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BeBox Hardware Information
The obvious places to start for BeBox hardware information are the Datasheet and Technical Specification provided by Be themselves. Note that most of the datasheets provided here are in Adobe Acrobat PDF documents. I believe that you may use recent versions of GhostScript to print and view these under UNIX-like operating systems. Or if you use Windows, there is a free Adobe Acrobat Viewer available. Some of these links came from Kazuki Sakamoto's BeBox hardware pages. I am very grateful to him for providing them.
I am also extremely grateful to Dominic Giampaolo for providing me with details about the locations of the various devices on the ISA bus, and several other details that no-one outside of Be has ever really needed to know.
Component | Details and links |
Motorola PowerPC 603e |
Two of these microprocessors provide the processing punch of the BeBox. Motorola have a ton on information on their PowerPC 603e pages. Note that the Dual603-66 used a pair of 66Mhz PowerPC 603 chips, whilst the Dual603-133 used a pair of 133Mhz PowerPC 603e chips. The main difference (other than clock rate) is that the 603e has twice the L1 instruction and data caches. There is no L2 cache on the BeBox. |
Motorola MPC105 |
The MPC105 provides a bridge between the PowerPC 603 processors and the PCI bus. It also acts as the memory controller, and arbitrates the processor bus (but not the PCI bus). There is a lot of information on Motorola's MPC105 pages. The PCI bus runs at 33Mhz in both the Dual603-66 and the Dual603-133. The MPC105 supports both DRAM and SDRAM, but SDRAM is not available as SIMMs so one cannot use it in the BeBox. The MPC105 supports either two processors or one processor and a level 2 cache. Be made a choice to go with two processors and sacrifice the L2 cache, since the performance gain of a second MPU far outweighs the performance gains of even a very large L2 cache. The MPC105 supports two address maps; the BeBox uses Address Map A. The MPC105 is device number 0 on the PCI bus. |
Intel 82378 |
The 82378 is the System I/O component in the BeBox. It provides the PCI to ISA bridge and bus master arbitration on the PCI bus. Information on this PCIset may be found on Intel's 82378 pages. This chip also integrates many other devices: a seven channel DMA controller, two 82C59 interrupt controllers, an 8254 timer/counter, a BIOS timer, Intel SMM power management support, and logic for NMI generation. In addition, the SIO and SIO.A each support a total of six PCI Masters, and four PCI interrupts. Decode is provided for peripheral devices such as the front panel LEDs on the BeBox, the real time clock, keyboard/mouse controller, floppy controller, two serial ports, one parallel port, and IDE hard disk drive. (Note that these devices are contained in the 82091AA). This device appears as device number 11 on the PCI bus. |
Intel 82091AA |
The 82091AA is the Super I/O component in the BeBox; an integrated I/O solution containing a floppy disk controller, 2 serial ports, a multi-function parallel port, an IDE interface, and a game port on a single chip. Intel has a datasheet on their 82091AA pages and also a page of Questions and Answers. This device appears to live on the ISA bus. DMA channel 2 in the BeBox is allocated to the floppy drive, DMA 3 to the parallel port, and DMA 5 to the IDE controller. The 82091AA provides the BeBox parallel port (at ISA 0x378), the first two serial ports (at ISA 0x3f8 and 0x2f8 - both 16550 compatible) and the IDE controller. |
Symbios 53C810 |
The NCR 53C810 is an 8bit Fast SCSI controller that connects without any additional glue logic to the BeBox's PCI bus. There is a datasheet for the more recent 53C810A, but I cannot seem to find one for the vanilla 53C810. Does anyone have a link to one? The 53C810 supports bus mastering and is connected to both the internal and external SCSI 2 ports on the BeBox. The 53C810 is device number 12 on the PCI bus. |
Cirrus Logic CS4231 |
The CS4231 is the multimedia audio CODEC that provides the BeBox digital audio system. It supports simultaneous recording and playback at 48Khz in 16 bit stereo. There is a datasheet available here. DMA channel 6 in the BeBox is allocated to Audio capture, and DMA channel 7 is allocated to playback. It uses interrupt 14 on the Be interrupt controller, and is at 0x830 on the ISA bus. |
Texas Instruments TI16C554 |
The TI16C554 provides four serial ports. All of these are 16550 compatible. Two of these are the third and fourth serial ports, located at ISA 0x380 and 0x388. The other two make up the two MIDI ports (two in, two out for a total of four connectors) and are clocked at a different rate, compatible with MIDI. They are located at ISA 0x3A0 and 0x3A8. There is a comprehensive datasheet here. |
Benchmarq bq3285 |
The bq3285 Real-Time Clock lives on the ISA bus at 0x70, and is connected to that wee battery on your motherboard (it's a CR2025, if you ever need to replace it). It provides a real time clock and calendar to the BeBox, as well as 128 bytes of nonvolatile storage (14 bytes of this is used for storing the time and date, however). It can also produce a programmable square wave output, and three individually maskable interrupt event flags at periodic rates from 122µs to 500ms. It stores only a 100 year calendar, so I'm not sure how year 2000 compliant it is (Most RTCs have a "Century" field in the NV storage, don't they?). One may download a datasheet from Texas Instruments' bq3285 pages. Be have requested that we don't use the 64 bytes immediately following the 14 used for date/time, otherwise BeOS and BeLinux may conflict with each other. So guys, bytes 0-13 are for the RTC, 14-77 are for Be, and 78-113 are free for us to use. |
Still to be done |
I've still got a few things to write up: |
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© 2002 William R Sowerbutts <will@sowerbutts.com>
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Be is a registered trademark, and BeOS, BeBox, BeWare, GeekPort, the Be logo and the BeOS logo are trademarks of Be, Inc. All other trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. Yadda yadda yadda.