Good point, sure. The same happened in the original Efika.

Which low power multimedia chip (video and audio) would you solder down to such a board?

Not so much: the Radeon 9250 and Volari V3XT were ~5W graphics chips. The maximum power we ever saw an Efika draw was 12W with graphics and hard disk, and it would idle (i.e. sit at a desktop with disk spinning) at around 7-8W.

PCI Express is a bit more power hungry as standard, and most of the graphics chips for it (at least the ones that usually come on cards) are meant to be paired with 100W quad core desktop processors - in essence, pointlessly powerful (you could never drive them to expected performance on a PCI-E x1 with a 1GHz embedded processor). While I can show you benchmarks that show that 66MHz PCI is not a great deal slower than AGP even though AGP 8x is... "8x faster", and that there is no appreciable performance hit from running a low end graphics card at x1 rather than x16 (after all AMD can and do [or did] sell them at x1 for highly embedded solutions and cheap laptops) - you're not going to see them reach PC benchmark levels.

Every time we go looking for something like this to build, that nags at me: the 50 people on this forum and others that will just whine that it's not built like their PC and they get disappointed that it will not match up to their dreamland of "breaking M$-Wintel LOL Amiga rocks and will be the future".

It's a real downer, so why bother?
Audio is easy if it has an I2S bus (probably not). If you needed more than one PCI Express device (one audio, one video) you'd triple the cost of the board using a bridge.

For a single video chip you could probably find a relatively low power "multimedia" chip from Fujitsu or something.

If you can find an audio chip that will run off some other embedded bus (SPI?) then you have a solution but in the end, that much work for graphics and audio is pointless when you have chips like the i.MX range, SnapDragon, Tegra2 (or the MPC5123/MPC5125 or MPC8610 or whatever if you insist on PowerPC) which have all this all built in.

As for the above rant, no, the i.MX515 is not going to come close to performing like an XBox360 (it has about 3GHz too little clock speed to do that - this is the cost of not melting it's own solder pads! :) but it'll at least give the iPhone and Nokia N900 a run for it's money, and that isn't all that bad. How many 3D games available for the iPhone right now? :D

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Matt Sealey

Here is yet another imx515 base device: http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News ... lker-PCT1/

For the mentioned AMCC chip (and also for the FreeScale QorIQ P2020), I'd be glad to see something similar, as the original Sheeva Plug (which I have a couple on my desk), or its latest reincarnation, the Guru Plug Server Plus: http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/ ... -plus.aspx This could quickly build a larger user and developer community around PPC "server" chips, just as Sheeva brought a revolution for ARM.

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

Holy smokes, I actually touched some LimePCs today!

This was at an unlikely venue, the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose, CA. The ESC is a geek-oriented event primarily for engineers who want to touch the latest toys, and for engineering managers who wish they had stayed engineers. So I was quite astonished to see LimePC there, since ESC is NOT a consumer show like CES. In fact, LimePC was there to sell design and manufacturing services, and the products were there to show prospects what kinds of things LimePC can make.

So here's what I saw. Most of these are not at their poorly-maintained web site, so details are from a hard-copy brochure.

1. LimePad: this is an interesting combination of a iPad-like 10.1" LCD tablet called the E10, which can be inserted into a clamshell with a keyboard to become a netbook. Processor is "1 GHz minimum Cortex". I assume they mean an ARM Cortex-A8 or A9, as they're the only ARM Cortex that run that fast. 512MB DDR2, 8 GB SSD (250G HDD optional), Ethernet, USB, 3G, Wireless LAN, Android/LimeOS. 12 hours video time, 240 hours standby.

2. LimeLite: "Your mobile entertainment center" with pocket-size unit with 5.0" LCD which plugs into a base station with USB and Ethernet. Freescale MPC5121e, 512MB DDR2, 8GB SSD, Ethernet, 3G optional, Wireless LAN, Android. Plugged into the base station LimeLite reminds me of a Chumby, but you can unplug the unit and carry it around like an iTouch.

3. LimePC X1: the same product that was sold as CherryPal. I finally got to touch one!

4. LimeBook A9: cute little netbook with 8.9" LCD 1024x600 and "1 GHz minimum Cortex processor". From the name I would guess it is indeed an ARM Cortex-A9. 256MB or 512MB DDR2, 4GB or 8GB SSD, optional 30GB HDD, Ethernet, 3G, Wireless LAN, 2 USB, SD card reader, VGA, Android/LimeOS. Comes in white, black, pink, yellow, blue, or green. This one I actually played with a little, but it couldn't do much because there was no Internet connection. Still, it seemed like a nice little netbook.

5. LinkBook: same as LimeBook A9 but with a Freescale MPC5121e. I think its called the LimeBook at www.limepc.com.

6. TWR-MPC5125 Freescale MPC5125 processor card for Freescale's Tower system, described earlier in the thread.

LimePC also had LimeNAS (Network Attached Storage) and LimePC X1V which both use VIA C7-M or VX855 processors. I think these are x86, but I'm too lazy to check. They also had a LimeSTB which is a set-top box.

Quite a lot of products, most of them showing pretty pictures and apparently working. I have no idea when any of them might hit the USA or under what brand names they might sell. Still, an unusually interesting booth visit.

ESC continues Wednesday 4/28 and Thursday 4/29.

What a sighting! Please, somebody go there, take dozens of photos, videos, steal the displayed units, whatever!

(what, the audience is yawning!?)

Alright, the only interesting detail in those computers (as everyone and his dog is doing those gadgets today) is the PowerPC variants, quite strange they keep on using this architecture.
Hey it would even enable comparing the same product powered by these two different CPUs.

There is nothing strange in using PPC or the MPC5121e :) It is a nice chip, I have some development boards based on it, and even demoed it in Budapest and Prague. One just does not have to consider it as a general purpose chip. I mean, in general, the EFIKA with MPC5200 was faster, but there were some applications (sorry, can't recall after 2+ years, which ones), where the MPC5121 had a lot better performance.

Obviously the ARM based LimePC machines will be faster, still PPC has its value, especially where somebody needs to run existing PPC applications.

And don't forget some other PPC product lines: IBM Power N+1 chips, which still beat any Intel/AMD chips, and Freescale QorIQ chips. None of them for the desktop, but still fantastic :) I'm still looking forward to get a QorIQ based board/system somewhere...

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

...which makes for the obvious scene of the engineers' boss, slamming open the department door and shouting "what the hell are you doing?!"

I don't know if that scene ever happened... that way. But what's real is that most of the PowerPC group was let go of freescale after the MPC512x debut. And PowerPC was one of the roots of this company!

Who is doing the MPC5125? Was it the third brother of the MPC5121e and MPC5123, and thus the same project? I ask because I didn't see the MPC5125 mentioned back then, and for me it's like it appeared after the MPC team had left, which would be very strange.

They designed it for a very specific set of applications. It works well if you want one of those specific applications, but the trade-off for high bus bandwidth for peripherals meant things you'd expect on a desktop weren't there (overall cache coherency).
It's the same overall product group - automotive. Just a different organization of people and products within it.

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Matt Sealey

And now for something completely the same... except that it's smaller (and cheaper!)

Applied Micro (formerly AMCC) just announced APM801xx family, which sounds like a little sister to the recently-announced APM821xx. Very few details except that it's PowerPC and comes in a very small package:

http://investor.appliedmicro.com/phoeni ... highlight=
Sounds like it's intended mostly for home and small business Network-Attached Storage (NAS) applications, like the SheevaPlug/PogoPlug and is intended to compete with Marvell ARM offerings in that space. No on-chip graphics as far as I can tell, though you can attach whatever you like over PCI express if available on the particular chip.

Would be nice, if it would also come with a Sheeva Plug like development system. This could revitalize interest in PPC, just as the Sheva did for ARM. Actually, a cheap NAS/networking devel system from Freescale would also be nice (hint: with QorIQ :-) ).

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

Actually, the APM801xx will have a development board (added since original press release). However, Applied Micro (AMCC) development boards have never been cheap, so we'll see. The Freescale MPC5125 Tower board should be showing up soon. Still no stock at Digi-Key.

http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News ... -APM801xx/

I haven't looked up teh details yet, but looks nice. Who is going to make an "EfikaPPC II" out of this?

Yeah, EfikaPPC II with this chip would be nice. I still use the original EFIKA as my router. But I just checked the price of AMCC devel boards, and I'm pretty sure, that those prices will never attract Linux users and sysadmins, like the EFIKA or the Sheeva Plug...

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

If anyone is interested, there seems to be Freescale MPC5125 Tower boards and kits showing up in tiny quantities at various distributors such as Digi-Key, Arrow, and Avnet.

By tiny, I mean inventories of 1-2 units. Still, that's infinity percent more than zero.

I got this information from the Freescale web site http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/sit ... arch=false. Click on "Distributor" buttons.

another Efika5121e/THTF clone??

http://www.linkbook.co.za/