Hi everybody,
thanks for the votes. Although there weren't much of them
it's enough for me to understand that the ARC design isn't
of much interest.
I DO understand that most or nearly all members of the
list cannot afford $2000 or the like. Ok, that's your
problem :-)
My problem is that I can't offer the board for less money.
Someone asked if skipping EISA would save money - yes it will,
but it won't reduce the price by 50%.
Another problem is that Waldorf has no time to do two re-designs,
one for our own purposes, one for riscy. Even if we had, we
would come into the same loop - you'll ask me why a dump ISA
board costs us$xxx. You can't buy a board for $500 if the CPU
plus bus controller chipset is $800. Prices will change, but
this will take a while.
Some time ago the group decided to wait for R4000 instead
of using old-fashioned R30xx derivates. I did not mind. Now we
have a R4000 design, surely not the best (fastest) one available,
and perhaps not the cheapest one, but we can have it.
Any alternative in sight ? NO. Correct me if I'm wrong, please.
What do we do now ? Tell me. I can only say: Waldorf will
buy this design, no matter how riscy decides to go on (or stop).
Don't get me wrong: I would LIKE to offer a complete board
incl. CPU/SCSI/VIDEO/SERIAL and so on for $1000. But I can't.
However, whatever the group decides to do now, I'll support
it if I can.
Cheers,
Andy
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