Quote:

Indeed, but imgaine if they considered a mATX board with slots!

PS: mATX with slots - that would be useful;-)

I liked the last video. I mean installing/updating MorphOS on some IDE SSD is fun already as I thought this would be fast, but seeing that process with the NVMe device - impressive!

> Nice to see that they're using SOC's that we've already discussed.

As we've discussed all Power(PC) ISA SoCs ever available, they weren't able to use one we've not discussed ;-)
Btw, why not continue to use your long-existing account?

> I to would prefer the T2081 [...]. The extra cores would be useful under Linux.

That's just extra-threads compared to the T1042.

> an MATX form factor board with expansion slots would have been more useful.

Erm...

Sorry, I was under the perception that the board was something smaller like a micro itx form factor.

I've been away for awhile, and I didn't remember my old login.
Ijust noticed this board.

The T2081 has a slight clock speed advantage, and Altivec, it's not a matter of more cores, it still only has four. But the T2081 cores are multi threaded. Making the four cores act like eight virtual cores.

[ Edited by Iggy 26.11.2025 - 16:50 ]

Quote:

8 virtual cores that in real life perform like 5 or 6 actual cores.

Quote:

Welcome Back, Iggy. I have a small Paper Notebook for Passwords. Not the übersafe Option,but has actual advantages (Like keeping Accounts live since 20+ years).

Thanks Zylesea,
It's been a tough year.
I haven't been keeping up.
We sold our house and I gave up alcohol (a really long year).
I even sold my last Amiga (the first one I bought, an A2000).

Anyway, I don't have either of my G4 or G5 Powermacs, so it's encouraging that I may be able to buy a new PPC board.

I'm glad to see that you guys are still online. I'll have to look for another X1900 based video card.

Anyway, I hope all of you have a great Christmas holiday.

https://youtu.be/Ur3ErtkMtPE?si=6Py5E69x_QuEaV74

Take my money, please!

Quote:

Sure they can take your money.

Won't make a spare board appear out of thin air though......

Update:

> Complete MorphOS-related entries from the "blog": […]

15th December: "Onboard NIC driver is here!
[...] On December 5th 2025, developer Frank Mariak of the MorphOS team successfully completed and tested the Qoriq Network driver for the new Mirari mainboard."
https://mirari.vitasys.nl/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Qoriq_eth_MorphOS.webp

Harald: A skilled hardware engineer with a deep understanding of
Amiga architecture, Harald is the brains behind the new
mainboard design.

??! would you consider offering the great T2081 processor with the
mirari - motherboard - at some point, or perhaps even as a
version 2 later. I would find it more professional and
advantageous to have a better CPU on the
motherboard from the start.

A buyer decides how much they want to pay for this.

I would, of course, be willing to pay the
additional cost.

Update:

> Complete MorphOS-related entries from the "blog": […]

16th January: "The Symphony Within!
[...] the Mirari board hold a Trion FPGA. This FPGA can be configured to act as various components, including the glue logic for peripherals. One such peripheral is an onboard sound Texas Instruments DAC. Connecting an FPGA to a sound DAC often involves a communication protocol called I2C (Inter-Integrated Circuit). I2C is a serial communication bus commonly used for connecting low-speed peripherals to a motherboard or microcontroller. While the FPGA could certainly be programmed to talk I2C, MorphOS itself needed a way to initiate and manage this communication. Just as the already present AHI audio driver and NVME driver, Harald took on the monumental task of writing the actual sound driver for the Mirari’s onboard audio. Frank provided the essential I2C component for MorphOS. This wasn’t a sound driver itself, but a lower-level library or module that allowed other parts of the operating system (like Harald’s sound driver) to send and receive data over an I2C bus. As a result we are able to produce a 1kHz tone using the onboard audio."
https://mirari.vitasys.nl/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Mirari_Onboard_Audio_001.jpg

18th January: "Mirari.audio v6.1
The first version of the onboard audio driver has been finalized and compiled by Harald. This means there is no need for an additional soundcard in the Mirari mainboard anymore to have sound when using the MorphOS operating system."
https://mirari.vitasys.nl/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Window04.png
https://mirari.vitasys.nl/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Screen41.png
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2tHqxZRUiU

[ Edited by Andreas_Wolf 19.01.2026 - 00:19 ]

Nice work, Frank&Harald!
THX!

A reliable, professional, and honest statement about a successor with a T2080 or T2081 would be better.

A Core e6500 would be preferable, regardless of whether it's running MorphOS, AmigaOS, or Linux.

Why isn't the technically best solution implemented immediately?

As @geennaam stated on amiga-news.de
(but you might have already seen that)

The Mirari is not based on any existing development board. Its design was created entirely from scratch, following the design rules and component library provided by our manufacturing partner in China. Our goal was to deliver a well-specified board at the lowest reasonable cost, so we included features that added value without significantly increasing the bill of materials.

The choice of the T1042 was deliberate: it is much cheaper than the T208x, it uses the proven and supported e5500 core and provides all the interfaces required for a mainboard. Using a more expensive T2080 would have forced us to move to a 10-layer PCB instead of 8 layers, while offering only marginal advantages over the T2081. In addition, the e6500 core was not supported by ExecSG at the time, and likely not by MorphOS either, so software support effort was also a factor.

As for similarities with the Tyche board, I can only speculate. Many component placements are dictated by the processor pinout, and others by the ATX form-factor requirements, so some resemblance is inevitable.

Mirari's compatibility with the T2081 is simply a bonus and was treated as a secondary design objective. The only real T2081 specific design choice was to build the audio interface (I2S) inside the FPGA. Because the T208x does not have a peripheral which can interface directly with an audio codec. The Tyche board took a more risky approach by using an older consumer grade PCIe audio chipset. Another one was to use DDR3 instead of DDR4. Because unlike the T1042, the T208x does not support DDR4. But since the DDR4 interface operated at the same frequence as the DDR3 interface, increased latencies would have resulted in lower poerformance compared to DDR3.
One might argue that DDR4 offers better availability, but we do not see any issues at the moment to aqcuire large SODIMMs at a reasonable price. Given the current DRAM situation, the price and availability of DDR3 might even be better in the near future.

The reduced number of SerDes lanes and lack of SATA on the T2081 are not real drawbacks in this context. The PCIe Gen3 controller in the T208x family is limited to four lanes, so even if you wire eight lanes to a x16 slot, it still operates in PCIe 2.0 mode. Which has no benefit from a bandwidth pov. GPU performance on next-generation PowerPC systems is constrained far more by CPU capability than by PCIe bandwidth.

The same applies to NVMe and M.2 storage: Amiga filesystem performance stay far below 500MB/s, so the available slot bandwidth is not the limiting factor.

The absence of onboard SATA is also not an issue. The board includes two NVMe ports, which provide ample storage options. While I cannot comment on OS4 support yet, both Linux and MorphOS install perfectly well from a USB drive. Modern ATX cases rarely include external 5.25" bays, and optical drives have largely disappeared from laptops as well. For those who still need one, a USB DVD drive or a PCIe SATA card works fine. The Sil3132 SATA2 controller operates correctly under Linux and MorphOS on the Mirari, and the system should also be able to boot from it, though I have not tested that scenario yet.


Hope this helps.

Once again, technical paraphrasing is being used here, and a poorer bigger processor and regression in performance and development are being prevented with the next level future of the PPC. The old Core is a wrong way and not funny

Normally, you should use the T2080/T2081 processor, which is marginally more expensive. NXP's prices are publicly available.

Why should a customer buy cheaper when they can have something better? I will definitely wait for a NEW Mirari Version 2.0 T2081 Motherboard.

A Motherboard Chips Design where you can plug in a Graphicscard with a Soundcard like a Soundblaster and have Onboard SATA available. Why would you want to do without internal SATA? That's ridiculous. The Core e6500 is much better.

Development means the future, not changing nothing at all.

Quote:

Sure, then go buy a "trivial" number of them at those prices.

180$-331€ is what I found without taxes and you have to buy multiples of 60.
"in stock" means nothing at all these days so the real price might be anything between the above numbers.
(or maybe even that you can't get a reasonable number at all as AEon found out with the P6T used in X1000)

Similar T1042 deals start at 70$.

Add taxes and tariffs and the added real cost before production can be anywhere from 100-300$ not even considering any design changes necessary.

As for "future" all these chips were more about legacy support than anything else when they launched 10+ years ago.

Quote:

Uhhh... You can plug in a Graphics Card.... and a soundcard if you like,.
Anyway.. feel free to wait for the next version

Quote:

Even if I understand argument, that T2081 is better ( i.e. more powerfull ) CPU than T1042, it has no big sense to write the same post again and again.

It was said several times that development will concentrate at first to T1042 type, and if all will work as expected, second version will be with T2081.
It makes very good sence, becouse there is not lots of developers which can work on both projects simultaneously. So please, give them time to finish Mirari I first.
If you check benchmarks on Discord, you will see T1042 competes good with G5.

Personally, even though I also prefer the T2081, I will first purchase Mirari with the T1042. And then, of course, if will be available, second Mirari with the T2081.

Indeed, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect

> If you check benchmarks on Discord, you will see T1042 competes good with G5.

It's somehow funny how QorIQ P5 has been declared inferior to the PPC970 performance-wise on this site for the last decade (not necessarily by you) and now its little and slower QorIQ T1 brother is apparently treated much differently.

> all these chips were more about legacy support than
> anything else when they launched 10+ years ago.

I don't think so. It's more like it turned out that way with Freescale's takeover by NXP.

> T2080/T2081 processor [...] is marginally more expensive.

...only if a factor of ~2.5 counts as marginal.

Quote:

Whatever their name was in that given week FreeScale did try to keep PPC going for a few years after Apple’s Intel switch but that ended more than 10 years ago with everything afterwards just being old cores on newer nodes just to satisfy costumers still in that ecosystem.
Just like ColdFire for 68k in the late 90s and early 2000s.

>> It's more like it turned out that way with Freescale's takeover by NXP.

> Whatever their name was in that given week

That's the point: It wasn't a mere name change but a takeover, as I wrote. Opposed to mere name changes, takeovers usually entail product strategy adaptations in the smaller (or even both) companies in order to streamline the product portfolios of the (former) two companies.

> FreeScale did try to keep PPC going for a few years after Apple’s Intel switch

Yes, and unfortunately with the wrong roadmap/strategy only catering for their networking/telecom customers which made them lose a significant share of their SIMD-dependent military and aerospace/avionics customers to Intel, starting by changing the announced e700's base from e600 before Apple's Intel switch announcement to e500(v2) after Apple's Intel switch announcement, which eventually resulted (with e500mc as intermediate step fixing the questionable decisions made with e500(v1/v2)) in the e5500 lacking AltiVec. They then attempted to correct this with the e6500 with AltiVec, but I'm not sure how many of their previous military and aerospace/avionics customers they could win back, if any.

https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?forum=3&topic_id=11623&start=27 (#28)
https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?forum=3&topic_id=7183&start=193 (#194)
https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?forum=3&topic_id=7001&start=270 (#271)

> but that ended more than 10 years ago

Yes, essentially with the takeover in 2015, although NXP released lower-power and faster-memory e6500-based QorIQ T2/T4 chip variants in 2016 (#17) and new e200-based chips for automotive at least until 2021 (#210).

> with everything afterwards just being old cores on newer
> nodes just to satisfy costumers still in that ecosystem

The only Power(PC) die shrink after the takeover I'm aware of is the 16nm e200 for automotive. The lower-power and faster-memory e6500-based T2/T4 chip variants from 2016 were not the result of die shrinks.
If you mean *before* the takeover, I'd say that the e6500 surely isn't just an e5500 on a newer node. While the e5500 indeed was shrunk from 45nm in the QorIQ P5 to 28nm in the QorIQ T1, the e6500 has always been 28nm, and I'm not aware of it ever being put on a node newer than this.
The e6500 was Freescale's attempt at winning back previously lost customers from SIMD-dependent military and aerospace/avionics markets while at the same time keeping their existing networking/telecom customers. That the e6500 may have seen successors without the takeover by NXP is pure speculation on my part, of course, but at least roadmaps had hints on them (if that means anything, that is).