I was wondering which would be better for the efika board PCI or AGP graphics card
PCI
http://dma.net.au/index.php?action=disp ... t&pid=3426
AGP
http://dma.net.au/index.php?action=disp ... t&pid=3814

i still dont know why pci is more expensive than agp

Hi.

If the PCI-AGP riser card is cheap, then go for the AGP card.
There is no difference in speed when used in the EFIKA.
PCI is only more expensive because of supply and demand: Most people want AGP, hence price goes down due to larger quantities produced.

For my project I'll go with a Radeon 7000 I think, as it should consume less power than the 9250 AFAIK.


Best regards,
Johan

do we know what risers are supported for the EFIKA? What I'd like to see is a riser that gives a right angle PCI slot so everything can be stacked on top of each other making a small unit.

FP

Hi.

Something like this should work I guess:

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/store/ris ... Riser_Card

Best regards,
Johan

OK, that looks like what we need, just need to work out a local supplier for this....and wait for an efika of course

FP

actually to have the PCI card sit above the 2.5" HD there is going to have to be some additional hight provided by the riser...so until we see one of these in action we won't know the exact measurements

Hi.

Yeah, I didn't take that into account as my project doesn't use a harddrive, but flash instead which takes less space.

Can't wait to test it on a real EFIKA though

Best regards,
Johan

does anyone know the capabilities of the pci/agp slot on the efika

As far as I know it just uses the PCI functionality from the MPC5200B processor, which doesnt support AGP at all. Also there's just and only 1 PCI riser slot right, no AGP? Or is the new board different from the one on the pictures?

Beside that, does the Efika in some way support executing the BIOS initialisation code that's inside the graphic cards' ROM, since this is usually in X86 binary format? If not you'd have to go through a lot of trouble to get most 'normal' graphics cards to do anything at all since manufacturers like ATI do not release the specs that you need to build your own/open-source initialisation code. At least that's what they (the ATI representative) told me when I wanted to include an ATI-chip on a MPC5200B board of my own.

Guys, about using graphic cards on EFIKA, read this http://www.ppczone.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=536. That should help you out.

Alex

Hi, here is some basic information.

1. The 5200B only supplies a PCI bus at 66 or 33MHz.

2. Off the shelf PCI at 66MHz are not available. Thus, the EFIKA uses the AGP slot in PCI mode. We mechanically bridge the AGP to PCI. 66MHz is the smallest common denominator (AGPx1).

3. The HAL/OF on the board can handle the x86 BIOS just fine. We manage this today with the PegasosPPC/ODW and all the ATI cards we have shipped therein. We have also ported the HAL/OF to PowerPC based platforms beyond our own.

The good news is that XGI has released the source code to Genesi and going ahead both 2D and 3D will be supported. For XGI, it is good for them as they won't need to support different firmware for different boards. They will just focus on the HAL/OF.

Hope that helps.

R&B

P.S. Remember the EFIKA v2.0 has the XGI chip equivalent and the Altera FPGA. The 5200B EFIKA seen here is a software development platform and a reference design. We will be releasing the EFIKA design through Power.org soon.

_________________
http://bbrv.blogspot.com

Judging from the pictures of the EFIKA, the PCI slot is 3.3v only. Video cards designed for the PC are either 5v or universal (3.3v & 5v). The PowerColor 9250 appears to be 5v only, so it won't work in the EFIKA.

Oddly enough, PowerColor's 7000 Series PCI cards appear to be universal.

Also, I don't know if the AGP riser gives you a 3.3v, 1.5v, or 0.8v AGP slot. If it's 3.3v, you have to make sure your AGP card is compatible with 3.3v. Not all of them are.

so the efika has gfx capabilities onboard? if so thats absolutely brilliant....
EDIT; the team writing the efika book would probably like to know these things....

Where can I find information about what type of Altera FPGA is used. Where does the Efika use the FPGA for?

Cheers
Gunnar

fpga good question because it would be realy interessting to have a fpga for some projects as offload engine e.g. dsp for audiocompression or ciphers.