PPC740L G3 CPU Daughterboard For Blackbird Powerbooks

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Just looked at the 750GX pinout and it shows five lines: PLL_Config 0-4 so I guess it's not a "later" version of the G3 than the FX. Anybody got a link handy to the 750FX User Manual?

edit: never mind, I just hadn't moved the PDF out of the downloads folder to documents as yet. Same thing PLL_CFG[0:4] on the FX and something called "Dual PLLs" whatever that is? Is that what you meant by "Two" PLLs, kev?

 

[kev7112001]

Just looked at the 750GX pinout and it shows five lines: PLL_Config 0-4 so I guess it's not a "later" version of the G3 than the FX. Anybody got a link handy to the 750FX User Manual?

edit: never mind, I just hadn't moved the PDF out of the downloads folder to documents as yet. Same thing PLL_CFG[0:4] on the FX and something called "Dual PLLs" whatever that is? Is that what you meant by "Two" PLLs, kev?

yes

 

[kev7112001]

and i have all manuals and datasheets and errata for PPC's and many bridges/chipsets besides the impossible marvell series stuff which i really need

well i have some but i need the programmer manual

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

I had no idea the 2300 was so similar in architecture. I can completely see what you are talking about. It appears that our two projects do certainly intersect. Anything you learn can be applied to future plans for the BlackBird project, and vice-versa.

Pretty much anything PowerBook in 603e is exactly the same thing as I see it until you cross the great divide into the PCI architecture. Anything before PCI is PCMCIA only.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

I had no idea the 2300 was so similar in architecture. I can completely see what you are talking about. It appears that our two projects do certainly intersect. Anything you learn can be applied to future plans for the BlackBird project, and vice-versa. 

I finally figured as much. Major overlap's exactly why I've kept up a running commentary about my unofficial project here in your topic. We're pretty much working different sections of the same jigsaw puzzle.

Your Plan A is a (very cool) practical experiment with alternate avenues available in case of failure. You have a fairly clear path toward building a very complex new board, if and when after either success or failure at first pass. I'm researching methods for doing the least complicated experiment possible next to your Plan A, which is building a 1400 Processor Card. That's the type of simple electron plumbing I can do, no logic involved. Just solder the copper pipe network together correctly, add the proper gate valve for power and it should be good to go.

The really fun stuff starts when we begin to pull the 2300c architecture apart in order to miniaturize it for fitment into the Blackbird's Faraday cage. :approve:

p.s. to flesh out the post I made above when I was very tired: PCMCIA/CardBus and the Blackbirds

PCMCIA - "The original standard was built around an 'enhanced' 16-bit ISA bus platform."

CardBus - "CardBus is effectively a 32-bit, 33 MHz PCI bus in the PC Card form factor."

http://www.bixnet.com/pccaandex.html

 

[Paralel]

p.s. to flesh out the post I made above when I was very tired: PCMCIA/CardBus and the Blackbirds

PCMCIA - "The original standard was built around an 'enhanced' 16-bit ISA bus platform."

CardBus - "CardBus is effectively a 32-bit, 33 MHz PCI bus in the PC Card form factor."

http://www.bixnet.com/pccaandex.html

Yeah, unfortunately, since it works as a PCI bus, it seems as though it would be very difficult to back-port it to any of the Powerbooks that use the '030 bus style, since that is more or less NuBus type (No such thing as an '030 bus that can handle PCI, at least as far as I am aware)

 

[Gorgonops]

No such thing as an '030 bus that can handle PCI, at least as far as I am aware)

Anything is possible if you're crazy enough, as evidenced by the fact that PCI slot busboards for the Amiga 1200 exist. But, yes, like most of the truly far out Amiga expansions that's basically the exception that proves the rule.

 

[kev7112001]

Yeah, unfortunately, since it works as a PCI bus, it seems as though it would be very difficult to back-port it to any of the Powerbooks that use the '030 bus style, since that is more or less NuBus type (No such thing as an '030 bus that can handle PCI, at least as far as I am aware)

actually there are 68k PCI bridges eg Qspan by moto there are a few others too already lookin at them for another project of mine

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

https://lists.purdue.edu/pipermail/cytometry/1999-March/012466.html

PCI card to NuBus Slots is a thing, have that in house. Slots are on a passive backplane. The NuBus chipset on the PCI card could be deleted from its schematic. The remainder would be a raw 68k bus that could be torqued into a 68030 PDS to PCI adapter. If someone wanted to translate the PCI side of the card to CardBus you'd wind up with a CardBus to 68030 PDS adapter for upgrading a PCI architecture PowerBook to use SE/30 and IIsi cards. Drivers for doing that via the NuBus chipset are in house as well. PDS and NuBus cards are handled the same way in the NuBus architectire Slot Manager setup so that ought to work I would think.

You'd need to flip-flop the drivers to go bi-directional, but much of the work there has been done. I'll take a look at the interface card later if I have a chance and post the 68K<->PCI bridge chip's ID.

 

[kev7112001]

in my other project we are trying to make a faster PCI to 030bus since at the moment the mediator board we use goes through the old slower Zorro bus which is a big loss atm since we only get a max 13MB/s bandwidth shared with a Voodoo 3

youtube has vids of our cards playing Quake 3 and RTCW etc etc

ther is another PCI bridge that just became fully opensource and just FYI Zorro bus is basically a 030 bus

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Unfortunately, it looks like they did custom bridge logic.



Card's from 1995, what are the dates on your available bridge solutions? Might the Mac drivers be compatible? The bridge itself should be a black box, no?

 

[Gorgonops]

Unfortunately, it looks like they did custom bridge logic.

The "Mediator" bridges for the Amiga have a welter of CPLDs on them. The closest thing to an off-the-shelf mass-produced solution seems to be the aforementioned Qspan2 by Tundra:

https://www.idt.com/products/memory-logic/ehb-embedded-host-bridges/ca91l862a-powerquicc-pci-bridge

That targets several products with 68040-like busses. (It's mildly interesting to note that this includes some PowerPC-core processors, although they're feeble little pipsqueaks that wouldn't be at all interesting prospects for Mac CPU upgrades despite having 68040-ish busses.) Given how cheap programmable logic is this day I don't see any particular advantage of using that device, particularly if your goal is to have the bridge try to paper over some of the software gaps you'll obviously run into in trying to graft PCI slots onto a 68k Mac that has no idea what they are. (In principle at least you could probably design a bridge that maps PCI devices' I/O into the assigned Nubus Superslot spaces via some programmable registers; obviously you'll still need to write drivers for whatever devices you intend to plug in.)
 

ther is another PCI bridge that just became fully opensource

Are you referring to the Prometheus bridge?

make a faster PCI to 030bus since at the moment the mediator board we use goes through the old slower Zorro bus which is a big loss atm since we only get a max 13MB/s bandwidth

Maybe it's worth pointing out that there's a limit to what you can reasonably expect to get out of an 030. Using 68020-compatible asynchronous bus transfers the 030 takes a minimum of three bus cycles to transfer a word, which makes the best you could ever possibly expect out of a baseline 16mhz '030 is something around 21MB/s. Synchronous transfers would get you to 32MB/s, but something tells me the Amiga chipset doesn't use those anywhere on the motherboard, but I could be wrong. (I'm also skeptical the "030 bus" in the Macintoshes that are subject to this thread use them either.) You certainly might gain *something* by going upstream of the Buster chip, but...

 

[kev7112001]

yes i know all about the bridges and yes the prometheus with latest firmware is out there and we are not using 030 cpu's just amiga's bus design is based on it

zorro can do fast as pci its the "BUSTER" controller that limits you this is why the Phase5/DCE GREX/visions series were fast as they had there own pci bridge to 040/060

http://www.e3b.de/prometheus/

 

[Gorgonops]

zorro can do fast as pci its the "BUSTER" controller that limits you this is why the Phase5/DCE GREX/visions series were fast as they had there own pci bridge to 040/060

See, this is where I always sort of start losing the plot with Amiga upgrades, because essentially what you're describing in these systems is having a stand-alone single-board computer sitting on a PCI bus with the actual Amiga (IE, all the bits that actually make an Amiga an Amiga) just sort of sitting off to the side "over there". So is the resulting computer actually even an "Amiga" anymore (what *is* an Amiga, anyway...?) but... whatever, never mind.

In any case: you're the one who said:

in my other project we are trying to make a faster PCI to 030bus since at the moment the mediator board we use goes through the old slower Zorro bus

And:

just FYI Zorro bus is basically a 030 bus

which lead me to (apparently mistakenly) believe that actually communicating with stuff sitting on the actual '030 bus inside the old Amiga motherboard was something you actually cared about? You can look in the Motorola 68030 manual and read up on what transfer modes are possible on the '030 and you'll find the only circumstance under which you can even remotely approach the ridiculously optimistic "150MB/s" that's claimed Zorro III is capable of (which so far as I can tell is based on some rather unrealistic math and presumes a couple of not-68030-based targets communicating privately with each other) would be using synchronous stream mode on a 50mhz-ish '030 against a high-speed cache, and hitting that would depend on having hardware on the bus utterly different from anything that ever shipped in anything outside of some very exotic workstation.

Just out of curiosity, what is the fastest thing that supposedly sits on a Zorro III bus? The fastest "Fast RAM" memory benchmark I could find on this page is in the ballpark of 60MB/s, and that's to the onboard fast RAM in a Cyberstorm PPC. If it can only talk to RAM at 60MB/s how is it as fast as 32 bit PCI@133MB/s?

 

[Gorgonops]

yes i know all about the bridges

And also, just a note: Your tone seems very combative, perhaps you might want to take a deep breath or drink less coffee. I only posted the link to the Prometheus bus (and Qspan2) because Trash was asking for more specifics about 680x0-to-PCI bridge solutions and since you seemed like you might know I thought it'd be worth checking with you if that was the "open source" bridge you were talking about, verses some other project.

I'm sorry I apparently completely misunderstood whatever it is you're apparently doing when I extemporized about what sort of performance I thought was realistic to expect out of an '030-to-PCI bus that sits on a motherboard that incorporates chips designed for the '030 (and therefore imposes their speed limits on it), but, again, it seems to me like you're taking it as some sort of attack. Chill. Please. We're all friends here.

 

[kev7112001]

um you must be mistaken about me and converting a bus into another is what all computers are doing i think you need to calm down 

 

[Gorgonops]

um you must be mistaken about me and converting a bus into another is what all computers are doing i think you need to calm down 

For the record, you're talking to a moderator. Don't want to swing that around, but I think that's worth putting out there.

If you want to talk about Amiga bus converters in whatever detail you want by all means do so. But I think everyone would appreciate it if you'd actually do so in a way that contributes to the overall conversation rather than just dropping catty little content-less remarks and unverifiable vague claims.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

He's a mod, you're not, think about it. []

Back on topic:

I'm playing around with buzzing connections between PBX and the 603e on the 2300c board. Cleaned up the decapitated CPU pads and I've got a setup for pulling one leg off at a time for torturing that little PBX bugger. [}]   Five down, 235 to go. 603e-240 maps to PBX-1 as expected. Of course it's OVDD and 603e-239 maps to PBX-2 which is GND. Next three are all n.c. but no biggie. Haven't looked at the signal descriptions yet, but they don't sound like they head to the 030 I/O bus. I'm expecting beaucoups n.c. results on this go round. Whatever direct connections I find won't need to have wire test leads soldered to the pads on CPU or PBX sides of the board. That should simplify things, making buzzing the fast and slow buses a lot easier.

edit: dammit Eudi, you beat me to it!

 

[kev7112001]

whats that mean im talking to a moderator? yeah i can read so are you gonna bully me with that fact or something like a cop?

you are starting a issue for no reason and i dont understand why

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Both of you pipe down and let's have some mainline on topic fun.  :approve: