On Wed, Jul 02, 2003 at 02:32:34AM +0200, Segher Boessenkool wrote: > Sven Luther wrote: > > > So you think that the north-bridge could be an Apple-IBM common design ? > > It's an Apple design.
Indeed, manufactured by IBM. I'm just curious to see what bridge IBM will use in their 970 machines. > > > The rest is not as important, as it is connected trough a HyperTransport > > bus, so any HT chip will do. The funny thing is that they have a special > > PCI-X bridge sitting between the north bridge and the super IO chip. I > > No. The "super-io chip" (a KeyLargo derivative) is connected to HT. > > > guess this one is just a off-the-shelve piece, while the IO chip is of > > Correct, the HT<->PCI-X bridges for the slots are AMD parts. > > > more common apple lineage. It has serial ATA, standard ATA for the > > I believe the serial ATA is a separate (non-Apple) part. Not according recently released Apple's docs: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Hardware/Developer_Notes/Macintosh_CPUs-G5/PowerMacG5/PowerMacG5.pdf The K2 chip has a lot of things in it: 2 serial ATA, one parallel ATA, a HT link, a Firewire controller (the PHY is external), the Ethernet controller (including the PHY), 2 USB 1.1 controllers (for Modem and Bluetooth), an I2S interface for sound, an interrupt controller (MPIC), the PMU interface, and finally a standard PCI bus (for the USB2.0 controller and the optional Airport Extreme card). It probably has a few more things I missed. Another interesting point is that the memory controller can use 2GB DIMM modules, which could bring the total RAM to 16GB for the memory hungry ;-) > > > USB 2.0, > > A separate, non-Apple part (hi Ben). Indeed, K2 has USB, but only 1.1 for internal uses. > > > Firewire 800, > > I'm not sure about this. The FireWire 400 is the same as before, > though. > > > networking and > > Still SUN GEM. > > > audio. > > Still TAS3004, but with added optical links. > > > Naturally, one could even build a PPC 970 motherboard with This > > IBM/Apple northbridge, some PCI bridge, and Nvidia's HT connected > > southbridges, not that we have much drivers for them though. > > Yes, but why? And engineering adequate cooling for the 970 seems > to be non-trivial, to say the least... It is non trivial because Apple seems to have done everything they could do to minimize noise. The power dissipation of a 970 is in the 50W range, worst case, which is easily in the range of forced air cooling when you don't care about noise. Gabriel
