wt PC -where more than half the power is spent on cooling fans- just to read mail and develop C/C++. I can do with less power, if that means halving my electricity bill. Also, one of the Pegasos' limitations was the amount of RAM available. The 8610 will come with lots of RAM by default, and given the bandwidth increase, it will mean you'll be able to do more, faster. Sure, you won't be able to run Stalkers or Call of Duty 4, but you knew that anyway, right? That's not the cause of a PPC desktop, anyway.
It's not the same hardware, it's the G4 as it should have been in the first place, with lots of bandwidth (pretty much the same that any common PC has, 667MHz DDR2).
I guess we'll have to wait for actual benchmarks to really see the difference, but I'm sure that the "surprise" Bill mentioned will more than make up for it. Also, Genesi is trying to reenter a market that is almost dead (PPC desktop). If 512x/8610 sells and makes a profit, what's there to stop Genesi from producing faster products?

Konstantinos

Not entirely true. Due to technical limitations we can't support more than 2GB on the MPC8610 - but these days, 2GB of RAM is so cheap ($20) it won't matter. The MacBook Air only comes with 2GB of RAM and it's soldered to the board; so if you need more, well, Apple have taken the "screw you" route in order to fit it inside a manilla envelope. Can you imagine a situation where you would need more, though?
The MPC8610 memory controller should run at 533MHz, but we can put in higher-specced RAM to take advantage of better latencies (as we did with the Pegasos ODW :)
Lack of demand :D

You're right, the PPC desktop market can't sustain Genesi. The ARM board, further projects with other processors and technologies, other products for more broad markets (even if that has to be a Windows PC) and more embedded environments (phones perhaps) have to be considered now.

If the surprise pans out.. it will be somewhat of a coup :)

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Matt Sealey

Markos:
You forget one very important factor when you discuss lower
energy bills.. How many years will you have to run this PowerPC
before you start saving money on your energy bill?

What's stopping you from purchasing Mini-ITX boards with
cheap dual-core Intel mobile CPUs? These CPUs are not
far from PowerPC when it comes to power consumption,
but are several times cheaper.

when it comes to power-saving, money is usually of small importance (within certain limits of course). Performance and efficiency is.
Nothing is stopping me, I already own one of those (actually a Shuttle PC). It is very fast, but it's by no means in par with a cpu such as the 8610 when it comes to power efficiency. And they're not really that much cheaper (a base Shuttle PC cost me ~400e (incl CPU+RAM) which is not that cheaper than the expected price of the 8610 -I hope :)

To me, 2GB is huge.
I also like soldered RAM, even more so recalling the RAM modules nightmare on the Pegasos I.
Nope.
Nor anyone else. There's no such desktop PPC market. Not that you can't build a very nice desktop computer with PPC, of course.
As you mention it, it sounds as it had materialized, at least as much as the boards based in 5121 and 8610. By the way, I've just checked freescale's ARM offerings (yes, I am that smart, wow), and their i.MX family looks quite competitive, the i.MX31 being a hell of a beast, although it seems that only i.MX21 is being used in a real product, Iwatsu's IP Videophone NR-IPKTV.
Or are you thinking in switching CPU provider on purpose?
By the way, the i.MX31 is listed at $20 a pop, which makes the 8610 a scandal al $170. How can it be that the vendor is charging so much for PPC technology? Are they doing this to sink it?
If the CPU alone is almost $200, the $300 or even the $400 price tag is pure science fiction: Dead end. I don't think anyone would buy a new computer with this SoC at a higher price: Price/performance relation simply is orders of magnitude out of the graph.
"other" processors... let me count, taking out PPC and ARM... Oops!
Could you explain how would that make sense? Genesi competing against, for example, ASUS?
:shock: ...Genesi competing against Nokia? I don't get it. Well, I don't get many things, frankly.
Sorry, as english is not my native language, I don't get the meaning of "coup" in this context. Is it something that spoils surprises?

@Konstantinos:

>The 8610 will come with lots of RAM by default

Is this a promise? :-)

>and given the bandwidth increase, it will mean you'll be able to do more, faster.

Mac mini has up to 1.5 GHz though and its L2 cache is bigger and faster (latency).

@jmarcos:

>By the way, the i.MX31 is listed at $20 a pop, which makes the 8610 a scandal al $170.

How about the 750CL (from Wii...)? You can buy the 2.7 Watt 600 MHz part for under 20$.

ask Matt, I can't say :-P
I bet you that the 8610 will be faster in general use, the memory bus is more than 2x faster then the mac mini G4. It doesn't matter if it has a bigger L2 cache, the cache has to get its data from RAM too. Unless we're talking about brute-force calculations where the extra MHz will make a difference, then G4 will get its ass kicked by the 8610, I should say.

It amazes just me how naive some people can be..

How much is a tsi110 Northbridge for that chip, do you think? Does it come with an integrated graphics unit?

If you want to design these boards, go grab a CAD package and start designing, Arno. There is far more to it than quoting AVNet prices and looking on Wikipedia.

There is absolutely no future in designing PPC boards around discrete processors and northbridges, end of story.

As for Kristian's doubts, the MPC8610 is faster than any single-core Mac Mini. It is the same difference that lets AMD continually performance rate chips at "3800+" when they run at 2.2GHz - the inbuilt memory controller does wonders for performance.

I would suggest you stop comparing though; we are not making a Mac clone or an Amiga box. Stop looking at the Freescale prices and parametrics; they're better than that if you have an account manager and have access to the latest revisions of the chip.

Please just trust us. We know what we are doing.

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Matt Sealey

Although I undestrand you, I'm also scared at how angry you got with Arno. I'm as naive as him (no, way more!)...
Yes, comparing a CPU to a SoC is not right.
Very important statement here. I also started to have that firm opinion some time ago.
Yes, but the price qoute for the 8610 is scaringly high. I'm worried because you won't sell boards if they are expensive. I'm not saying they have to be as cheap as the Efika 5200 (amazing deal), but pricing makes the difference between a killer product and a flop. After all, customers think "they are just computers, they are all the same, why buying this that is more expensive".
OF COURSE, that's for granted!