On 7 Mar 2023 at 23:06, Ben Hutchinson wrote:
On Tue, Mar 7, 2023, 5:14 PM Volkert via Freedos-user
<freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote:
You might look for products based on a Vortex86 SoC. Those have
a legacy BIOS and can boot MS-DOS and older Windows versions
and such.
[ + a link to the Vogons forum, which has links to ICOP]
I'm looking for one that's mass produced, just like Arduinos and
Raspberry Pis are mass produced hobbyist computer boards. The only
problem with those is they don't support intel CPU instructions.
I'd like to second the advice given by PM Volkert:
you should definitely take a look at the Vortex86 family, namely on
motherboards made by ICOP, or miniature PC boxes by some other
sibling company in the family around DMP and ICOP.
Note that Vortex86, especially in the DX2 generation, is pretty close
to machines of the 486 / Pentium era. It's got a proper, full-blown
ISA bus straight from the SoC, and also 32bit / 33MHz PCI.
The DX-based boards by ICOP come with an XGI Z9s graphics chip that
has something like 32 MB of dedicated Video DRAM and is accompanied
by a pretty good VESA BIOS, where good = decent compatibility with
DOS-era software. It can run Windows up to XP, although for XP the
onboard 512 MB of RAM is already hardly sufficient. Graphics drivers
are available for the Windows 9x and NT.
With the Vortex86DX, you get an AMI BIOS with APM support (no ACPI),
with AT-style power supply control.
The more modern Vortex variants (up to DX3, at the time of this
writing) are faster, maybe up to on par with the early 45nm ATOM's,
they have more RAM onboard, their BIOS adds ACPI support, but these
newer Vortex platforms start to depart slightly from the hardcore
"oldtimer DOS experience".
Vortex86 by DMP / ICOP is the last remaining supporter of the DOS
era. You won't buy any other new hardware with a comparable set of
old-skool features.
Speaking of "mass-produced"... I'm not sure to what extent you are
aware of the functioning of the market of PC computers.
I myself work in the "industrial PC" business, so I'm aware of this
niche that may slip under the radar of a typical home/office PC user.
The mainstream mass-produced gaming/home/office PC's have a pretty
short product life cycle and are subject to the latest marketing
trends and fads. A particular motherboard model is available for
maybe a year. Say 6 months to 2 years. You get a truckload (cargo
ship load) of a particular motherboard model produced for stock, that
stock gets depleted in a few months and will never come back. By the
time that batch gets depleted, a newer model is already being
mass-produced. Etc.
The industrial PC HW market is different. The customers demand
product lifecycles that last many years, preferably forever. The
quantities sold are minuscule, compared to the mass market. Maybe 10%
of the mainstream market, if you summarize across a CPU generation.
The production batches are typically much smaller, compared to the
mass market - but, the production runs do repeat, as long as demand
lasts, and as long as chips are available.
The chip-level lifecycle is longer. The stumbling block is the CPU
and chipset - nowadays often merged together conveniently in an SoC.
For the embedded/IPC market, the champion in product lifecycle and
volume sold remains Intel (not AMD). In the product pages at
ark.intel.com, mind a note here and there saying "embedded SKU
options available". The word "embedded" here correlates to the
specific IPC market niche, and an extended availability, often for a
decade or almost.
Note that this IPC/embdedded motherboard market does not run along
with the evolutionary bleeding edge: instead, it seems to pick up
mature CPU generations as they're phased out from mainstream
availability. Courtesy of that conservative approach, in the
industrial x86 market you get stable silicon (already after several
iterations of early bugfixing revisions), stable motherboard PCB
designs (industrial ATX motherboards can actually be fine-tuned
siblings of previous generation mainstream models), stable BIOS and
bugfixed drivers.
If I return to the arrangements of "manufacturing and
order-processing logistics" : there are differences between
industrial PC vendors.
Generally only the biggest vendors try to keep stocks in regional
warehouses - say Advantech is a prime example here. Advantech
themselves appear to work with non-trivial production batches - as a
result of which, often the particular model that you're after is not
in stock at the very moment when you'd need it, and you have to wait
for a few weeks for the next production run + logistics. Returning
customers tend to calculate with these lead times. Also, chances are
that the boards are actually in stock in a warehouse near the
production line, and in the EU or U.S. you can pay extra to have your
motherboard delivered directly, thus saving maybe 2-3 weeks off the
low-cost "gravitational streaming" logistics.
Several smaller vendors, typically based in Taiwan, of not only PC
hardware but also Ethernet switches, flash SSD's, DRAM modules and
other components, use a different model: on the verge between batch
manufacturing and "build to order". Popular versions of their
hardware are stocked in some reasonable quantity, but they can also
"make to order" down to one piece = on demand, with a lead time of a
week or two EXW. They appear to have flexible production lines that
can assemble small runs of PCB's on demand.
The PCB boards themselves are stocked and allow for modular assembly
= multiple variants of a product can be made on a shared PCB design.
This approach can give you a lead time of 2-4 weeks DAP anywhere on
the globe, which isn't bad if you're integrating some industrial
process control gear. Anywhere on the globe, with a product lifetime
sometimes exceeding a decade - generally as long as chips are
available.
I've mentioned Intel as a champion of long product lifecycles on
industrial PC chips. But I'd like to amend this. There is one
exception, and that is: Vortex86 by the DMP of TW, and the
motherboards by the sibling company ICOP.
This is the actual champion of x86 PC product lifecycle duration,
hands down. For instance, the estimated EOL for the Vortex86DX has
been, for about a decade "as long as demand lasts, maybe 2023 but
that's not a definitive date".
I understand that DMP is a fabless silicon maker, having their chips
baked and packaged by some second-tier foundries using
older/cheaper/finetuned lithography nodes. (Did I hear UMC?)
I.e., DMP+ICOP pretty much have their own chips.
You may have noticed how chip shortage has affected the availability
of the RPi, mainstream ATOM-based ITX boards, onboard car
entertainment units, mobile phones, notebooks, printers etc. As much
as I can tell, ICOP just kept shipping their embedded motherboards -
if there was a shortage of some chips, it was not their SoC's.
I don't know the details behind the scenes, but the fact is that they
just keep marketing the most popular versions of their classic
industrial motherboards to this date. Somehow they even have XGI/SIS
make the discrete graphics chips for them - where the more recent
Vortex generations have a VGA subsystem integrated on chip (where the
VGA memory is now shared with the system RAM).
Speaking of ICOP, I'd also like to mention that their "industrial
extended temperature range" motherboards appear to run more stable
than your mainstream average. They have a minuscule RMA rate.
That said, note that the industrial/embedded PC motherboards are more
expensive than the mainstream models. Maybe 2x-3x. What you pay for
is the lower volume of manufacturing, the longer product lifecycle,
the availability "on demand, within a month, forever".
For you as a maker/integrator of some low-volume intelligent systems,
this is the component product lifecycle that makes your business
model viable.
Plus you get "no frills", no consumer marketing gimmicks, long-term
sustainable thermals, quality passive components.
What you end up running into, with modern Windows versions, is EOL's
on the OS. End of sales, end of security updates, end of the
possibility to activate (solved by Windows Embedded).
For serious use, if you ask my preference, and give me a choice
between RPi and ICOP, I vote firmly for ICOP.
Except where you need high resolution graphics with HDMI output,
perhaps the RPi4 has more performance, the Vortex family is still
32bit only (no 64bit support) etc.
If you really are not into the x86 PC legacy of ISA and compatibility
with old stuff (peripherals, legacy BIOS interfaces, DOS, the
bare-metal applications of the DOS era), my favourite choice is the
Intel ATOM family. Right now I'm eagerly awaiting the "Alder Lake N",
but generally anything starting from BayTrail has decent thermals /
performance / modern features / relatively compatible graphics.
Alas, availability of ITX boards with an ATOM onboard is poor.
You have a better chance of getting ATOM on a plethora of proprietary
or industrial x86 motherboard / SBC formats - from the likes of
Advantech, Kontron, Nexcom, Aplex, ...there are many of them.
Note that DOS (esp. FreeDOS) can boot on a large share of relatively
recent embedded PC motherboards with x86 processors from Intel or
AMD. The only condition is: the BIOS/UEFI must contain legacy BIOS
interfaces and boot capability. In modern UEFI firmware families, the
keyword to look for in the SETUP menu is the "CSM".
If the CSM config menu is absent, typically you're out of luck with
DOS on bare metal. Of course you can still turn to virtualization.
If you're open-source minded, QEMU/KVM in Linux is amazing.
But even DOSbox in Windows can work wonders.
With some pieces of really old software, especially in DOS, you may
run into problems if your CPU is *too fast*. And, not all of those
are based on the Borland Pascal CRT library bug (which can be solved
by a patch). My answer is: Vortex86DX. You can underclock the CPU
core right there in the BIOS SETUP.
Or a HV/emulator that allows you to throttle the clock of the
emulated CPU.
Or, you can try tweaking the P-state and T-state of even a relatively
modern CPU, to make it run as slow as a 486 :-) while the CPU IPC
dosage in time is still pretty smooth (the T-state PWM frame is 8 or
16 ticks of the CPU core clock).
I'm getting off topic... apologies.
To return to your question:
If you're asking for a mass-produced hobbyist PC, ICOP is as
mass-produced and as hobbyist as it gets in the PC business.
Look at the feature set of their motherboards if that fits your idea
of "hobbyist support".
No modern Intel-based motherboard has that set of GPIO and old
combatible peripheral interfaces.
If you're after Arduino / RPi style interfaces, take a look at the
86duino (which is also Vortex-based).
Good luck with your project, whatever it is :-)
Frank
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