Hi !
I just wanted to say that this Pegasos 8641D board looks very promising with it's dual core processor and PCI express slots.

I would like to propose a project using 3D accelerated gfx for that board, but it seems that there is no gfx drivers supporting PCI express on Linux/PowerPC at the moment (open source or made by ATI or NVIDIA).
So I guess it's useless to do such a proposal now. Am I wrong ? Maybe you have new information on this point ?

By the way, isn't this board a bit competing the OSW/Pegasos III board ?

Anyway, I say it again, but it really looks nice : keep up the good work !

Look here for more information:

http://www.powerdeveloper.org/8641d.php

R&B :)

_________________
http://bbrv.blogspot.com

There are plenty. We ran a PCI Express Radeon in the Marvell board (see press releases) for testing the firmware. It runs TuxRacer just fine and dandy.
How do you suppose we compete with ourselves?

_________________
Matt Sealey

Great !
I've proposed my project. I hope that the description is enough detailled for your needs.
See here : Open source 3D real time engine

Neko: Pegasos 8641D has backward compatibility with Pegasos I/II and rest of software?

_________________
wintel free

How do you mean?

How would it not be broadly backward compatible?

It's a dual core G4 processor with the northbridge integrated.. the southbridge is different to anything we've used before (SATA and USB 2.0 etc.) but the interfaces are common standards (AHCI and EHCI respectively) and so on.

Linux already knows about all the hardware on the reference board and it's in the mainline tree already. The Pegasos 8641D should be fairly close in design but a huge drop in cost (the ref board is $4000). Fairly easy to port to if you already have a Pegasos II - and vice versa. You may not even need to do any porting at all (after all, it is a G4).

_________________
Matt Sealey

I'am about Hardware Abstraction Layer conception - software, working under HAL must get workin on any hw with HAL implementation? It's right?

_________________
wintel free

I just tested the open source Radeon driver on my x86 notebook, which has PCI Express on-board Radeon X600, and it works fine. It's openSUSE 10.2 beta1 with Xorg 7.1.99. I did not have much luck with earlier versions of this driver, so it's showing progress. It's still slower than the binary only ATI driver, but no extra download and no more crashes as just a few months ago.

_________________
CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

Thanks, there is good informations there but:
- When this machine could be available ?
- How much could it be priced ?
- And, important, how much electrical power will it use ?

Nb : I really this such a kind of machine could be a really great Power desktop computer.

:-)

https://www.pegasosppc.com/store.php?category=21 for the first two of your questions, and also look at Neko's post here in this thread, before you get a heart attack :-)

_________________
CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

The reference design is available now if you are very eager to get into dual core PowerPC computing. However as a reference design it has a LOT of features totally unnecessary for a consumer product. It's for developers who want to create a product which will instantly run on the final Pegasos 8641D. We have a developer program of course (see bbrv's link)

That board is $4000 right now. This is Freescale's price.

The target price for the final design will be an ODW-like system for $1500, just like the original ODW was. We hope this will be on sale in 2007, the sooner the better. There is a lot to do! I think we will want to get this system ATI Certified like we did the original ODW, but for product sale rather than as an afterthought. There is also a lot of demand for providing more complete packages (monitor etc.) which we can put in there.

As for power consumption; the current ODW (with a 3-year old 130nm G4, nice hard disk, DVD burner and Radeon 9250) consumes around 80W 'idle' - that's booted to a Linux desktop and not doing much.

We hope a complete system with the 8641D will not be much more; at least it will compete very well with a complete Intel Core Duo system with similar hardware components (roughly the same clock speed, SATA disk and DVDRW, DDR2 RAM, and a PCI Express graphics adapter).

_________________
Matt Sealey

It will have (and the reference board does have) Linux support out of the box including 3D graphics drivers. We have always offered this.

The difference between buying a board from Freescale and from Genesi is the firmware. We think ours is better, because we have our HAL to simplify the design-level abstraction of the board, the x86 emulator to bring up the graphics adapter, and the Open Firmware device-tree is dynamically generated under the Genesi solution (rather than compiled in using a Linux tool), plus the IEEE 1275 standard client interface, which will take a lot of the effort out of supporting Linux *and every other OS*.

Freescale do not much have any motivation to get into porting every OS out there, the OF client interface, and the firmware HAL, make this so that it won't matter that they don't want to stray too far from Linux.

The HAL.. that is a story for another time. There are exciting things revolving around it.

_________________
Matt Sealey

Does it mean that 8641D projects will be approved and projects running sooner than those for OSW? I've thought projects will have to wait for Genesis board and not for this from Freescale, or am I mistaken and Freescale will support projects by their own reference design?

Thanks,
Karel
PS: yes, I'm quite eager, since those 4xGigE and dual core capability looks really really great for our IIOP firewall. :-) http://projects.powerdeveloper.org/proj ... ending=615

From what I can see (from the specs) the 8641D hardware is closer to the hardware we'd be seeing on the horizon (in the next few years) on consumer's desktops. Although the OSW has some serious POWER :D behind it, for all purposes dual core is where the market will be for the next few years and systems above that will be out of reach for most consumers.

@Genesi, In a few weeks (1 or 2) I am going to start writing a paper on multi-threading real-time processes, ie for applications such as multi-core game engines. My question out of this would be what are the advantages of either platform (970MP vs Core Duo) for multi-threading. The conclusion that I'm up to at the moment is that PPC is in the lead due to the vector engine, which would speed up tasks such as streaming/generating dynamic BSP trees.

AltiVec is the key. We agree. For the money and the performance in terms of efficiency and ability to do work, we would put the smart money is on the 8641D. That is our feeling today. Your premise sounds good.

R&B ;)

_________________
http://bbrv.blogspot.com