Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Kate Feng <[email protected]> · Thu, 06 Nov 2003 08:07:39 -0500

"Chestnut, Ronald P." wrote:

> Taking Mark River's suggestion, we are now looking at getting
> another 2700 PPC, since we support that too.
> Motorola says the model -3441 (which we have here) is being replaced
> by the -3461. So again I ask if anyone has used the -3461 and if it
> is totally compatible with the -3441.

I understand you are looking for something compatible to your old
system to save time. Maybe you can ask Motorola what the difference
is between the two models in terms of specification. The MVME2306 board
we used  at NSLS was replaced by the MVME2304-0141 board, which is also
discontinued about one month ago. The only difference between the
two is that the memory size is increased from 32M bytes to 512M bytes.
Without rebuilding the vxWorks image, we  added the -mlongcall
option  to recompile the EPICS base and  application for the new
board and it works. I hope this helps.

> The last MVME-177 we ordered (SLAC Controls) were model 177P-55SE
> and around $8995.
> The currently offered model is the MVME-177PA-67SE, for about $5995.
> See: http://mcg.motorola.com/us/ds/pdf/ds0048.pdf

For your case, I understand you have time concern. However,
I  am really shocked at the price of the  MVME-177. Maybe I did
not spend enough time to learn about the board. I do not see any
obvious reason why the price is nearly twice of the VME5500
board. We  paid  $2.9K for the MVME5500, which is hard for us not
to choose it as a standard board considering its high performance,
long roadmap, and competative price, as compared with other
existing boards. It seems to be a sensible investment
protection for us.  See
http://sns.bnl.gov/documents/vme/MVME5500.pdf  and
http://mcg.motorola.com/cfm/templates/general.cfm?PageID=2040

The challenge to the MVME5500 board is that  presently it only has
supports  from vxWorks and Linux, but not EPICS and RTEMS.
Well, hardware can not be changed, but software can be
developed.  We  bought some  MVME2304-0141  boards as a spare so that
we have enough time to develop software for the MVME5500.

Cheers,
Kate

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System