TG68 Accelerator?

[countzero]

The drawback: the Altera DE2 board costs more than 495 USD alone, imagine if you want to create a market for that product!!!

http://www.altera.com/education/univ/materials/boards/unv-de2-board.html

I believe the OP was not talking about using a development board, but a custom designed one to fit in a miggy. The price of a Cyclone 2 chip alone is not that much (definitely cheaper than a second hand 68060 these days).

The only drawback here is that Cyclone 2 is a 3.3v chip, and it may require some work to interface it to the Amiga bus. I wonder if the DE2 Tobias used is 5v tolerant ?

[Dr_Righteous]

Cyclone 2 comes in either BGA or TQFP package. While TQFP is possible, soldering a BGA component to a board is beyond most home users skills, and requires a professional hot air working station.

Naa, just a good hot air gun. As much as my hands shake the BGA would be easier than the rest of the soldering. LOL!

[jagoche]

I assume you are talking about something like this, right?

http://www.a1k.org/forum/showthread.php?t=20223

A FPGA board based on TG68 of TobiFlex running in a A500 seems to be on pair with a 030 at 25 Mhz.

[Dr_Righteous]

Smell the rubber? LOL! Well not quite the punch I was hoping for my A4K, but a hefty improvement over any other stock machine. The ability to add RAM would be most helpful, and again it could be updated with a better core down the road.

[Gulliver]

@countzero
Ah, okay then, those chips do have a nice price!

[Dr_Righteous]

Hmm, there's a little more hope in the Cyclone III's. Twice the clock speed.

[edit] OMG how about a Virtex-5 FXT? Built in 440 PPC! [/edit]

[RedskullDC]

Hi Countzero,

I wonder if the DE2 Tobias used is 5v tolerant ?

DE2 (and the DE2/70) boards have clamp diodes on the GPIO connectors which give some measure of protection against 5V.

The more inputs you have which are driving over 3.3V however, will tend to raise the core voltage on the FPGA.

Not normally a problem for Address/data lines which are actively driven by buffer chips.

Not so for Active low signals on the AMIGA bus, which will typically have pull-up resitors to 5V.  More of these you have, FPGA core voltage will drift higher.
Over about 4V tends to permanently damage the the FPGA.
Plenty of references on Altera site/Cyclone datasheets to absolute maximum ratings.

DE1 board has no clamp diodes. If you were to try hooking the DE1 GPIO connectors straight to the Amiga bus
like:
http://www.a1k.org/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=22915&d=1264849250
I supect you would fry it very quickly....

Red

[Dr_Righteous]

Could we not simply buffer the connections to the legacy bus with 5v tolerant buffers? Keep the accelerator 3.3v.

[billt]

I believe the OP was not talking about using a development board, but a custom designed one to fit in a miggy. The price of a Cyclone 2 chip alone is not that much (definitely cheaper than a second hand 68060 these days).

The only drawback here is that Cyclone 2 is a 3.3v chip, and it may require some work to interface it to the Amiga bus. I wonder if the DE2 Tobias used is 5v tolerant ?

Voltage level shifters wouldn't be a big problem to get 5V working.

Put an FPGA with a DIMM slot, mayeb an IDE or SCSI connetor, and you're ready to go. There's something I'd like to do that would be an FPGA on an accelerator card anyway, it would be interesting to allow it to do what I want as well as to act as a standalone TG68 or Natami CPU accelerator as well. Don't think that would add much more to things. Just a couple connectors and some peripheral IPs from OpenCores inside the FPGA. I liek the idea of fitting TG68 into their Wishbone bus, maybe the Coldfire/68K to Wishbone bridge would already allow that. Then it's plug and play with many of the other things there, just need OS drivers. And a different connector for what I'd like to do beyond this. I'd just add a particular connector and have everythign arranged so as not to interfere, a PCI connector treating the entire Amiga computer as a PCI device.

[billt]

OMG how about a http://www.toyotanation.com/forum/showthread.php?t=332738? Built in 440 PPC!

Very cool technically. But OMG those are over US$8000 each chip!
http://avnetexpress.avnet.com/store/em/EMController/Programmable-Logic/FPGA/_/N-100235?action=products&cat=1&catalogId=500201&cutTape=&hrf=www.avnet.com&inStock=&langId=-1&proto=&rohs=&storeId=500201&term=VIRTEX%2B5%2BFXT&topSellers=

[AJCopland]

There's something I'd like to do that would be an FPGA on an accelerator card anyway, it would be interesting to allow it to do what I want as well as to act as a standalone TG68 or Natami CPU accelerator as well.

Doooooo iiiiiiiit! You know the the hypno-toad would want you too

[Dr_Righteous]

Very cool technically. But OMG those are over US$8000 each chip!
http://avnetexpress.avnet.com/store/em/EMController/Programmable-Logic/FPGA/_/N-100235?action=products&cat=1&catalogId=500201&cutTape=&hrf=www.avnet.com&inStock=&langId=-1&proto=&rohs=&storeId=500201&term=VIRTEX%2B5%2BFXT&topSellers=

Well I wasn't thinking dual core. LOL! Still $1,500 tho. Maybe the price will come down with time

The Virtex-6 is pretty bad too. Owie. Spartan-6 it is!

[pepilolio]

No one has thought, that is possible to use faster PENTIUM processors running a simple cpu emulator, with plenty of memory and properly attached to the Amiga with some bus logic? It could be simple and cheaper than all those stuff, and changing the CPU Emulator in a ROM, we could "have" processors from 020 to 060 or PPC at high speed.
I know....intel outside, but it could be a chance. Imagine an amiga running a 060 at more than 2Ghz! Simply stunning!
680x0 emulators, can be found for FREE in the net and the rest, with some documentation ...

[kolla]

How do you expect the CPU fan of that pentium to fit inside the amiga?
Again, easier to just use UAE.

[sbeehre]

someone was trying this and there are pics of it in the gallery somewhere.... he had a PC motherboard hooked up to an amiga.

[Iggy]

Why hasn't someone updated the design of a combination 68060 and PPC accelerator board. 68060's are still available at a relatively low price and PPC chips that run several times what the original accelerator board's processor  ran at are available.
It seems this would be a lot cheaper than an FPGA.