Re: Build your own Motherboards (was Re: AMD K6 233 Cpu 465 BogoMips??)

Terry L Ridder (terrylr@tbcnet.com)
Sat, 05 Sep 1998 12:12:06 -0500

Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>
> On Sat, 5 Sep 1998, Alex Buell wrote:
> [snip]
> > > Even a more moderate idea (like designing an SMP mainboard for Power PC)
> > > can be pretty complex. The thing is it will cost a lot to produce a 6-7
> > > levels board. It's not ham radio unfortunately :(
> >
> > Yes, but once you've done the design work, it's quite cheap to manufacture
> > them. It's the design & development that is the real killer here.
> >
>
> Well the tooling costs alot, so you will have to commit to a certian
> fairly large number of units. (i.e. 1000)..
>
> You could perhaps have an easier time adding features to make it a 'geek
> board': Say two PPC chips (with cache please :) ), a TMS320C6701 DSP
> (@167mhz doing single point it gets 1Gflop!), lotsa digital and analog IO
> ports... cool stuff like that, I'd spend $700 on it (providing the PPCs
> were reasonably fast)..
>

What you basically described is the original BeBox, which had a "geek
port".

On a semi-related issue, would anyone have an idea on how someone would
GNU GPL hardware? To make it easier take the specific case of a
motherboard
design. How would someone GNU GPL the motherboard design?

The BIOS for such a board is the easy part that is software and is
already
covered by the GNU GPL. The masks for a multi-layer PCB could also be
GNU GPL-ed. (It is "artwork"). But is that enough to keep the design
free?

-- 
Terry L. Ridder
Blue Danube Software (Blaue Donau Software)
"We do not write software, we compose it."


 When the toast is burnt
 and all the milk has turned
 and Captain Crunch is waving farewell
 when the Big One finds you
 may this song remind you that they 
 don't serve breakfast in hell
 ==Breakfast==Newsboys


-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/faq.html