On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 12:13:35PM -0400, Jon Fraser wrote: > I think people that have them, have had them for a while. > > You can still get, I believe, the bcm91125 and bcm91250. > http://www.broadcom.com/products/Data-Telecom-Networks/Communications-Processors/BCM91125E > How you actually order one, I don't know. I assume you have to go to a > distributor. The usual story seems to be that people either turn pale when they hear price on the order of $5,000 for a new board. Or they don't hear back at all because a sole Linux hacker doesn't sound like he's going to buy a few thousand chips every quarter. Adjust the numbers a little (some go as high as $35,000 a board!) and they apply to virtually every company. > When I got a 1480 a year ago, it had to be built and took about 3 > months. The internal transfer cost was very high. So I really don't > think they are available anymore. BUT, I don't work for that group. > > Are people just looking for eval type boards with MIPS cpus? A clear yes. In particular the Swarm and Big Sur boards which aside of graphics are as close to an workstation or server board, are highly sought after as indicated by usually high 2nd hand prices on ebay. Even though far from new these boards are the backbone of the native compile farms of several Linux distributions including Debian and the native testing by various commercial and non-commercial software developers including myself. Aside of mostly SGI surplus workstations the Sibyte boards are clearly the most popular among those who somehow managed to get hold of them. What this all boils down is that these aging platforms want a replacement and a more accessible source. But for the time being they are still the best for many developers. Ralf
