PeterS wrote:A lot of time has passed since their ARM offensive and they might be amenable to selling a small backstock of v5 if they have any.
I don't know if the v5e made it into any printers but some of them can be had for £50-100 on ebay and the cpu could be extracted. BGA mounted ?
[edit] It looks like the v5e was in several HP printers at 540MHz.
Anyone brave enough to put one in a Firebee of evaluation board to find out if it works ?
Well, these companies are simply not interrested in peanuts like us. It is a business for earning cash, not a company like we may think companies.
They know that they cannot expect more than let´s say in the absolute best case 5digit numbers of sold processors, and thats nothing they care about. See what happened to the 68k. Motorola abandoned the development even when Amiga, Atari and Apple where still in business. No problem for a chip producer that 2 plattforms didn´t manage any transition to any other CPU (like Apple did with the PPC) and dissapeared. So what can we expect from them today with a small community of 50k people – including all the Retro and "Game only" interresteds?
The business is working that way, that you do either buy "ready" CPUs in hardware like we did with the MCF5474 the fastest V4e, or "Intelectual Properties", what means VHDL or Verilog configurations of such a CPU under NDAs for producing your own CPUs or ASICs with your own hardware departement, what is the usual way today for Coldfires which IPs are sold now by Silvaco formerly IP-Extreme. But as a microprocessor these days contains a lot of stuff (see the good article from Vincent:
http://firebee.org/fb-bin/page?label=Zo ... ire&lng=EN ) you have to buy and integrate every single part of such a microprocessor, or develop it at your own. As said above MMU, Timers, Interrrup Controller, RAM controller, FPU, … Once you have that stuff inside a huge and very expensive FPGA or FPGA-Farm if you like to achive high clock rates, you need to develop a production process for producing ASICs or real CPUs.
HP did that with Freescale. We have people inside the ACP working in real CPU production (8-Bit) as day to day job. They confirmed us that we have no chance to bake our own chips, or even develop them from bought IP. Additionally there is the problem that Silvaco even doesn´t have the V5 licence to sell it. As said above Freescale adviced me to become lead customer of IP-Extreme and talk them into licencing the V5(e) from them, ...
The 2nd option, using existing chips is more realistic, but also extremely complicated. We do not have any chance to find out what HP included into the existing V5es. In worst case the chip has nothing to do with our existing V4e that we use, except the downward compatible Coldfire ALU. The Firebee board would most likely burn immediatly, if you connect a HP V5 chip to it.
Beside the fact, that the chips have different numbers of contacts and simply cannot be connected.
We can buy hundrets of thousands of the 400MHz V5e versions immediatly/right now in Asia from resellers ($8,5 per unit), but there is absolutely no chance to find out what is inside, and what the pins are.
So our only chance would be:
Either to find somebody inside NXP (Freescale) who really likes us and can give us a documentation under NDA from the existing chips, or to find such a person inside HP who can decide that we are allowed to get a documentation of their chip
BTW, producing own chips, even if somebody of us would have $20 to $50 Millions around, would be questionable. We then could produce 68060 as well with similar amount of work.
MegaST 4 with Sounddesigner II MegaBus hardware and 56001, Hades 040, MagiC Mac at Mac OS 9 and a FireBee.
