“We are very pleased how with how the Phoenix/Genesi relationship is developing. Genesi is in the process of formally organizing itself into two distinct activities: One to support the task oriented objectives focused on the delivery of the DTV STB by the end of 2003. The Future of the Pegasos and MorphOS, including the release of the Pegasos II using the Marvell northbridge.” Read the announcement at Morphos-News.de.
Announcement Concerning the Genesi/Phoenix Collaboration
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Would someone translate the press release-ese here? I don’t get it.
One would surmise that Pegasos switched their motherboard from the Articia northbridge —
http://thendipo.alias.domicile.fr/img/aprilcpu/ap1_big.jpg
to the Marvell northbridge.
Or something to that effect. So parts of the BIOS and OS will have to change.
I’m sure one of the Amiga lurkers could give the gory details.
LOL, thanks Michael – I was really lost too.
Due to past difficulties between certain executives, Pegasos motherboards will only come with old Mai chips. However the newer revision chipsets are currently being used for AmigaOne-XE and newer Teron motherboards.
You can compare some initial benchmark comparisons between the Pegasos and AmigaOne at the following link:
http://personal.inet.fi/cool/pekosbil/a1benchmarks.htm
Do note however that the G4 benchmarks did not include any Altivec optimised software tests, in which case the overall performance performance can significantly be improved, depending of course on the software type and degree of optimisation.
it looks like AmigaONE beats Pegasos, but it’s not good benchmark because test was run by two different persons, and on two different operating systems! (i know that both are on linux kernel but still there can be differences).
So that benchmark doesn’t mean anything, it’s not good.
These are just some initial tests, the testers are open to suggestions however. SuSE Linux is also available for the AmigaOne, so that should be a good start.
Originally these tests were mainly intended to compare the currently different available AmigaOne motherboards and CPU combinations, but today Gunne’s results were added.
Bouma, Bouma, Bouma, as much as you like this to be true, it
is not and will never be true. They don’t want to walk on
a minefield ONCE again, being on the first batch of companies
to use the new Articia S revision cause it could possibly
have bugs need fixing again. You keep repeating that MAI does
not like Genesi while you know *NOTHING* about that case
except the stuff your people tell you… The same people
that said that the Articia S has no bugs at all some months
ago, while Gerald Carda was in MAI’s HQ proving the bugs
and designing a fix… Yes, the same fix Eyetech used in
their early “AmigaONE” Terons…
> Due to past difficulties between certain executives,
> Pegasos motherboards will only come with old Mai chips.
Nonsense. Pegasos I mobos come with the current revision of ArticiaS (and Genesi’s own CPLD-added fix) because that’s all that’s available. The fixed ArticiaS revision is not yet in production, and it’s unknown when it’ll be available. There are no difficulties between execs, Genesi is a customer of Mai. It’s unknown when Mai can supply the product that the customer wants to buy, so the customer has found an alternate source of northbridges for their next product, the Pegasos II. Please don’t invent conflicts á la the silliness currently going on between fanatics, zealots and sycophants of varying convictions in the reclusive former “Amiga community”. It’s not needed here.
> However the newer revision chipsets are currently being
> used for AmigaOne-XE and newer Teron motherboards.
First of all there are no newer Teron mobos than the Teron PX (the one you and Eyetech refer to as “AmigaOne XE”). This is not yet in volume production because (among other technical reasons, like that the firmware is not finished) there is NOT yet any fixed ArticiaS northbridges available.
When a reliable distributor who has a clue about the product, like Terra Soft, starts shipping Teron PXes, then you’ll know that it’s ready.
> It’s unknown when Mai can supply the product that the
> customer wants to buy
Not to mention that the Marvell Discovery II is simply a better product than the ArticiaS (nobody knows when/if the “ArticiaP” will be available). How they’ll implement AGP will be interesting to see though, but it’s not like there aren’t several ways of doing that.
The Pegasos is a load of crap give me an amigaone any day the Pegasos is a badly desighned system that is very slow and expensive there isnt a list of any of the features a real os needs .
> You keep repeating that MAI does not like Genesi while
> you know *NOTHING* about that case except the stuff your
> people tell you…
Actually I do know. Alkis you have been wrong on various occasions in the past and even apologized sometimes to me for you trolling. Why do you continue to even bother?
In the specific case, no you do not…
You were wrong MANY times in the past…
And about trolling, the only one trolling in here is you,
you started it.
Yeah, right.
Mike, kind of your presentation here is really unbelievable. I think that non amiga orioneted ppl have to be fed up by all that AOS vs. MorpOS crap.
The thread was about Phoenix and Genesi cooperation, so why do you mention Amiga One here – who really cares in that context?
Maybe Genesi and Phoenix should leave all amiga related forums , leave all that last three years of sad Amiga reality behind, and start afresh …
-pekr-
Just to illustrate how good of a relationship BB has with Mai, BB is threating legal action against Mai: “One mis-step on their part now and we pull the trigger. As you see, these are not idle threats from ourside. If we had not used lawyers to get Mai’s attention in the first place we would not even be discussing a new chip today…”
And you probably haven’t forgotten the clashes which took before this, which angered both Terra Soft and Mai Logic regarding BB’s FUD spreading.
Petr, please don’t play to be so naive, you know those far fetched A1 vs Pegasos performance claims originated from BB himself.
He refused to back up his wild claims with any data, so instead I now provide a link to a location where one can find at least some real comparison data.
It is sad to see that Bill tries to cover up his own mistakes by counter attacking with ridiculous non-backed up claimswith regard to the performance of 3rd party products.
And you seriously BELIEVE that MAI wouldn’t sell 1080
ArticiaS chips to Genesi cause they were…. pissed off?
LOL… Unlike Amiga Inc etc, serious companies do not act
on a personal level, if you want to buy something from them
they will sell it to you…
Genesi is a company that has produced an operating system (MorphOS) that at one point was to be the PowerPC version of AmigaOS, and a PowerPC motherboard to run it on. (Genesi is the name of the current company, which is made up of the former bplan GmbH of Germany and Thendic-France.) At an early stage, the developers of MorphOS had a falling out with Amiga, Inc. which led to them continue developing their own OS independently of Amiga, Inc.
This press release refers to a contract that Genesi has received to produce an STB based on its Pegasos motherboard. The first version of this motherboard uses the Articia northbridge, which the Teron PPC motherboard that is being marketed as the basis for the AmigaOne (handled by Eyetech under license from Amiga, Inc., also uses). Due to various problems, both technical and supply-related, the Pegasos II motherboard will use the Marvell northbridge.
The second part of the announcement refers to the Phoenix Developer Consortium ( http://phinixi.com ). This is an organization that was set up a few years ago as a resource for developers wanting to continue some kind of Amiga-like platform. Initially QSSL (QNX) people were involved but it became more apparent that QNX wasn’t really desktop-bound. Recently, when Genesi began more actively looking for developers for their MorphOS/Pegasos products, they and Phoenix got together in a kind of natural fit: a company with new hardware and OS, and an organization with people with ideas looking for a new platform to play with. (It needs to be pointed out that Phoenix is a rather loose organization and not every member is planning on working on something related to Genesi. Some, in fact, are skeptical about Genesi’s chances. But that’s the nature of the group. For those who do want to work on Pegasos/MorphOS-related projects, Phoenix is setting up working groups and mailing lists, which are referred to in the second part of the announcement.
Sorry for going on and on, but it looked like a little background and overview would be a good idea here. I hope I’ve been relatively accurate; corrections would be appreciated, where necessary.
— gary_c
Phoenix? Weren’t they the Phoenix Platform Consortium? The
guys that never got anything done after Gateway pulled
the plug?
I should add that there has been an amazing response to these announcements, with people signing on who used and coded on Amigas in the past and are excited about a modern implementation. Purists will point out that these aren’t “official” Amiga, Inc. products, which is true. But what seems to be more important is the look and feel rather than the brand name. And Genesi has a great deal of enthusiasm for supporting developers and user groups, a momentum that has been sadly missing in the (broadly defined) Amiga community for a number of years. Phoenix has many members who intend to work with AmigaOS as well once it is released. In the meantime, the resentment shown by those who can only be fans of the brand-holder is unfortunate, but peripheral.
— gary_c
gary_c, the voice of reason among the ranting of fools.
Thanks for trying to bring this back on topic.
AmigaDave
Well as a long time Amiga/computer user, Genesi seems to finally
be moving things in the right direction. They have
released a real piece of hardware and a companion OS that
is fast,efficient and powerful. A STB DTV deal has been
made that will generate lot’s of sales and opportunities
for developers on this platform. They have commited to
being a multi-OS system too, meaning you can run MorphOS,
Linux, NetBSD and others eventually. They are supporting
the developer community and open source efforts through
the Phoenix group and have gave special pricing and OEM
style deals for developers. For Pegasos II they
are going with DDR ram, Marvell bridge (no more articia bugs…)
3 high speed ethernet ports, dual G4s (SMP) etc. I think their
hardware and vision of the future is quite promising not
only for Amiga users but anyone interested in a new computing
platform. As a developer I have ordered a Pegasos1 board
and will most likely upgrade to PegII when released.
(they offer a great upgrade deal). I am also keeping an
eye on AmigaOS4 but I think if it in the hands of AmigaInc.
it really can’t go anywhere. It’s important to be successful
and ensure the future of the platform and Genesi operates
in a proffesional and intelligent manner. I think Genesi and
the Pegasos have a real chance of becoming a standard for
many alternative OS users, certainly worth watching…
Can you take your quibble over to ann.lu (or preferably /dev/null) and stop polluting a perfectly fine site?
Ok, I may have been a little bit rough but I think that Mike also failed to conform to the forum terms with opening what you call the stupid zealot OS wars. Look at the reactions following his post …
The Amigone benchmarks are off topic, this violate your forum terms too.
“Due to past difficulties between certain executives, Pegasos motherboards will only come with old Mai chips.”
is a false claim.
“However the newer revision chipsets are currently being used for AmigaOne-XE and newer Teron motherboards.”
This is false too as this new revision is not available to the public yet.
I agree to fully conform to your forum rules if all posters do so, including Mike.
I am looking forward to the Pegasos II, as this presents for the first time a PowerPC motherboard that is in the same technology-range as the x86 motherboards sold today.
I am also impressed with MorphOS and how it has grown from a mechanism to allow AmigaOS to advance to a more advanced OS design while retaining backwards compatability into a full OS of it’s own.
> I am looking forward to the Pegasos II
> I am also impressed with MorphOS
Easy for a salesman to be impressed with his own products.
MorphOS is not tye future of Amiga OS, AmigaOS4 is.
Noone said that it’s the future of AmigaOS but it already
is a very nice Amiga like OS with a base to implement a nice
new modern one…
> BB is threating legal action against Mai:
Perhaps you would be kind enough to enlighten the readers WHY, instead of just posting 3 loose sentences without saying where you got them from? *If* they had a contract with Mai basically saying “we’ll supply Genesi with X items of ArticiaS chips, within this-and-that time frame, and they’ll perform as specified”, then they have very solid ground and every damn right to file suit. I’m not saying that this indeed is the case, but you OTOH said NOTHING worth the electrons you wasted.
> And you probably haven’t forgotten the clashes which took
> before this, which angered both Terra Soft and Mai Logic
> regarding BB’s FUD spreading.
Ah, you mean the time when that “friend” of yours e-mailed loose quotes of Buck’s, totally taken out of context together with an “innocent” question about whether this is a company that TSS and Mai Logic would like to do business with, to Kai Staats at Terra Soft? And when this mysterious friend of yours hurried to post the reply too the ANN.lu news/discussion site? Together with the short “our product works” (duh!) statement from Pam Han (IIRC), the marketing manager at Mai Logic? The time when this friend of yours caught so much FLAK in the comments to that piece of gossip/shit-stirring filth, that you had to step in to defend “the poor girl”? Is that what you’re referring to?
You really are a piece of work, Mike.
Ooops. I was unintentionally anonymous above.
As an old Amiga user i am feeling so ashamed for all this people fighting about… well… nothing. Pegasos or AOne… it is really silly. And sad. There is no shipping product now, no real operating system and very little chance of success. I loved Amiga because it was an incredible system; i did not bought an Amiga because it was an **alternative** system. So, stop the fighting, please, and concentrate yourself on really useful things. I hate headless fan, i just want to discuss things with people who are able to use their brain and not with a bunch of histerycal teenie like.
at how all the usual suspects come out of the wood work.
thank god for gary_c i say.
even though mike b can write calmly where the others cannot (well maybe christophe
they are all well off base and are basically boring…
The NorthBridge is being changed because of the existing device was found to have a number of bugs which have been fixed with the addition of external components.
It is indeed true there was some legal wrangling over this, the company in question simply wouldn’t accept there was a problem even when presented with evidence. Bugs in complex components are hardly a new thing but at least the manufacturer would acknowlege them. They eventually did this only after they were visited by Gerald.
A temporary external fix was developed but it could not run at full speed, more bugs were later found and a new fix had to be added which can run at full speed, we strongly doubt the new fixed version of the current Northbridge produced by the manufacturer will be up to the standard of the fix developed by bplan, consequently we fully expect relevant benchmarks to show this – (pure CPU benchmarks are not testing the differences).
The new northBridge is made by Marvell semiconductor and adds support for much more modern features. We have not at this point announced the exact part to be used.
We also have a very good deal to develop a STB using our technology I’ve just been to a big conference on the subject in fact, very interesting stuff.
MorphOS is the future of AmigaOS as envisioned by Escom.
AmigaOS4 is the future of AmigaOS as envisioned by Hyperion.
So it really depends on your point of view, doesn’t it?
“MorphOS is the future of AmigaOS as envisioned by Escom.
AmigaOS4 is the future of AmigaOS as envisioned by Hyperion.
So it really depends on your point of view, doesn’t it?”
Nobody knows how things are going to work out. My guess is that these apparently competing products will end up in different niches.
It will probably be clearer around the end of next year.
[quote]MorphOS is the future of AmigaOS as envisioned by Escom.
AmigaOS4 is the future of AmigaOS as envisioned by Hyperion.
So it really depends on your point of view, doesn’t it?[/quote]
No as Escom is no more
And Hyperion have a license from Amiga.inc The IP holders to develop amigaOS to AmigaOS4.
If MorphOS=AmigaOS then it would not be called MorphOS.
We do very much appreciate the coverage of MorphOS on OSNews. We found it surprising that the Phoenix Announcement would get such coverage, but of course a Forum such as this is exactly the way we should leverage to draw new Developer talent to the platform and to Phoenix.
Thanks Eugenia!
Sincerely,
Raquel Velasco and Bill Buck
[email protected]
Why have both main Amiga development teams gone down the road of developing an OS for a higher-cost / non-mainstream platform?
One might think that the road of getting an AmigaOS to run on readily available AMD/Intel hardware would have easier, faster, and more fruitful. There is plenty of tested hardware out there, funded by the big guns in the industry.
There might be an interesting opportunity to do a cool Amiga OS for PCI Express for instance.
What is the rationale of PowerPC? Is it because it can do emulation of old 68K Amiga?
Of course, in a year or two, not having DRM on the chip will be compelling to many… and the true genius of using a non-mainstream CPU will be seen by all 😉
>What is the rationale of PowerPC? Is it because it can do >emulation of old 68K Amiga?
Scalability of power. You can get $10 PPC chips ideal for embedded applications. In addition, PowerPC can be set up for a bus-driven solution rather than be tied to a CPU-driven solution. Means that your Radeon 9700 isn’t waiting for the CPU to finish it’s jobs to get around to handling the bus needs, it can do that itself. You can even introduce specialized co-processors onto the CPU bus to take workload off of the main CPU, causing an artificial speed benefit by reduction of workload. On top of this, the CPU architecture is licensable now, thanks to IBM. This means that the speed problems can be addressed by a 3rd party, inducing competition in the PPC market similar to that found in the x86 market. And we all have seen how that kind of competition can be extremely beneficial.