Bassano del Grappa (Italy) 10/01/2007 - Alternative Holding Group, Soft 3 and Virtual Works created today ACube Systems Srl, a company born to take care of the production and commercialisation of the Sam440ep product line.
Sam440ep will be the first manufactured motherboard. The heart of Sam is the PowerPC 440, a System On Chip (SoC) made by AMCC under a licence from IBM.

The main characteristic of a SoC system is the presence, together with the CPU, of a number of integrated peripherals which allow to build a complete system with a huge savings of both development and debug time, with less components and space used on the PCB. This also results in a significant cost reduction for the customer.
As a consequence, the board doesn't need the classical northbridge / southbridge combination because a part of their functionalities are implemented in the CPU, and the balance is provided by other components and devices.
The availability is planned for the first quarter of 2007.
The new company will continue to do research and development for current projects for the embedded and desktop markets.
More news will be made available in the next weeks through the company website www.acube-systems.biz.

SAM440EP is the first modular motherboard produced by us. Sam's CORE is the PowerPC 440, a System On Chip (SoC) produced by AMCC under license from IBM.

One of the main features of the PowerPC 440EP is the presence, together with the CPU, of a number of integrated peripherals. This allows us to build a complete system with a huge savings of both development and debug time, with less components and space used on the PCB. This also results in a significant cost reduction for the customer.

As a consequence the northbridge/southbridge combination (like the ArticiaS/VIA686B) is not present on the board. Part of their functionality is built into the CPU and the balance is provided by other components and devices.

For the specific model of CPU mounted on SAM, the 440EP, we have the following integrated peripherals:

- DDR memory controller

- PCI controller

- Flash memory devices controller

- USB 1.1 host and USB 2.0 device controller

- 2 Ethernet 10/100 ports

- Up to 4 serial ports

- 2 I2C interfaces

- SPI interface

- 64 pins for General Purpose I/O

Physically the 440EP is a chip of 35mmx35mm, with a PBGA packaging with 456 pins. It is built with CMOS (0.13 um) technology, has a very low power consumption (only 3 Watts at 533Mhz) and it does not require any active cooling system.

It seems like the Efika has a serious challenger. The board will run several linux distro as well as AmigaOS4 (they'd love MorphOS as well)

Hey! The EFIKA is not a competitor! We don't think of this board in this way. We hope it/they will be VERY successful. They can even use this site to assist in building a developer program. We have absolutely no problem with their success.

It's not the Platform, it's the People!

:D

R&B :)

BTW, the people behind the SAM440 did express a desire to have MorphOS running on their board as well. Would this possible (in *practice*), and what would it require to make it happen?

BTW, the people behind the SAM440 did express a desire to have MorphOS running on their board as well. Would this possible (in *practice*), and what would it require to make it happen?

Get in contact with the MorphOS-Team.

What does that mean exactly? Mailing Ralf Schmidt, or negotiating with 10-20 different IP-holders? Or can one close a deal with Genesi (who then will handle everything else)?

PostPosted: 13 Jan 2007 02: 27 pm Post subject:
I just noticed one thing.. The PCI-port is 3.3V
just like the EFIKA. 5V cards won't fit.

but there's an onboard gfx chip.