Save Scening with AAA

[downix]

@JJ
Untrue, I can name 4 people with access to the designs.  I can even name 2 with access to the AAA and Hombre designs.  The issue is IP rights to these designs, and Amiga's unwillingness to license them to 3rd parties.

[downix]

@Athiest

Of course there are.  AGA and even AAA could be put into FPGA quite easily nowadays and not got an arm and a leg.  I've got a trio of Xilinx FPGA's sitting here emulating components of my own chipset (which is larger than AAA, would need larger FPGA's than I have today in order to impliment fully) so I know that they can get the speed needed if you're willing to pay for it.

A smarter idea, of course, is to mask-form a chip using ASIC techniques.  Get the low volume production cost savings of FPGA, but the lower cost per-chip of a custom chip.

[jdiffend]

I know a lot of you want a new AGA or AAA chipset but it just doesn't make sense and isn't cost effective.
Even if there were AGA or AAA modified to run faster they couldn't compare to a modern graphics chip.  Nothing even supports AAA, not even the current OS!!!  Why in the heck would you want that?

Who cares if emulation doesn't run all the old games!  There are only a handfull that I'd still play anyway and many of them already work on UAE.  And UAE will continue to improve.  Sorry, nastalgia isn't a good enough reason to want AGA IMHO.  

There are fairly fast (performance like GForce II) 3D graphics chips with built in featurs that stomp on those old chipsets (Transform & Lighting, DVD support...) going for $15 in quantity.  The brand new 3D chips should be under $50 by 2005 and they render photo realistic images in real time!

And while I'm at it... sound?  Uh, CD quality 24 bit 3D 6.1 channel sound chip around $15.

It's $30 for near state of the art vs Jurassic Park... sorry but dinasaurs are dead and buried and should only be seen in a museum.

[minator]

The average cost of doing a full custom design with the latest technology is on average $14 million IIRC (read it on EETimes a while back).

At 0.13um the mask alone costs $2 million and you need some *very* expensive development tools and simulators because at that price you have to get it right first time.

Very few companies are now developing custom chips at this level and the ones left are dropping out like flies.  Unless you know you are going to sell millions of them (think CPUs), or make a huge profit on each one (think high end graphics chips) there is simply no point.

A factory (FAB) to make these things in will run you about $2 Billion (Commodore used to have it's own FAB).

FPGAs are a much lower cost route and these days and if implemented I would guess every bit as fast - if not faster - than the real AAA.


If you want AAA get an FPGA, read up on VHDL or Verilog and get coding :-)

[downix]

A fab will run you about $250 million for one "good enough" for what we're talking about here.

And the cost for a mask is not $2 million.  That's the cost of a whole assembly.  The mask itself is only $400k or so.

But, let's address the situation.  We don't *need* 0.13u processes here.  Hell, the Alpha was kicking everyones posterior and taking names using a process 4 years old.... namely dirt-cheap to get chips made at.  Let's use 0.18u or even 0.20u here, suddenly the cost for a whole assembly is under $150k.

You're suddenly in a price-affordable range and the technology is in-reach of the big-boys.

[Jose]

Don't have time to be here now but I just remembered something. AInc. might not even have the rights to AAA anymore! Remember that they didn't bought all IP.  :-(

Another thing. I'm not into electronics at all, but fFrom what I've read the thing would be too costy, and unperformant when compared to todays standards. It'd be only for having those features like screendragging, multiple screens at different resolutions, and of course for the sceners.


As for the price  it'd be only a matter of estimating the price cost,  then have preorders made (BUT ONLY ACTIVE WHEN THE THING WAS ACTUALLY DONE!). When enouph people preordered some company could do it if they wanted to take the risk. .
There are some Amiga users that would like to see it happening.

[downix]

Well, let's go into detail here, if you'd like Jose:

roughly 2.5 million transistors total for the design as/is.  Design done in a HDL called "M", no longer in major use it seems.  However, Mentor has conversion tools to render these to Verilog in short order, so $120k for the tools needed.

now, 2.5 million transistors comes down to roughly 500k gates, depending on register handling, any SRAM included, etc, so 500k is a good estimate.  half of the gates are in 1 chip, Andrew.  The other half are split among the remaining 3 chips.  Now, need to double 2 of the chips, to get the 64-bit configuration.

So, we need a single 250k gate FPGA's and 5 50k gate FPGA's.  

Altera has several FPGA's that fit the bill.  For the 5 smaller ones, I'd recommend Flex10k's.  For Andrea, use an Apex20KC, and throw in a DDR-RAM or sDRAM controller to replace the legacy model as well as a PCI bridge over the off-chip logic that's there now, effectively for free.  

Total cost for the chips in bulk:  $18.

[alx]

How much is "bulk"?

[downix]

@alx

Sorry about that, I tend to forget not everyone knows my habits.

I always go on price for 1000 units when pricing out any solution.  if I price it out differently, I always let people know.

[alx]

Wow :-o

Surely you're not saying that if A inc sold 1000 custom chipsets at $18 each then they would cover costs?  If that was the case (and even if it was for 10000 or more units at $100), they could put them on PCI cards and sell them for use in the A1 or PCs (for emulators etc).  Now that would be good!

[Jose]

With the price current classic Amiga hardware sells 18$ is ridiculously nothing. I bet some people would give more than 100$ for it.

But I remember AAA wasn't finished yet.
If it was finished and you're completely sure of what you're saying this could really happen. I'd buy it. At this price many people would buy it for nostalgia alone.
Is EVERTHING included in the estimation you made? Like you forgot the D/A converters or something?

[downix]

Jose wrote:
With the price current classic Amiga hardware sells 18$ is ridiculously nothing. I bet some people would give more than 100$ for it.

But I remember AAA wasn't finished yet.
If it was finished and you're completely sure of what you're saying this could really happen. I'd buy it. At this price many people would buy it for nostalgia alone.
Is EVERTHING included in the estimation you made? Like you forgot the D/A converters or something?

Also, that $18 was for just the chips.  I also mentioned the cost of the software needed at just under $200k.  As for work left, nobody can be sure how much is left to do so it is impossible to estimate.  Dave Haynie claims one value, but he's also not a chip designer.  

Also, I was including the DAC's and PLD's needed, as with modern technology in FPGA's you'd no longer need these supprting chips.