I am really happy hear about progress in new PPC hardware :)

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wintel free

i was just looking at http://www.power2people.org/bounty_047.html that looks really nice for desktop, file server, nat/gatewayrouter, or a media server. just wondering, what would be the ram options ? i was hoping for alot :)

I would love if it would be possible to build a HTPC out of it, so personally I hope that the video from the built-in GFX controller of the 8610 will be routed to a HDMI connector (The board will also have a PCI-E x16 physical slot (with 8 lanes routed to it) for "real" GFX cards), and that the sound is better than AC97 audio, preferably HD sound with surround sound capabilities.
As far as I understand, the first steps in this bounty is about determining things like this, i.e. whether there will be memory slots or if the memory will be soldered directly to the motherboard, and if it's the latter, what amount of memory will be there (I think they will put as much as possible if this is the case).

what is the cost savings for soldered on ram versus having slots that can support something like 4GB? ( was about to say 8Gb but thats a 32 bit cpu so maybe thats pointless, unless there is a way a 32 bit cpu can use 8GB )

not that linux or any OS needs that, but helps with the disk cache, and i use tmpfs alot.

but the most important is for this to be realized, i just hope my ibooks keep going as long as they can.

matt

According to the docs, the 8610 supports up to 16GB of RAM. As for the cost, I would guess it is cheaper to just provide 2 or more DIMM slots and just offer "certified" (ie. tested) DIMMs. It would drive the board cost down and the DIMM manufacturers produce in much bigger quantities anyway.
I'm hopeful it will.

I'm not so sure about that. Sure, it would make the board itself cheaper, but not necessarily the consumers' total cost for board+memory. Genesi (or whoever manufacturer that will build the board) could probably source RAM chips much cheaper directly from the manufacturers or big wholesalers instead of the consumer having to buy memory modules that has been pushed through several instances in the value chain, each adding their own profit margin to the price. And then you would have the challenge of tuning the firmware to a whole bunch of possible modules that the consumers might use. You can't trust anyone would accept a "you must only use this supported module" sticker, and people will call it bad quality if they can't use the modules of their own choice.

I would advocate 4 Gigabytes of RAM soldered directly to the motherboard. It would be more than enough for almost any usage, it would probably result in a cheaper board, and it would be much simpler since it would simply work out of the box without the need of fiddling with supported/unsupported RAM modules.

if going with on-board RAM, i'd rather genesi did custom RAM amount population this time (ie. the customer chooses how much, within genesi's norms, of course) in contrast to what happened to the original efika.

Ahem, that's even harder to do, it would require multiple production runs (ie. one with 1GB, one with 2GB, one with 4GB). The way I see it, there are only 3 choices:

a. Just provide 2(or more) DIMM slots for the user to choose.
b. Include the average amount of RAM (2GB) by default.
c. Include the maximum amount of RAM (16GB) by default!

The last will probably make some people drool, but for most users it will be useless. Personally I'd choose a, and just get 4 or 8GB of certified DIMMS for myself. But most people would be fine with 2GB.

They would be fine now, but 2G of RAM is the standard of 2009. The board will (hopefully) start shipping in 2011! Even the full amount won't be that much by then.
I'd personally go with 2 or 4 slots, everybody is used to supplying RAM sticks anyway, nearly no general purpose i386 board has soldered RAM chips.

Having RAM soldered on the board has some very important advantages. The most important, that you don't have to deal with the nightmare of configuring the countless combinations of modules people would attempt to use.

I've learnt a little about how many thins a BIOS (or whatever you name it) has to do just to get RAM working, and sometimes I'm just marvelled that things do work! Modern memory is very, very complex. And precisely because the BIOS doesn't know which RAM is out there, sometimes it has to do kind of random guesses.

The only disadvantage of soldered RAM is... Decide the amount!

And if the memory have some fault? you can not substitute...
if is soldered...

This is my dubpt.

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I'm very interested that the 8610 Board will power even the netbook or notebook version.

Is this on the future "roadmap"?

Now the 8610 is build with 90 nm chip, does it will be at 45 nm like the other Freescale power processor?

I know that is scheduled already QorIQ
chips to come to 22nm...

Thanks

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