Pegasos Processor & technical information...

The Pegasos ships with the PowerPC family of processors, either the IBM 750CXe (G3) or the Motorola MPC7447 (G4). They bring many top end features to the Pegasos, including: Low power consumption. Minimal heat production. Harvard Architecture with integrated L1 and L2 caches. Seperate cores to handle Fetch/Branch, Load/Store and Dispatch. The Pegasos mounts its processor on an expansion card, similar to those found on higher end workstations. The advantage of this is easier scalability, allowing one to upgrade to two processors using the same motherboard. Only the northbridge is the limiting factor. In addition, as newer RAM and bridge technologies arrive, it is possible to create new boards and cards to take advantage of these processors without throwing out your existing equipment. The same processor cards are used by both the Pegasos and Pegasos II motherboards. With the rapidly changing scope of technology in the world today, the ability for the Pegasos to be upgraded with the latest technology is a key advantage of the platform.

The 750CXe from IBM, also called the G3, is a price-conscious energy-efficient processor from the PowerPC family of processors. Its simple design allows the G3 to achieve comparable performance to budget processors from other families while consuming less electrical power. By not needing active cooling, and running on a few Watts, the G3 allows for very quiet computers to be built for a very low price. Now available is a processor card sporting the Motorola 7447 running at 1 gigahertz and up. Also called the G4, it is the latest in the PowerPC lineup from Motorola, offering an improved performance base over the previous generation of processors. In addition to a larger cache and higher clock speeds over the G3, the G4 offers more pipelines, an improved front side bus (FSB) and most of all, a SIMD unit called the Altivec. Altivec offers a dedicated on-chip vector engine, capable of delivering over a GigaFLOP (billion floating point operations per second) while remaining affordable to the average user. This provides the G4 a key advantage in mathematically intensive operations such as 3D graphics, scientific simulations, and internet routers, providing a similar level of power as more dedicated Digital Signal Processors (DSP's). By combining this with the processor itself, Motorola (and soon IBM) are providing this performance while being easier to program than the common DSP.

The Pegasos is built using advanced chipsets available from VIA, Marvell, and Sigmatel. These provide all of the advanced capabilities you will find with the Pegasos. Genesi uses the Discovery II from industry leader Marvell as the northbridge in the Pegasos II. Marvell uses an advanced crossbar architecture, similar to that found in advanced network routers. In addition, it provides: ECC memory support, a general purpose high speed I/O for onboard logic, gigabit ethernet fully capable of supplying the peak speed for this technology, and up to 8-gigabytes of address space. The internal crossbar fabric supplies up to 100 Gigabits/second, delivering unprecedented performance for the Pegasos II. The Pegasos' audio codec is the Sigmatel STAC 9766 which supplies a 20-bit AC97 audio codec. It includes multiple input channels at 18-bit to allow for mixing down a microphone, CD-audio and even DVD support. For modern audio, a digital S/PDIF output has been included, allowing the Pegasos access to the latest generation of audio technology. VIA supplies many components for the Pegasos including the 8231 southbridge and 6306 controller. The 8231 supplies such things as the serial, parallel, IDE and USB ports for the machine. The 6306 is a high performance IEEE-1394 controller providing 3 Firewire® ports for the Pegasos to use.

No Risc no fun...

© GGS-Data - www.ggsdata.se Alla rättigheter förbehållna - All Rights Reserved