Alan Speaks

Secondly, Fleecy and I were plannning to sit down and make sure that we issued a jointly acceptable, coordinated, news release on the A1. But he got snowed in, in Cumbria, so we can't now do that until later in the week. Expect a major web site update on both our and Amiga's sites next Monday.

But in the meantime I'm going to repeat here some of the things I said at Alt-Woa as some of the 'authoritative' postings on this list (& ann) have been off in the realms of fantasy and bear little if any relationship to what I actually said.

But first a bit of of background.

The main feedback that has come out over the last year can, I think, be summarised as follows:

In October 2000 when we laid out the design for the A1, there was no commercially available 'northbridge' chip (the interface between the CPU, memory and PCI bus) at the relatively small quantities that we needed at an economic price. 'Southbridge' chips were available (these handle the system timing, interrupts etc and, traditionally also embed the lower speed peripheral functions such as IDE, USB etc), but clearly these do not come with a built in A1200-PCI bridge - which would have to be built in custom logic. It therefore made economic sense to build a custom southbridge chip - but without the integrated peripherals (these were available on separate chips at low cost anyway) which incorporated the A1200-PCI bridge. Things were going nicely until May/June . . . . and you know the rest, or most of it anyway.

By the time OS4 development had been signed off in early November the world had moved on. Commercially available PPC northbridge chips were available, and coupled with off-the-shelf southbridge chips, were able to deliver better price performance than the original A1 custom chip design, and (since the big boys had already been using them successfully) without the risk of bugs intrinsically present in any custom logic implementation. This meant that the only custom logic function needed was the PCI to A1200 bridge.

Alongside this many people had expressed a wish only to have a stand-alone A1 board, without the need (or ability) to run hardware-hitting applications. In addition Hyperion have been making better than expected progress in decoupling the chipset dependancies in the OS with a result that it will cease to be reliant on the Amiga chipset quite soon now. (Of course hardware hitting applications will still to a greater or lesser degree need access to a genuine Amiga chipset). Given this, we thought it would be sensible to try to provide Amiga chipset availability as an a option, so that the main A1 board would not have to carry the cost of providing this connection - in terms of PCB and component real-estate and in requiring a custom tower to mount it in. The upshot is that Escena has come up with a solution which allows the bridge to the A1200 chipset to be made from a PCI card, via ribbon cable, to the A1200 edge connector. The use of a ribbon cable also solves the 'will it work in an xyz tower' problem, as there is (within limits) quite a wide range of A1 & A1200 relative board positioning that can be used. Theis A1200 bridge will be an additional cost item for those who need it.

So with Escena concentrating their efforts on the bridge card, and us deciding to use off-the-shelf north and south bridge parts for the main board it made sense to subcontract the design and manufacture to experts in this field, who, surprise, surprise, are far east based (hence the problem with customs on Friday). The board (currently) runs an open firmware-compatible bios and runs PPC linux (which is how we know that the hardware works properly before OS4.0 is released).

In terms of timeframes the board is now ready to go into production, with a lead time of 4-6 weeks. However we will not press the button until we can be sure that OS4 will be ready to run on the board in the same timeframe. OS4 is scheduled to go into beta during March, and we will make A1 boards available to help with this process. When we get the thumbs up from Hyperion we will start production and they will be with your local dealer around 6 weeks later.

In terms of specification the entry level board will run a 600MHz G3 CPU and will come with this soldered in place, thereby keeping the costs as low as possible. After the first production run we will be producing boards - obviously at a higher cost - with a cpu carrier so that cpu's can easily be interchanged to suit your speed and pocket requirements. As G4's fall in price we may also offer a soldered in place G4 cpu option as well. What happens if you buy an entry level board and want to upgrade it in a year or so's time? Well exactly the same as when you bought a similarly priced accelerator a couple of years back and want to upgrade to a faster one. You either sell it privately or trade it in to the dealer where you purchased it. In fact in the PC market, depite all processors being socketed, hardly anyone ever changes the cpu to improve the computer - they nearly always have to buy a (at least) a new motherboard as well. We're just being upfront about it!

So lets revisit that feedback list again:

CPU speed concerns -- G3/G4 to their current clocking limits

Memory speed concerns -- 133MHz FSB (DDR doesn't help PPC's I am told)

Provision of legacy peripherals (FDD/Serial/Parallel/kb/mouse) - On board

Provision of integrated peripherals - 2xUSB (motherboard) + 2 more on headers; LAN; AC97; MC97; UDMA100

AGP speed - 2x (although this is still a red herring in my view)

Will it run Linux? - Yes

But I dont have/want/will never buy an A1200 - Fine by me

Will it fit in in an EZTower mk1-5/RBM/xyz tower? - Yes (subject to xyz definition - not sure about wooden towers)

It costs too much (interesting this one as the price has never been announced) - A1 including 600MHz G3 cpu at current component prices and exchange rates GBP 350/USD500/Euro 600 excluding local taxes and shipping. And before anyone (who probably has no notion of real manufacturing and development costs) pipes up that they can buy a xzzz PC motherboard for $2.49 from Walmart remember this is for a board being manufactured in the (very?) low thousands, not by the million. (And don't forget that a 240MHz 603 ppc blizzard with 060 cost around ukp550 ex tax when they were last available - those were the days ;-) )

Where is it? - In my office running Turbo Linux at the moment. In your dealer as soon as OS4 is ready.