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 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
