On 4/9/25 6:20 am, Sebastian Andrzej Siewior wrote:
Interesting that new e500 based boards are made. It is probably one of the last available CPUs capable of doing 32bit powerpc. But reading Amiga I would expect m68k based CPUs not powerpc (especially this one). Color me surprised.
Well that would be Classic Amiga or real Amiga. This dates from the 90's but since m68K stopped being produced, it needed another CPU. It was also after Commodore died and Amiga was in limbo so one company produced a hybrid 68K/PowerPC CPU card and followed Apple. Later the OS was ported to PPC as AmigaOS4 and independent PPC ATX boards were eventually released. To cut a long history short the lineage went from G3, G4, to P.A.Semi PPC64, AMCC440/460, e5500 and the infamous P1022 SPE all from a few different companies. With designs now for the e6500 aside from the PPC laptop. The P1022 PowerPCSPE was (unfortunately) chosen for a low cost PPC board called the Tabor or A1222 and news spread a decade ago now. However, it cost more to produce than it was worth, as the ISA was more incompatible with PPC than any PPC ISA before it in the history of PPC backwards incompatibility. So it needed a an FPU emulator to emulate common FPU code using SPE code. Time is bullets and software cost money. All this along with Covid 19 hardware shortage meant the poor board was delayed, which was a good idea at the time, but all these issues just shot it down. The board was finally released in 2024 but ended up being more expensive and suffered reverses. The A1222 is still supported by the OS4 development team as well as receiving Linux support up to kernel 5.4.
-- My regards, Damien Stewart.