From: dhaynie@jersey.net (Dave Haynie)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.misc
Subject: Re: Phase 5's A/Box, yeah right...
Date: Wed, 03 Sep 1997 06:06:25 GMT
Organization: PIOS Computer
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On Tue, 02 Sep 1997 16:50:18 +0200, Johan Ronnblom
<jrblom@mtek.chalmers.se> wrote:

>> Come on people, who are you kidding ? Phase 5 have spent two years
>> developing the PowerUP PPC accelerators, 

>> You people must be smoking some weird shit. ;-)

>Excuse me, but is this 'respected HW engineer' the same that hasn't even
>managed to put together a BEbox-clone out of ready made parts in more
>than a year?

If you're talking about me, you're laboring on several misconceptions:

	- It hasn't been a year since I started the PIOS One design.

	- It's not even close to a BeBox clone.

	- There's a world of difference in the magnitude of the jobs 
	  you're comparing. I've been the only engineering, working 
	  in my spare time (eg, I have a day job and a family), for a
	  startup company, which often means we have to wait,
	  sometimes long, for resources. And I'm building a whole
	  system. That's drastically different from the situation at
	  an established company, with several full time engineers,
	  an existing tool infrastructure, when you're making a 
	  change to an existing single-board product. I'm not saying
	  it's necessarily a slam-dunk, but the existing '060
	  design is more than half of the work. I did look into 	
	  exactly this kind of thing for AT, when they threw around
	  the idea of building a "fast Walker" (eg, Walker with PPC
	  rather than 68K). It's not that difficult.

>Anyway, if it is such a 'childsplay' then I wonder why noone else has
>done it before..

Probably because most folks realize there's little to no market for a
hardware product without the appropriate software support. And for a
CPU, "software support" is "operating system". A PowerUp accelerator
costs more than an '060 accelerator, and does nothing for you out of
the box, or in any way you can be sure will be supported beyond the
PowerUp module, if at all. 

Dave Haynie      Vice President, Technology    PIOS Computer
haynie@pios.de     "...no RISC, no fun"