A-EON Technology Ltd is pleased to announce that Tabor, a new powerful, low cost, entry level PowerPC motherboard, which forms part of our A1200 series, is about to undergo beta testing.
As part of our drive to create more powerful lower cost, entry level hardware and expand the Next-Generation user base we commissioned Ultra Varisys to create a new PowerPC motherboard. The result is Tabor, a 170 mm x 170 mm mother-board based on a Freescale QorIQ P1022 32-bit e500v2 dual-core PowerPC processor running at 1.2 GHz. Prototypes have already been shipped to key developers and members of A-EON Technology’s Core Linux support team and, as a result, several Linux distributions are already up and running on the Tabor board. Working in cooperation with ACube srl, a beta test programme is about to commence, which is already over-subscribed.
Sounds like nice hardware, and it’s great the Amiga community, even after all these years, can still buy new machines for AmigaOS 4.
It would be great if they said what the “low cost” actually was.
Exactly.
Well you know the saying: “if the item is without a price tag, you can’t afford it”. Or don’t want to pay that much. My guess is that this wil be quite a high priced “low cost” item. I’m happy to be proved wrong, of course.
They also fail to mention the incompatible FPU. The new accelerator that was in development (Ultimate PPC) used this same CPU and was axed because of the FPU, (or lack of a proper FPU in it).
Yeah. They do have a plan to as a first stage software emulate the FPU (which will be slow) and later use a JIT emulation (faster, but still not nearly as fast as a working FPU). I read a comparison that this board, on a single core (no Amiga system can use more than one) is about as fast as a Mac Mini PPC clocking at 400 MHz. I don’t know if that is in FPU intensive operations or just in general though.
This will only be interesting despite this if the price is low, which usually it never is in Amigaland, and if you really want to use AmigaOS 4. Or if you are a PPC nerd in general and plan to use Linux on it.
And here lies a big problem. Amiga OS4 is going to have to be ported to this board and some sort of FPU emulation routine written to suit it. At the pace of OS4 development, it will probably be a couple of years at least before OS4 is ready and can run on this board. As for Linux, I and most other folk already have several x86/64 PC’s and a Raspberry PI to run that on, hardware (in the case of PC’s) that is much superior and faster for the task.
I really don’t see the point of this board, and going by the threads on Amiga.org, Amigaworld.net and EAB not many others do either.
It’s suppose to be cheap. Price has been the problem for many potential AmigaOS 4 users. But there is no price tag yet so we don’t know how cheap “cheap” will be.
And yes, the slow pace of development is a bigger problem. AFAIK the drivers for X1000 is still not fully done, after 3+ years. The X5000 still hasn’t got it working (MorphOS already got a beta running on it), not to mention Gallium, SMP and 4.2 that went from “coming soon” a couple of years ago to “not even close to finished” as we are told today. It seems that, for whatever reason, Hyperion is not really up for the task and need some serious help.
Since you don’t cite your source of information for the comparison, and I know it to be factually inaccurate (source: I own a Tabor board), let it be on the record that the above comment regarding comparable performance to a 400MHz Mini is totally, hilariously wrong, and wholly inaccurate, made by a known troll.
Edited 2015-11-04 21:42 UTC
Ah, the Amiga world faced two culprits: Mehdi Ali and… PowerPC. Slow, overpriced, scarce. After Apple had ditched PPC, there are no capable PPC CPUs to speak of, it is mostly an embedded market now. If they switched to, say, ARM, some hobbyists could at least play with AmigaOS on dirt cheap Raspberries (AmigaOS cannot handle multiple cores anyway).
AROS is working on an RPi-focused ARM port. If AROS ever sprouted SMP and memory protection, it would be a great match for the Pi2.
Edited 2015-11-03 18:01 UTC
I think most people would rather just have an accelerator board to put into their old classic systems. I know I’d love to have a PPC in mine, I just don’t have the 1k+ to get one, and also am worried about it dying right afterward, since it’s all old hardware. We need some new ones in the 300-500 range.
Unfortunately I don’t see that happening, but it’d sure do wonders for getting Amiga OS4 to be adopted more.
I know myself I have been waiting for years to pull the trigger on an Amiga OS 4 compatible system. I can’t quite put my finger on the main reason I haven’t it usually comes down to the fact that for a hobby system the hardware is very expensive, and that for the money you aren’t getting a lot of system.
I was semi interested in the last workstation system but it was priced far out of my reach, and the Sam440 boards feel like highway robbery for the specs listed.
If a system spec’d like this was priced appropriately and the issues with the FPU could be worked out in an acceptable manner that doesn’t neuter the product I might look again at a OS 4 system.
Edited 2015-11-03 03:31 UTC
How do these guys stay in business? They can’t possibly be selling enough machines to stay afloat. So who is backing them?
It almost feels like they have purposely kept Amiga from the mainstream by consistently focusing on dead-end hardware.
ACube Sys makes embed stuffs IIRC.
A-Eon, I really don’t know. It seems highly unlikely they make any profits with these ultra specialized HW only a very small niche can/would buy.
There is lots of talk on the forums that Trevor (the owner of A-EON) sponsors it with money from his energy sector investment companies.
Something like that. He doesn’t do it for money.
From http://www.amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2015-10-00027-EN.html
According to visitors of the “Amiga 30” event, a QorIQ P1022 is used as Tabor’s CPU. This processor is equipped with a FPU that is incompatible to that of most other Power CPUs – especially those used in AmigaOS 4 hardware. Apparently, emulating a ‘regular’ FPU in software is possible – though having to perform all floating point calculations in software would drastically reduce performance in some areas (graphics, sound, 3D). (cg)
This is what OpenCL is for. A gfx card with proper opencl drivers can do it.
For sound , openal can be accelerated with opencl
For gfx , 3d can be accelerated with opencl
Even spreadsheet calculation can be accelerated with opencl.
For the occasional hello world fpu program, you can live with the weak cpu.
But of course , rewrites are necessary. However, this rewrite is inevitable.