Because it's not economical to make one in any numbers less than a few thousand. We would have to make more CPU cards than there exist Pegasos boards to make it viable from a per-unit cost point of view.

To buy cheaper processors we have to lower our standards and use a bin sort from Freescale which is intentionally overclocked, had it's minimum power rating raised and re-marked as a faster chip.

That means you get, at 1.6GHz, something like a 1.3GHz processor which has been re-rated. The laser-marking on the die still reflects it's 1.3GHz specification. The maximum temperature is lower (85°C rather than 105°C) and the reliability and MTBF is lower (5 years rather than 10). It will also draw a SIGNIFICANTLY higher power consumption than a true 1.6GHz processor, and far, far more than PowerPC processors are expected to on our systems - this in itself means heavier cooling.

That is what you get for cheaper processors. Frankly we wouldn't want to go down that route.

At 1.0 or 1.1GHz, clocked as the fab intended, you would get a reasonably cheap CPU card. That's probably the best we could do for the ~$199 price point.

We could use 700/800MHz processors with incredibly low power ratings (better than the 750CXe) but that would *add* to the price. Hardly worth it is it, unless you happen to own a Pegasos II G3, in which case you gain AltiVec - but for everyone else it would be a downgrade, and cost more than the original motherboard.

At the top end you could be paying $450 for an officially clocked, tested 1.42GHz 7447A processor, and a great deal more for a 1.7GHz 7448 for very little benefit in performance compared to the heat, power consumption added on.

There is no such thing as a 1.8GHz 7448 - let alone a 2.0GHz one. The 7447A re-rated tops out at 1.6GHz, the official top clock speed is 1.42GHz. Any other clocks you see on Mac sites are really down to their guarantee, possibly Freescale re-marked processors which are then overclocked even more.

Simply put, it's not worth it for you, it's not worth it for us, for the very few units we would end up producing. It also does NOT help anyone who wants a new workstation - they would be relegated to buying older Pegasos boards, and new CPU cards by some method. bplan can no longer manufacture or sell them without substantial cost involved in bringing it back to production as an RoHS compliant system.

A lot of manufacturers have simply revised or reengineered products from scratch rather than produce RoHS compliant systems. A lot more have simply thrown a product away. We're not really alone here.

Far better an option is to create something new, and modern. The world is moving to multi-core processors, faster RAM technologies, serial ATA, USB 2.0, higher integration and lower cost. The world does not want a pluggable CPU Pegasos which is 6 years old, hard to find RAM for, but lead-free.

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Matt Sealey

okay, so, when sometime in future, there will be new pegasos boards, would it be possible to make it's cpu cards compatible to pegasos2? i mean, that if there will be bigger amount of peg3s, wouldn't it be possible to sell also some of the cpu cards to peg2 users?

or else, the cpu card is useless in pegasoses...

bye, MarK.

BTW, is the slot1 connector on Pegasos somehow compatible to the ZIF connector on Mac? Would a special card with ZIF or MegArray connector take advantage of the Mac CPU cards? Would this work?

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There are lots of problems with the idea of a pluggable CPU card, the most obvious one being that even if you have a pluggable CPU card and a generic motherboard, not that many people actually update the CPU. It may as well have been soldered to the board.

As CPU speeds and core numbers increase, so do bus speeds and technologies, RAM technologies, and peripherals. Putting a 4-year-old processor in a brand new motherboard, or a brand new processor in an old motherboard, means you miss out on a lot of the things that make the 'new' item so desirable.

You also run into pin-compatibility with connectors - the 7447A and 7448 have internal temperature diodes and pins to control the frequency selection for power management, which could never be connected to the Pegasos board correctly, since there is no pin connected to the correct interrupt line or any logic for it. You lose features of the new CPU, because you wanted to support the old board.

Imagine running a G4 on a 60x bus just because the motherboard logic did not support MPX (this was the solution with the Articia).

All in all, again, supporting the old boards is not economical. The discrete CPU, along with the Discovery II, the VT8231.. costs too much, not made anymore, precious features would have to be discarded to support it.

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Matt Sealey

Neko:

Thanks for your honest answer.

I agree with you when you say that it is way better to do a whole new mainboard and cpu card instead of making the old Pegasos again. And I think you are right, it is not good to produce cheap, overclocked, hot, power consumpting cpu cards. You made definitly the right steps when you planned and built the evaluation boards of the Pegasos 8641D and the Tetra Power.

But right now, and for the next several months, it seems that there will be no end user boards of that products.

I did not know that the 7447A is only available at up to 1.42 GHZ and that everything beyond is overclocked. Probably this is the reason why Apple only made G4 Macs up to 1.42 GHZ :-)

So, you say that a 1.42 GHZ cpu card for the existing Pegasos will cost about $450. Thats quite a lot of money for that...

I did search at PPCzone and at MorphZone because I remembered something about this, and I found the following which bbrv said in 08/2006 at PPCZone:

"There may be a 7447A card upgrade. We *have* made a few. They work. The issue is simply supply and demand. Send us an email if you would upgrade one for 200 Euros. That is about what it costs to make. This would simply be a _take care of you users_ gesture. We would do it if there are enough of you."

Did the price for 7447A cpus rise or fall since 08/2006? I do not know. And I do not know if cpu cards have to be RoHS compliant or if it is difficult to make them compliant. But maybe it would be still possible to produce these cpu upgrades for EUR 200?

When bbrv made this offer I was expecing the Tetra Power to be released soon as it was announced to be shipped at Q3/2006, for $799 when one returns his Pegasos2. So, paying EUR 200 for a G4 @ 1.42 GHZ for a 4-year-old mainboard did not seem to be very economycal for the end user compared to a whole-new Tetra Power with a 2.5 GHZ G5 and several other advantages.

But as I said before it does not seem that the Tetra Power and the Pegasos 8641D will be released to end users within the next months. So I wish bbrv would consider to renew the offer to build a cpu upgrade for Pegasos2.

I would pay EUR 250 for a 7447A card @ 1.42 GHZ.

And what about making cpu card converters for Mac cpu upgrades? At least you would not have to buy the G4 cpus for complete, official Pegasos2 upgrade cards which should save you quite a lot of money.

Every new electronic good to be sold within the E.U., exept military and critical heath equipment and repairs, must follow the RoHS rules since July last year.
A cpu card is a discrete product, thus it has to be RoHS compliant.

Bring it on ;-)
Seriously, is there some news on the 8641(D), 970 or PWRficient side?
My last impression was that a 8641(D) enduser board is no more scheduled, which is IMO a pity.

I am talking to OWC at the moment and they could offer remove and replace service for G3 and G4 cards but this wouldn't be cheap.

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Indeed but that's because we have other things to work on like the firmware and the next Efika revision. At the moment it's not economical to make an 8641D board for various reasons.
Actually they did have a 1.6GHz PowerBook. There are basically 4 variants of the 7447A and 7448; You can view the parametrics underneath the comparison block.

http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/sit ... de=MPC7448


* 'N' type which are incredibly low power and very expensive. For instance a 733/800MHz 7448 draws a few watts LESS power than a 600MHz 750CXe. Look at the parametrics for the MC7448VU1400ND. I think I worked out that a 1.1GHz chip would draw just slightly more. This would be a passively cooled G4 using the same heatsink as the G3, and faster than the original Pegasos G4 card. However they ARE *very* expensive!

* 'L' type which are the standard chip, at a reasonable price. This is probably what we would go for. Look at the parametrics for the MC7448VU1600LD.

* special bin sorts for 'PC style' overclocking - this is what is supplied to the Mac accelerator market, and this kind of chip is fuelled by the demand of the Mac accelerator market. They are somewhat cheaper than the standard versions but are basically 1.3GHz/1.42GHz chips overclocked and remarked.

- They run at higher voltages (which exponentially increases power consumption).

- They cut the operating temperature guidelines down from 105C to 65C.

- They cut the lifetime of the chip down from 10 years to 3 or 5.

They're essentially 'unreliable', but considering a Mac upgraded by that chip probably won't last as long (either in usefulness or as other components or component availability dies) as the CPU.. it hardly matters to the accelerator guys. Look at the parametrics for the MC7448VU1600PD.

* special bin sorts for overclocking for Apple (the so-called 'MPC7447C' you may have seen on PPCNUX :) - they were higher spec than the other overclocked chips, with a nicer operating temperature guideline (85C) and a little longer lifetime. Apple obviously want new machines to last for as long as new machines need to last. They sort of fit inbetween. They don't list these chips on the site but there are certifications for it hanging around.
Exactly.
Not particularly.
They would cost 200 EUR to make which I figure today is about $300. The exchange rate has also changed! The US dollar is worthless :)

As Bill said, it would have been a taking care of the users gesture. As a retail card - or the basis of a new Pegasos revision - we need to add profit and cover our development costs, and allow resellers to make a profit too by setting a reasonable RRP!
Definitely not. We never had that plan.

The TetraPower was going to sell at $1500 perhaps for a complete system (like the ODW first was priced) and then drop strategically to $999 or $799 depending on demand and production economy. No trade-ins. We have no real use for Pegasos boards anymore; especially since, we cannot ship them anywhere since they contain lead components. All they would do is come back to bplan and go into the trash, which for a leaded board, is a lot of money. Recycling computer components responsibly costs more than making them.

Due to the complexity of the board and component supply, we are not going to just make 1000 boards and hope they sell, and give users a discount on sending boards to us for disposal.

That is the reality of RoHS.
Believe me, you are all free to go and find an electronics engineer willing to design such a card and bring it to market. We will even check your design and make sure it is up to standard.

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Matt Sealey

Well, I have to say if you don't lose any money by a $450 card I could bet that there are many (some) users would be very happy, especially G3 users if not anything else will or can happen in the near future.

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OK, sorry, my mistake. I mixed up the Tetra Power with the OSW, see

http://www.powerdeveloper.org/forums/vi ... sc&start=0

same product mmm? the Tetra is the evaluation board, the OSW is (was) the consumer product. Am i wrong ?

;-)

Amiga now is releasing a PowerPC desktop. What we need is also a PowerPC notebook. Based on a PWRficient, MPC8641(D), PPC750GX or PPC970MP.

Sweet would be a real CELL BE DevMachine, too. With a lot of RAM ;-)

Based on a CELL+, please ;-)
http://www.beyond3d.com/content/news/198
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=40661

HPC Cell? 100 Watt CPU Power? No thanks.

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