Sam460ex is a line of modular

motherboard A motherboard, also called a mainboard, a system board, a logic board, and informally a mobo (see #Nomenclature, "Nomenclature" section), is the main printed circuit board (PCB) in general-purpose computers and other expandable systems. It ho ...

s produced by the Italian company

ACube Systems Srl ACube Systems Srl is a company that started in January 2007 from the synergy of the Italian companies Alternative Holding Group Srl, Soft3 and Virtual Works. The three companies have been engaged in the areas of sale, distribution and engineering ...

. The machine was released in October 2010 and can run

AmigaOS 4 AmigaOS 4 (abbreviated as OS4 or AOS4) is a line of Amiga operating systems which runs on PowerPC microprocessors. It is mainly based on AmigaOS 3.1 source code developed by Commodore International, Commodore, and partially on version 3.9 develop ...

MorphOS MorphOS is an AmigaOS-like operating system designed for Power and PowerPC based computers. The core, based on the Quark microkernel, is proprietary, although several libraries and other parts are open source, such as the Ambient desktop. The p ...

AROS AROS Research Operating System (AROS, pronounced "AR-OS") is a free and open-source multi media centric implementation of the AmigaOS 3.1 application programming interface (API) which is designed to be portable and flexible. , ports are availab ...

or Debian GNU/Linux (CruxPPC at first, and then Debian Squeeze or Ubuntu ). The Sam460ex made its debut at the

Vintage Computer Festival The Vintage Computer Festival (VCF) is an international event celebrating the history of computing. It is held annually in various locations around the United States and various countries internationally. It was founded by Sellam Ismail in 1997 ...

Bletchley Park Bletchley Park is an English country house and Bletchley Park estate, estate in Bletchley, Milton Keynes (Buckinghamshire), that became the principal centre of Allies of World War II, Allied World War II cryptography, code-breaking during the S ...

in the UK on 19 June 2010, where it was demonstrated to the public running AmigaOS 4.1 along with the Timberwolf web browser, a port of the

Mozilla Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements curren ...

for the AmigaOS 4. Its hardware features were also showcased, with its SIM card slot and aerial, its ability to boot AmigaOS from SD card. In September 2011, Acube Systems introduced AmigaOne 500 based on Sam460ex mainboard.

Versions

Sam460ex

FlexATX FlexATX is a motherboard form factor derived from ATX. The specification was released in 1999 by Intel as an addendum to the microATX specification. It uses a subset of the motherboard mounting holes required for microATX and the same I/O pla ...

form factor (21.6 × 17 cm) * AMCC 460ex SoC – passively cooled PowerPC 440 core up to 1.15 GHz and including a double precision

floating point unit A floating-point unit (FPU), numeric processing unit (NPU), colloquially math coprocessor, is a part of a computer system specially designed to carry out operations on floating-point numbers. Typical operations are addition, subtraction, multipli ...

(FPU) * Cache L1/L2: 32KB/256KB * max 2 GB

DDR2 SDRAM Double Data Rate 2 Synchronous Dynamic Random-Access Memory (DDR2 SDRAM) is a double data rate (DDR) synchronous dynamic random-access memory (SDRAM) interface. It is a JEDEC standard (JESD79-2); first published in September 2003. DDR2 succeed ...

– 200-pin SODIMM up to 533 MHz *

Silicon Motion Silicon Motion Technology Corporation, stylized as SiliconMotion, is an American-Taiwanese company involved in developing NAND flash controller integrated circuits (ICs) for solid-state storage devices. The company has claimed to have supplied ...

SM502 embedded MoC (audio/video) max 64MB video memory * Audio 5.1 Realtek ALC655 codec *

PCI-express PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe, is a high-speed standard used to connect hardware components inside computers. It is designed to replace older expansion bus standards such as PCI, PC ...

4× lanes slot (v1.1, 16× mechanical connector) * PCI-express 1× lane slot (mutually exclusive with the SATA2 port) * PCI slot, 32 bit, 66/33 MHz, 3.3V * 1× SATA2 port (mutually exclusive with the PCI-e 1× slot) * 6× USB2 EHCI/OHCI ports * 2× 10/100/1000 Ethernet ports * SD card reader * Serial port The SATA2 port and the PCI-e 1× slot are mutually exclusive, only one of them can be used at a time.

Sam460ex Lite

The specifications are the same as for the Sam460ex, except for: * AMCC 460ex SoC clocked at 1 GHz * Cache L1/L2: 32KB/256KB * 512 MB DDR2 RAM

Sam460cr

The specifications are the same as for the Sam460ex, except for:
Absence of * Silicon Motion SM502 embedded MoC * Audio 5.1 Realtek ALC655 codec * Mutually exclusive 1× SATA2 port Users are expected to use graphics, sound and Sata interface cards with this model.

Reception

''Amiga Power'' magazine saw PCIe expansion for modern graphics cards, silent fan-less CPU operation, plenty of RAM and USB 2.0 as main advantages of the new Sam460ex board. However, the same review mentioned among weak points CPU speed, problems with audio on some motherboards and lack of 3D drivers for Radeon HD cards under AmigaOS. Reviewing AmigaOne 500, ''Amiga Future'' magazine highlighted supplied 2 GB RAM and overall system performance comparable to older Pegasos II computer, but criticized weak built in graphics chip recommending customers to buy dedicated graphics card.

References

External links

Sam4x0 Home page

ACube Systems Srl
Motherboard PowerPC mainboards Amiga {{compu-hardware-stub