This week, at UDS, Servergy has announced that it will be designing and selling a PowerPC based developer board like no other currently on the market. Typical Power dev kits are using out-dated and feature-poor CPUs. As a follow up, they made this formal announcement.
Servergy plans many needed features, including:
- Multi-core processor
- Hardware virtualization (via Linux kernel KVM)
- Gigabit ethernet
- HDMI video output
- Network offloading engines
- SATA controller
- Audio output
- USB Ports
- SD Card slot
Servergy has dubbed this board P-Cubed.
They are planning a wide range of software support including firmware/boot-loader source code and pre-built images for creating bootable SD cards. Support for major Linux distributions will include Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and openSUSE.
The platform is geared toward making modern Power systems available to developers for a fraction of the cost of full fledged server systems (Servergy's primary market). While the board is aimed at increasing the ecosystem and community around Linux-on-Power, the pricing is sure to attract hobbyists and students as well.
While Servergy did not say the exact price, they are aiming at a sub-$200 system. Keep an eye on Servergy's website for news and pre-order form.
Is something known about the used core? e6500 or is a IBM design more likely?
ReplyDeleteAll I can say right now is that we are evaluating features vs. price at this point. You wont see an e6500 processor itself for sub-$200, much less an entire board, so that's an easy no :)
DeleteHigh on our list of priorities is multi-core, hardware virtualization and some off-loading engines (packet and encryption). We are definitely aiming this to be a low-end version of our CTS product line.
I wish I could give more, but we are working hard to iron out these details pretty quickly.
wow, nice news!! I'm really courius about the chosen SoC... i guess it's a 476fp.
ReplyDeleteI hope it's a core with AltiVec ;-)
ReplyDeleteAny word on this? I can't frackin' wait to get my hands on one, Raspberry Pi for Power! (well,sort of).
ReplyDeleteBen:
ReplyDeleteI followed the CTS product line link above and the menus on the Servergy site don't seem to be resolving correctly. I think you have ".html" where you and the menu need "/products/" now.
This board looks very interesting. I'm a member of MorphOS operating system community. This system is one of still alive Amiga descendants. It started on Amigas with PowerPC accelerator cards, later it migrated to Pegasos and Efika PowerPC hardware produced by Genesi. Lately we have "conquered" Apple PowerPC machines, including wide range of Power Macs, Macs mini and PowerBooks. They are obsolete, but still quite powerful and are cheap and easily available. We also have ported the system to AMCC 460EX based board Sam460, produced by Italian company A-Cube. P-Cubed board may be our next step with its computing power and price. MorphOS Team is experienced with PowerPC processors ranging from MPC52xx to G5 units. I look forward to further P-Cubed announcements.
ReplyDeleteVaporware? Six months and counting and no sign of this...is this dead in the water?
ReplyDeleteBusiness being as it is, sometimes things get placed on the back burner. I can assure you, it's not dead. We are looking at places to finish the BOM and produce some initial boards.
ReplyDeleteAny news?
ReplyDeleteAny new info about P-Cuped?
ReplyDelete(perhaps it is going to morph to T-Cuped?)
@Ben, Do you have any news of this board?
ReplyDeleteWould love to see this happen. .
ReplyDelete