First Natami MX boards produced

[Hattig]

Great news.

Here's a useful annotated picture of the motherboard.

http://img35.imageshack.us/img35/7701/natamimx.jpg

[Hattig]

That's brilliant! When can I expect to see this in WinUAE? X^)

[EDIT]In all seriousness as a 68000 series machine it's be useful to see benchmarks or some way of judging performance comparatively to the A1200/A4000 and variants before deciding to buy one - a price point would be useful too. I somehow doubt this machine (with case) would be around a magic £200-£300 though (i.e. original Amiga price)... Might be cool to see it in a Walker case however, since it is really what the Walker should have been.[/EDIT]

From what I've read on the Natami forums, I believe that the N68050 will be running at over 100MHz in the FPGA, and that it will be quite fast per clock. However there aren't that many details out about this CPU, the Natami website still talks about the N68070 core that they will be doing in the future. There's very very little information on the N68050 core they have designed, apart from it being around 30,000 HCELLs in the FPGA.

[Hattig]

A RISC CPU isn't much use when you want a 68k Amiga though.

We will hopefully find out soon how well the N68050 performs. If it can do one instruction per clock at 133MHz, that's certainly not too bad.

However we need better benchmarking software on the Amiga than SysInfo!

[Hattig]

I wonder if any of the Natami devs will be trying to get AROS m68k running on the board

I believe this is one of the aims, so that they can ship it fully functional. There's certainly been talk about it on the Natami forum.

[Hattig]

Smerf, these FPGA Amiga implementations are clearly not for you. Can you stop rehashing these ancient arguments again in every thread. This isn't about creating a 2011 level computer to compete with a modern Mac or PC. There's the X1000 or Sam460 for that.

It's about creating a faster classic Amiga for those of us that happen to like the old classic Amiga, but want a bit more. NatAmi has said quite clearly that they're trying to create a hypothetical "late 90s" Amiga, with faster classic Amiga hardware rather than generic modern hardware (nice as it is). Those of us with classic computers as a hobby get quite excited at the thought, and as it's a hobby and our money to spend as we like, we don't care that it costs a lot - anything electronic custom-made in limited quantities will cost a lot!