Amiga PowerPC
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Amiga PowerPC
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Recently bplan released interesting news concerning their project "Pegasos". Thomas Knaebel, manager of the company, was kind enough to grant an interview to AMIGA aktuell International.
AMIGA aktuell: Could we open with a few words about your company, bplan?
Thomas Knaebel: Since its foundation in fall 2000 the object of the company has been the development of a marketable PPC system. Additional projects involve the industrial field in measurement technique and supervisory systems. By a consistent actualization of the Lean-Management-Idea bplan Ltd. can realize the necessary effort with a personal staff of only six employees. Current projects, as far as permission for publishing is granted by our customers, may be seen on our website.
AMIGA aktuell: There are some rumours that the company more or less is the direct successor of the Phase 5 company, well known in Amiga and Macintosh circles. The identical mail addresses of bplan and Phase 5 and the very similar projects certainly are not accidental. What is the connection between your company and Phase 5? (Additional note concerning this point at the end of the interview.)
Thomas Knaebel: The bplan company is NOT the successor of the late Phase 5. The mailing addresses are in no way identical, either, as you easily can see on our website. The original idea was to take over parts of Phase 5 resources (rooms as well), but that fell through due to the insolvency proceedings. The reason for the similarity of the projects you talked about is that a PowerPC mainboard will always have certain common characteristics even from different manufacturers (IBM, Motorola, Apple or bplan).
AMIGA aktuell: Your recent project is the Pegasos motherboard. Can you tell me which users you are aiming at with this project, and how you see your chances in this market segment?
Thomas Knaebel: The target group for the Pegasos platform is primarily those users and developers who are attracted to the power of a multiprocessor-PowerPC system. By the use of standard components the market price of a complete system will clearly be below of the prices of other PowerPC-system suppliers. We will offer this target group, which is expecting more than a prefabricated Wintel solution, a flexible and above all reasonably priced alternative, which e.g. with a dual-G4-750-MHz variant can stand any comparison.
AMIGA aktuell: The specifications of the Pegasos board sound to me a lot like the not very successful CHRP plans (CHRP = common hardware reference platform) of IBM. Could you explain how you came to the idea of the Pegasos board? Did the CHRP design of IBM have any influence upon your plans?
Thomas Knaebel: In principle the idea of CHRP certainly influenced the conceptual phase of the project. The development of the Pegasos design combines all our experience till now, as well as the requirements for an up-to-date PPC mainboard. The object of the development was from the very beginning to realize a platform which conforms with the requirements for a usable PPC system. In this case usable means: a) Sufficient standardization in the construction (ATX) and interface layout (see Pegasos specification farther down in the text), b) Performance and user scalability by a modular CPU conception, c) Moderately priced.
AMIGA aktuell: Do you intend to manufacture your own complete computer system based on the Pegasos specifications or will the board be distributed by OEM partners? Are there already contractors and/or interested parties? Or do you intend to license the board to be built by other manufacturers?
Thomas Knaebel: Until now plans for complete computers only exist for development systems. The distribution will be done by OEM partners, which will undertake production as licensees.
AMIGA aktuell: When, according your plans, will the sale of the Pegasos boards start?
Thomas Knaebel: The sales start is planned for Q3/2001.
AMIGA aktuell: And how much would you expect the end customer to pay?
Thomas Knaebel: The price for a complete system (incl. HD/DVD/RAM/mouse/keyboard) is about 1000 EUR.
AMIGA aktuell: Will AmigaDE be supported by the board?
Thomas Knaebel: In our opinion that question is round the wrong way. Hardware should not support an operating system - the OS must run on the hardware (and here the Wintel exception confirms the rule).
By using an OpenFirmware-BIOS the Pegasos hardware offers an ideal interface that can be supported by most different operating systems.
AMIGA aktuell: It would theoretically be possible to use AmigaDE with, for instance, Linux as host environment?
Thomas Knaebel: And practical, too. The fact, that the operating system must support the hardware and not vice versa, does on no account mean that AmigaDE will not run on the Pegasos platform.
AMIGA aktuell: Was/is there any correspondence with AMIGA Inc.?
Thomas Knaebel: Yes!
AMIGA aktuell: Which Linux variants (SusePPC, LinuxPPC, etc.) are to be supported by the board?
Thomas Knaebel: We shall offer the best possible support to all developers to cover all of them as best they can. To your listing of Linux distributions I'd like to add QNX and VxWorks.
AMIGA aktuell: Have you already had contacts with the name distributors? Is there already cooperation in this work? If so, what does this cooperation look like?
Thomas Knaebel: Yes! For example we have very close contacts with LinusPPC and others. Certainly your readers will find relevant indications on the websites of those distributors.
AMIGA aktuell: How is the cooperation with the MorphOS team to be seen?
Thomas Knaebel: Parts of the MorphOS team and the bplan staff are identical.
AMIGA aktuell: Could you please disclose a few names?
Thomas Knaebel: As the best known "MorphOS" personality, I can name here Ralph Schmidt.
AMIGA aktuell: Is it possible to tell us something about the system performance to be expected? Are there already any benchmark tests, which offer predicable arguments against traditional platforms (comparable PowerMacs and Wintel computers)?
Thomas Knaebel: Before long we will publish predicable benchmarks.
AMIGA aktuell: What are bplan's plans for the future?
Thomas Knaebel: We will expand our product-range of PPC hardware.
Starting with our recent design, in the future we will also develop powerful server systems as Thin Clients in the low-cost range.
AMIGA aktuell: I thank you very much for the interview.
Additional sources:
| bplan-GmbH: | http://www.bplan-gmbh.de |
| CHRP from IBM: | http://www.rs6000.ibm.com/resource/technology/chrp/ |
| MorphOS: | http://www.morphos.de |
| LinuxPPC: | http://www.linuxppc.com, http://www.linuxppc.org |
Additional note:
The information concerning the mailing address had been taken from the following internet site:
http://www.checkdomain.com/cgi-bin/checkdomain.pl?domain=www.bplan-gmbh.de
The information given there is not anymore in accordance with the recent state.
The Pegasos specifications released by bplan:
Christian Aichinger <christian@aakt.de>
