Sam 440 Flex board?

The reason the Sam-Flex will not have a 460EX processor is that it would require a complete redesign, e.g. a completely new circuit to be designed. So for the Flex it will use a 440EP, and if it sells well enough, that will encourage ACube to design a new board around the 460EX.

The reason the 440EP-based boards have only PCI slots and no AGP or PCI-Express is that the 440EP only has a PCI bus interface. You can get a PCI 9250 128MB directly from ACube for 35 EUR which is not a bad price.

I don't know about the zigbee module, you should ask ACube on that, but as far as I can tell from the picture, the module has to be soldered on, so either you get one with or without it, you would't be able to add it later (unless you're good with soldering).

@All A1 owners

Not sure this board is aimed at us anyway, idea is to get newer users on board (no pun intended) - the Sam, from what I read, may have a slower CPU than our A1s but it's better designed and seemingly more efficient, hopefully meaning that where A1s might bottleneck, the SAM doesn't, compensating for a lack of CPU "grunt".

This is just me reading between the lines, but that's certainly the impression I am getting.

Either way, this is a great step for OS4.x - more users, more developers, more programs.

Depending on the success of these boards, may reflect if a more advanced board is produced in future so,

@All potential users
if you want to run OS4.1, think carefully about investing right now, as Rigo said, if the current models do not sell we may all wait a long time, maybe even never, before any more boards come along. I'm not suggesting potential buyers purchase so we all get a more advanced board in the future by the way, the SAM as it is, is perfectly capable of running OS4.1 with the current specs it has.

If I had the cash, I would buy one and donate to a developer (I may do this anyway with my Xmas bonus.) Don't wait, if you want one and can afford it, go for it.

Cheers,
Rude!

Like I wrote, my SE is close to dead.
So yes, this is for example aimed at me.

Therefore I just wrote ACube to handle my inquiry as pre-order for the flex and to contact me as soon as it's available.
And I'll probably add extra memory to the order since it could be a bit tricky to find a good module elsewhere.

Back... creditcard in hand lol

So what's going on with Flex, anyone know?

It was meant to be released in August last year and it's now March....did it ever get released, maybe I just missed it ;)

As it's not advertised on AmigaKit's site I assume it's not due in anytime soon....

@NovaCoder

Last I heard, it would be released this month.

Amiga Future have tested one.

@COBRA

No 460 whatever? That seemed beyond reach at the moment to me anyway, but yet another 440EP?, disappointing given that with sufficient delay to make some adaptations, all the carryon at various times about more grunt, caches, PCI express, with a reference board available (ROHS), I would have regarded the AMCC 440SPe as distinctly possible now and preferable to any lesser chip.

Re Zigbee, ACube told me some weeks back they had begun work on support for it.

Noel

I've been a happy SAM owner for quite a few months now...

Every Amiga User just has to buy one, just like you brought your first A500...

I paid $1500 for the A500 $500 for the 1/2 meg expansion and $500 for the external disk drive and $1000 for the 1084 monitor in 1986... and all at once!

That is $3500.00

Trouble with today you all think cpu stuff should be dirt cheap and it holds you all back...

I paid $1500 for the SAM motherboard $250 import tax $200 for the tower case $120 for DVDRW $80 for 120gig Harddrive and $700 for my LCD 22" monitor a few days later.

That is $2850.00

My brand new SAM and everything else brand new is just fantastic!

And I'll be doing it all again... so what is everyone elses problem?

I don't think I want to say

p.s. I WANT a FAST OS4 machine BUT if we don't support the ENTIRE movement we are going to fall short of this TARGET and then I AM GOING TO BE SO PEEVED AT YOU GUYS who DIDNT BUY AN ENTRY LEVEL SAM!

But I certainly won't be mad for long because I know you aren't really serious about AmigaOS so probably don't belong here anyway...

@noelfuller

To be honest, looking at how long it's taking for the Flex board to be completed, ACube would have been better off making a board for the 460EX, they could be prototyping the first boards now. On the other hand I am a bit disappointed at AMCC, they announced the 2GHz dual-core Titan chip 2 years ago (it's similar to PA Semi's chips but with no AltiVec), but still no news from that. Additionally, last year the 460EX was available at up to 1.2GHz according to their website, whereas now it's only available at up to 1.0 Ghz. They seem to be moving backward rather than forward...

And the problem is that if ACube would start designing a board based on the 460EX after they finished the Sam-Flex, by the time they would have a product on the market, in my opinion the 460EX would be just as underpowered for the needs of the time as the Sam440 is now. I think the Freescale MPC8610 would be a better choice. Not only is it available at higher clock speeds (up to 1.33 GHz), it also has higher integer performance at the same clock speed (2.3 DMIPS / MHz as opposed to AMCC's 2.0 DMIPS / MHz), has an Altivec Unit (which none of the AMCC chips have and can significantly boost multimedia performance), has a faster 8-lane PCI-Express bus (as opposed to the 4-lane one on the 460EX), has integrated AC97 (saves board space and reduce component count) and even an integrated LCD controller, so it would be ideal for a board which is to be also used for embedded devices (no need for expensive Radeon M9). The 1066 MHz RoHS version is available for 150 EUR in single quantities (probably cheaper in 100+ quantities) so it's not such an expensive chip either.

If I were ACube I would not waste time with the 460 now...

@COBRA

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I'm disappointed to AMCC too. And I agree all the rest you said.

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Btw. Is this integrated controller good enough for big size LCD's ? I remember these have usually quite low max. resolution.

Another point is OS devs have said it would take at least a year to port to x86. But 4.1 was announced July-August last year. So if they started porting back then it could be available next August.

@TSK

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It's 1280x1024. Not HDTV resolution, but you usually don't need that for embedded applications.

@COBRA

I forgot you said it's good for embedded devices. For desktop one can always use a gfx card.

@TSK

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I sincerely hope this never happens.

I don't believe the people who sit on the bloody fence should get anything!

The way of the world truely disappoints me the most.

The day AmigaOS simply becomes another OS running on $100 hardware is the day for me Amiga Died.

And I won't be posting on AmigaBoards anymore.

I guess I can't change what is coming but I can limit my involvement.

When that happens the forums will be intolerable for years to come... don't make me start to build another arc...

@Slayer

If I could have a cheap 2ghz os4 machine, I dont care what cpu it uses.

@TSK

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Exactly. For embedded devices reliability is very important, therefore it's more desirable to have everything soldered. With graphic cards plugged into slots, etc. you can have contact problems over long periods of time, especially in environments where you have larger temperature variations than inside a house. Thus it would be possible to make boards which are suitable for embedded devices (by using the on-chip LCD controller to drive a display) but also suitable as a desktop system, by plugging in a PCIe gfx card.

@jahc

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You would care if you couldn't use existing Amiga software on it due to the incompatibility.

@COBRA

Okay, you got me there. I do like backwards compatibility.

@COBRA

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Maybe they can make it to convert PPC code to x86 on loading time. Active developers can recompile their software. And if it's hard to make PPC JIT emulator I think interpretive one would be good enough on fast hardware.

So we have to wish AMCC will release Titan soon.

@jahc

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I understand this mentality jahc but I don't agree with it, I don't believe in progress simply for the sake of progress nor will I ever sell my soul purely because I can get something out of it.

I can't think of anything worse than our beloved 20 year old + heritage ending up no better than a linux distribution... bluck!

Lets turn the damn tables and have those OTHER inferior OSs install on AmigaOS Hardware, think about it DARN IT!

@TSK

x86 CPUs are little-endian, and since AmigaOS is broken by design in that applications can directly read and write data structures in memory which are shared with the OS itself as well as other applications, you couldn't have x86 executables running and using the AmigaOS API together with emulated 68k and PPC executables in the same environment. But this topic has been discussed to death already dozens of times in other threads... This is not like MacOS X, which was designed with portability in mind in the first place.