Genesi Efika PPC

The Efika boots Open Firmware rather than a PC BIOS, and then carries an x86 BIOS emulation layer anyway, there so a stock AGP or PCI graphics card — the kind that expects an x86 BIOS to initialise it — lights up regardless. A PowerPC board that impersonates a PC for exactly as long as it takes to bring up a video card.

Genesi sold it for $99. The heart is a Freescale (now NXP) MPC5200B: a 400 MHz Power Architecture part whose e300 core descends from the old 603e. Around that sit 128 MB of DDR, a 44-pin notebook IDE connector, 10/100 Ethernet, two USB 1.1 ports, a 3.3 V PCI slot, and an optional AGP slot on a right-angle riser. The whole board measures 118 by 153 mm. Give it a graphics card and a notebook drive and it will run Linux (Gentoo, Debian, openSUSE, Ubuntu, CRUX PPC) or MorphOS.

Genesi (Genesi USA Inc., San Antonio) announced the end of the 5200B on 10 September 2007. The same press release named a successor built around the MPC5121e, still Power Architecture. That successor never arrived as described. The board that shipped in 2009 under the Efika MX name used an ARM i.MX515 instead. The 5200B stayed available through resellers for a while after the announcement, at that same $99.

This page leans on archived copies because the vendor is closing. Genesi’s own site now states it shut down Genesi USA Inc. as a Nevada C corporation at the end of January 2026, and most of the site’s links are disabled — only Projects, Support, and Contact still resolve. The older genesi-usa.com domain still forwards to the current site over plain HTTP, but reach it over HTTPS and it answers with a certificate for power2people.org: the handshake completes but the name does not match, so a browser gives up before the redirect ever runs. The specification pages that document this board sit on the site of a company that has already wound down. That is why the resources below carry archive links, and why raw copies of the vendor pages are held in the research manifest.

This one did not come off a secondhand marketplace. I bought it new from Directron, once in 2020 and again in 2022, and it is no longer on sale there. There is a small symmetry in that. When Genesi announced the end of the 5200B in 2007, the discontinuation notice named Directron as the US reseller that would keep the board in stock while a successor was developed. So it reached me new, from the reseller Genesi itself pointed at, thirteen and fifteen years after the board was declared dead.

What I have run on it is modest. Linux, whatever I could get working, which turned out to be an old version of Debian. The ambition is larger than that. I want to find out whether I can build a new Linux distribution that supports the board, using the rest of the lab to do it — a POWER9 machine, a Dell R740, a SPARC box — to compile a kernel and a toolchain for every architecture I keep here. That is probably the most challenging part of owning all this hardware, and it is the reason the release engineering platform exists. It is a task for later.

The board revision, whether the MS-CAN solder pads are populated on this particular unit, and a clear photo of it are all still to be documented.

Sources: Genesi’s own EfikaPPC specifications and product pages and its 2007 discontinuation press release, all part of the Genesi Network and so counted as a single source; the independent bplan GmbH reseller pages; the community-written Efika Book v1.5 (Geoffrey Charra, July 2007); the MPC5200B data sheet (NXP); and the Wikipedia Efika article. The specifications, and a note on the claims I could not verify, are on the specifications page.