Interview with Joe Palmer
BeOS Spotlight: Joe Palmer
By Oliver Thylmann - Tuesday, November 30th at 2:18pm
By Adnans: Can I overclock my BeBox? And if so, HOW?
JP: The 66 and 133 MHz 603s used in the BeBox were each at the top
of their speed range for their particular mask, so we never
tried overclocking them.
BeNews: Actually this has already been answered, partly, but there
seems to be some interest. Can you elaborate on this please. It
seems to be something you really like.
By Zer: What is your favorite anime TV show?
JP: Ranma 1/2 (Of course)
By Zaknafein: 1.) Who thought of the name "BeBox"?
JP: Well, The only thing I'm sure of is that it wasn't me. And in
fact, we have photographic evidence that it wasn't even anyone
at Be!
This Photo was taken in Japan by David Ramsey. He hadn't
noticed it at the time, but some months after we settled on
"BeBox" he was looking through his vacation photos, and there
it was.
Getting back to Be... The Hobbit / DSP machine had been called
the Be-1, and for a time we were calling the PPC machine the
Be-2, and sometimes the BeBox, and over time 'BeBox' just
stuck. Perhaps when BeNews interviews other Be old-timers,
this question can be laid to rest.
By Zaknafein: 2.) Who thought of having those funky LED CPU load meters on
the case?
JP: That may have been tossed around as well, but I think we can
safely blame Ramsey for that as well.
By Zaknafein: 3.) Who's idea was the geekport? In your opinion, what was the
best/most creative geekport gadget (if there were any)?
JP: That one I'm sure of. Jean Louis came up with the idea of an
experimentor's port for Geeks. The actual design task was
split; Larry did the ASIC on the motherboard, Guillaume did
verification and added some critical analog tweeks, and I did
the IO card design and layout.
By Zaknafein: We didn't see many gadgets inside Be, and that's as it should
be. The GeekPort(tm) was meant for one-off hardware hacks.
By Oliver: Can you fill us in a little more on your VideoS2 venture? How
far is this system along? Are you near production? What will it
let people do that was not possible (at that price) before?
JP: I'm finishing up the system board design, and things are taking
longer than I'd like (don't they always), but systems should
start to trickle out next spring.
I'm not publicly talking price yet, but my background is in
high-volume / low-cost designs... As for what it can do, think
HDTV. Think Uncompressed.
Oliver: As you are looking into supporting a lot of different operating
systems, will there be any performance differences depending on
the operating system that is used?
JP: Yes and no. The VS2 Box is basically a dual ported array, so
data streams can get to (or from) the disks without being
dragged through the host system. In that mode the host system
is only acting to 'turn the valves', so the host OS doesn't
really matter. But...
Passing pointers to play frames is easy, but the hard part of
Video is the Audio. The Video program is generally a single
stream of frames, (even if some of those frames have hours of
calculation invested in them) while the audio portion of the
program might be made up of many layers of location sound,
sound effects, and background music -- all at 5.1 channels.
It's clear that a low latency, high bandwidth OS is a perfect
fit for that task, and I only know of one OS that fits the
bill. ^_^
BeNews: He also saw a question about Be doing a new BeBox, so he'll
answer it on spec.
JP: Could Be do a new BeBox? Sure, in fact it's easier now --
assuming an x86 Box. Back when the BeBox was designed, there
were no merchant SMP motherboards. These days there is a whole
ecology of x86 motherboards (Or as Jean Louis would say, 'the
PC organ bank') from which to choose. These days designing a
custom motherboard is a little like designing your own hard
drives.
Should Be do a new BeBox? Well... It would put them in direct
competition with potential OEMs -- that's not a good thing.
BeNews: A lot of things are answered now but as the Interview might
have fallen through the cracks for some of you due to
Thanksgiving, Joseph Palmer will gladly take more questions.
Watch next Thursday for our Second BeNews Spotlight. Again,
leave your comments in the commenting system and we will pull
out the questions.
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