Hi folks !

I just would like to say here that I'm getting bored because I've invested a lot of time in the Efika & the Pegasos, and now since several months, everything seems to be paused or abandonned or is just announces of things that are not developed or not available...
I hope I'm wrong...

Why ?
- still no release of MorphOS - can't remember the date of 1.4.5 release
- Efika 1 now dead.
- Efika 2 planned... for when ?
- Efika powerdev project : a lot of them are abandonned
- XGI project ? Still waiting for a board...
- Pegasos III project dead
- TetraPower project dead
- PowerPC stuff getting really outdated compared to a 499€ basic PC laptop
...
etc...

Sorry for being negative here... I hope Genesi will find a good solution to fix that, but I don't see much interest for me in that now :-(
So long !

hi Geoffrey

why don't you pause yourself too ?
Do something else in the meanwhile, find some other inspiration, but don't give up ! we will all need you when the Efika2 will be out !

cheers

@ Geoffrey

full ack
i have the same feelings :(

@ SoundSpuare

Don't you think, we have enough paused and waited.
I think so

ok so you think you have enough waited.
but i suppose you'll still be around when MOS2.0 will be finally out ? ;-)

@ Geoffrey

EFIKA 1 is not yet dead. You can still get it, and it is worth getting it, as there is no alternative of this machine in the x86 world regarding to power consumption and performance.

I must admit, I don't care much for MorphOS 2.0, as I'm a Linux / FreeBSD guy. Maybe I'll install it for fun once available. And Linux works nicely on the machine. You can use Debian or Gentoo from the beginning, or a test version of Gutsy or openSUSE, both of which will be released in the coming weeks. So life is going on with EFIKA, even if not with rocket speed.

And my motto: Always look at the bright side of life...

Well, MOS 2.0 is not the issue of Genesi, but of the MOS-Team. There were demonstrations recently and MOS 2.0 is in it's bug fixing phase now. But the release should have been better yesterday than tomorrow - that's for sure.
The Efika1 is, according to BBRV, not really dead. If there will be another production, we'll see. But I guess the Efika2 is not too far away. The board is not the most complex one which is thinkable and I guess the bplan guys do it good and quick.
The OF is - I assume - much much much recycleable from the Efika1, thus reducing development time strongly.
XGI is IMHo not too interesting, at least not for end users.
PegasosIII - well, that's one of those things were it reall does not look good. I'd still love to see a 8641 board, but Genesi's/bplan's resources are limited. get to know some multi-millionaire with a faible for PPC and we were much closer to something like the PegasosIII. Money makes the world go round - it's like that (unfortunately).
TetraPower - similar to PIII.
PowerPC gets more specialized, the general purpose desktop PPC CPU is more or less dead now. But those ultra low energy processors have quite some potential and the 512x and 52xx are still leading the eneregy/efficience ratio. The situation in PPC land could be better, but not everything is bad there.
In the end an advice: keeping some distance to those things helps to keep a clear and a relaxed view about the things and to avoid black/white decisions.

i read somewhere here that the efika2 will feature a new firmware ? not the OF i mean.

maybe, who knows that ;)
i'm a MOS-user(fan) since the first public version and Peg-owner since
08/2002, as a ordinary user you can't see any progress and without any
communication from the devs and a featurelist of the next MOS-version,
it is really frustrating.
Maybe it is really time to change the hobby.

I'm no programmer nor processor designer..

But what can PowerPC offer, that ARM, Xscale can't?

In the embedded arena, I mean. If we are to push
PowerPC together, we need some kind of marketing-
plan. Nice words we can use when we talk with other
tech-savvy people and engineers.

"Cool computing" means nothing today when multi-
core x86 draw less power than a light-bulb.

It is all in the names of those who use powerpc

apple
nintendo wii
xbox 360
playstation 3
efika

:wink:

I know what you mean.

I got the EFIKA with concrete plans to write and optimize apps for it for MOS.
But as we saw, MOS is showing up either very late or maybe never ...

This situation haywired my EFIKA MOS development plans.
I believe many people planned to develop for the EFIKA/MOS platform and feel similar.

Its a real pity because I think something like MOS or AMIGA OS4 + EFIKA would have been a lovely bundle.
I'm sure people would have graped them out of Genesis hands.
Its a pity for Genesi that they could not sell this.

I doubt that waiting for MOS makes any sense now.
The other day I decided to work on EFIKA under the only real existing OS for it (LINUX).
I'm currently backporting some optimizations I once did to speed up the MOS version of RobinHood - I'm sure that with these optimizations backported to LINUX, Robins Linux version will runs playable fast on EFIKA under Linux too.


I feel like you that waiting for e.g MOS is very demotivating. I feel its best to become realistic here.
If you really want to do something maybe it yould help you if you focus on Linux too?


Cheers
Gunnar

It still does. Intel improved their cpus quite a lot, that's true.
The average Core#? is a real energy saver compared to old designs like the Prescott or such.
But still there is nothing energy efficient available from Intel like some ppc. Sure there are very energy saving (and ipressive) cpus, the ULV versions, but these are expensive.
A board like the Efika is power/performance wise quite unique for that money. Okay, VIA has something to offer, but still the Efika has its points.
The E2 will not be worse I guess, the energy consume will probably be a tad more (the gfx core will draw some juice), the added ram as well. But I guess taht will add 2-3W. And for the (more interesting) non headless devices you save the additional power for the gfx card (a low end card like the Radeon 7000 or 9250 is in the range of 10W).
You will - if my assumption of the addional energy consumption of about 3-5 W is correct - get a *complete* system (including 2.5" hd) which takes less than 10W.
I read from some VIA forums how they were tweaking their boards to come as low as 20W. It is possible, but it is much morre expensive and still consumes double the power (to be fair it should be noted, that such a system does offer some more MIPS).

If you want to see really low power I was playing with a Freescale MX31, ARM11 with VFP. It is as powerful as a MPC5200 and it draws under 100mw. I left it in a loop for a week and it stayed at room temperature with no heat sink.

Yes, there are even more power efficient cores than the e300 core used in the 5200 or 5121. But the 5200 is rated at 1W, add the power consumption for ram, gfx and the hd and you end up with roughly the same for a complete system regardless you are using such a 0.1W or a W core.
And I see still one very big advantage for the ppc and that is the availability of MorphOS.
Also the ppc offers a path from low end to high end processors which is missing on most other architectures (except x86), but I must admit that this path is rather a theoretical one (due to limited (money) resources).

iMX31 has integrated PowerVR 3D graphics like the MPC5121e. It requires you to use Mobile SDRAM, MPC5200 uses normal SDRAM. Of course Mobile RAM is 3x the price of normal RAM but 1/4 the power. We almost used it in our current design before switching to MPC5200. We are AC powered so power consumption didn't matter and the surrounding chips for MPC5200 are significantly cheaper than MX31.

MX31 is CPU in the Mircosoft Zune and some SmartPhones. It is optimized for battery operation.