Re: Recommendations for Power PC VME cards

[Korhonen Timo <Timo.Korhonen@psi.ch>]

We at PSI are also going towards the Motorola 5100 series, for the same
reason (2300 series non-availability.) We, too, are waiting for the
BSP. And would/will be interested to share the experience.

Up to now we have been using exclusively MVME2306 ioc's which have 
served us quite well, thanks to lots of support from the community 
(Andrew Johnson & many others.) The problems that we have had have 
mostly been due to interrupt handling (which is different from 68K and 
not all subroutines for 68K are implemented in the 230x BSP) and some 
cross-compiler related issues (alignment, etc.) These are more related 
to PPC architecture than the board itself, however. I do not have
any experience with other PPC boards.

Timo

Matthias Clausen wrote:

> At DESY we purchased the 5100-0133 board - since the 2300 series is not
> available any more.
> Waiting for the vxWorks BSP we got no experience yet.
> Would be interesting to share experience with others...
>
>
> "David H. Thompson" wrote:
>
>
> > At SNS we are planning to use the MVME2101 for the majority of our IOCs.  We
> > have one 2112 but Motorola tells us that the 2112 board is being
> > end-of-lifed.  Since we have not yet bought most of the IOCs, we are looking
> > at a board in the 5100 family. We have a 5110-2143 board in for eval.  This
> > board is somewhat more expensive than the 2101 but is also faster, 400MHz
> > vs. 200MHz. We think, from talking to our rep, that the 2101 will be
> > Motorola's low end board for at least the time frame that we will be buying
> > IOC boards.  We are watching the situation day to day as we plan to populate
> > the crates down the accelerator.
> >
> >
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: J. Frederick Bartlett (bartlett@fnal.gov)
> > > [mailto:bartlett@d0mino.fnal.gov]
> > > Sent: Thursday, September 19, 2002 3:16 PM
> > > To: Dennis Armstrong
> > > Cc: tech-talk@aps.anl.gov; bartlett@d0mino.fnal.gov
> > > Subject: Re: Recommendations for Power PC VME cards
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > > We are considering an upgrade to our systems to use the Power PC range
> > > > of VME CPU cards .  So the  question is  which VME CPU cards do EPICS
> > > > users  use?
> > > > Which are most compatible with the EPICS software?
> > > >
> > > > thanks for the replies
> > > >
> > > > regards
> > > Dennis,
> > >
> > >  The Fermilab D0 experiment successfully uses MVME2301, MVME2304, and
> > > MVME2604 processor boards -- we have ~100 PPC processors in the D0
> > > control system. Depending upon your application, there may be other
> > > MVME-series PPC boards that would better suit your purposes (i.e. a
> > > better performance/price ratio). Keep in mind that these boards can
> > > not be field-upgraded to add memory; so, when you estimate your memory
> > > requirements, allow for sufficient expansion -- EPICS data structures
> > > tend to be large.  I usually purchase boards with at least twice the
> > > memory that I estimate will be initially required.
> > >
> > >  We also have MVME162 processors (M68K family) and the same C and C++
> > > source code builds for both processor families (with one or two
> > > conditional sections).
> > >
> > >                                              Fritz Bartlett


--
Timo Korhonen  PSI (Paul Scherrer Institut)
               CH-5232 Villigen PSI
               tel + 41- 56 3103262  fax + 41 - 56 310 3383
e-mail: 
       timo.korhonen@psi.ch