Sunday, January 27, 2013

P-Cubed - possible solution for AmigaOS 4.x and MorphOS

Looking through the net I've noticed interesting hardware which could become an interesting solution for neo-amiga systems, namely AmigaOS 4.x and MorphOS.

Those systems lack new hardware - the PPC architecture is not so popular among desktop solutions - and that what we can get is quite expensive (I am not talking about old macs for MorphOS, of course).

https://www.power.org/solution/p-cubed/

The mainboard looks like Raspberriy Pi, and I can bet that this was inspired by Raspberry Pi. We can get some information clicking the link placed above, but we cannot get one thing - the information about the processor used?

There is some speculation on the net, that perhaps we can expect this:

QorIQ

P2


The P2 series is designed for a wide variety of applications in the networking, telecom, military and industrial markets. It is the mid-level platform, with devices ranging from 800 MHz up to 1.2 GHz. It is designed to replace the PowerQUICC II Pro and PowerQUICC III platforms. The chips include, among other integrated functionality, a 512 kB L2 cache, a security engine, three Gigabit Ethernet controllers, a USB 2.0 controller, a 64-bit DDR2 and DDR3 memory controller with ECC support, dual four-channel DMA controllers, a SD/MMC host controller and high speed SerDes lanes which can be configured as three PCIe interfaces, two RapidIO interfaces and two SGMII interfaces. The chips are packaged in 689-pin packages which are pin compatible with the P1 family processors.

P2020 – Includes two 1.2 GHz cores, with shared L2 cache

What will be the price of P-Cubed? That's the most interesting question for enthusiasts of MorphOS or AmigaOS 4.x! We expect it to be less than $200... quite much comparing to Raspberry Pi? Definitely... but in the world of PPC and overpriced amiga solutions it seems to be quite tempting.

I'll definitely follow this issue on my blog.