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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: TobiFlex on September 29, 2007, 08:00:08 AM
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Firt time starts a full FPGA-Minimig on the DE2-Board without external CPU and PIC. I use SDRAM and a CPU-IP-CORE. The CPU-Core ist software but not timing kompatible. Thats why make some Demos Problems.
Viele Grüße
TobiFlex
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ok, can I buy one?
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Nice, which CPU Core do you use? Maybe the one from wfoerster's Suska project?
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Cool. Very interesting project!
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Can anyone translate this in to English?
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moto
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@TobiFlex:
If you make a daughterboard with a m68k cpu. You could compare the timing with the HDL "software" cpu.
@motorollin:
It's someone doing what I thought about from the beginning. Implement Minimig with a standard FPGA developer board. That will eliminate the whole manufacturing deal.
A DE-2 board is a FPGA developer board from Altera. Which doesn't provide any Linux version of their Place & Route software as Xilinx & Actel does.
CPU and PIC can be implemented with a HDL computer language. Eliminating the need for actual physical hardware.
http://users.ece.gatech.edu/~hamblen/DE2/
http://www.altera.com/education/univ/materials/boards/unv-dev-edu-boards.html
Cost: 495 USD
http://www.xess.com/prod035.php3
Xilinx Spartan-3 XC3S1000 FPGA with Linux Place & Route software for free.
Cost: 199 USD
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I think some day i can fit the Core also into the DE1 Board.
freqmax wrote:
@TobiFlex:
If you make a daughterboard with a m68k cpu. You could compare the timing with the HDL "software" cpu.
This is my way to verfiy the software combatibility. I have developed a CPU-Validator to compare the Hard- and the Soft-CPU. But it is very difficult that the timing will match. At this moment I see no chance.
This CPU-IP-Core has nothing to do with Wolfgangs Core. There are complete different. This is my own development.
Viele Grüße
TobiFlex
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What sort of resources does it require compared to the Minimig core? The comparing of Xilinx to Altera gate counts is almost impossible so I guess comparing the synthetic CPU size versus the Minimig core on your setup would give us a clue as to how big it actually is and the minimum size FPGA required to contain it all. I would imagine the whole thing is too large to fit in a XC3S500E.
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Minimig: 6261 LCs + 172060 memory bits
CPU-Core: 3805 LCs
SPIHost: 1938 LCs + 147456 memory bits
others(SDRAM+ Sound) : 300 LCs
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freqmax wrote:
It's someone doing what I thought about from the beginning. Implement Minimig with a standard FPGA developer board. That will eliminate the whole manufacturing deal.
Oh I see. Does that mean we can just order an FPGA dev board off the web, download the MiniMig "code" or whatever the FPGA equivalent is, and have a MiniMig?
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moto
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motorollin wrote:
Oh I see. Does that mean we can just order an FPGA dev board off the web, download the MiniMig "code" or whatever the FPGA equivalent is, and have a MiniMig?
No. You will need to write a board specific wrapper to MiniMig. That could be many weeks work.
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Sure, Dennis' MiniMig code will need to be modified to work on the FPGA dev board. But isn't that what TobiFlex is doing?
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moto
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freqmax wrote:
Implement Minimig with a standard FPGA developer board. That will eliminate the whole manufacturing deal.
A DE-2 board is a FPGA developer board from Altera. [...]
http://users.ece.gatech.edu/~hamblen/DE2/
http://www.altera.com/education/univ/materials/boards/unv-dev-edu-boards.html
Cost: 495 USD
http://www.xess.com/prod035.php3
Xilinx Spartan-3 XC3S1000 FPGA with Linux Place & Route software for free.
Cost: 199 USD
This is a few synaptic connections above my basic stamp 2 projects :-)
But I'm totally interested and would love to tinker with it. Thanks for the links!
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TobiFlex wrote:
Firt time starts a full FPGA-Minimig on the DE2-Board without external CPU and PIC. I use SDRAM and a CPU-IP-CORE. The CPU-Core ist software but not timing kompatible. Thats why make some Demos Problems.
Viele Grüße
TobiFlex
I just finished checking this option out. In a word, can't be done. The EP2C35F672-C6 FPGA it utilizes only has 32,000 gates. The MiniMig's FPGA is 400,000 and is 80% utilized. In short, the chipset alone won't fit into the design.
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Well apart from the question can it be done or not, has anyone looked at the priecetag ? Sheesh 495 $ !!! :-o
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downix wrote:
I just finished checking this option out. In a word, can't be done. The EP2C35F672-C6 FPGA it utilizes only has 32,000 gates. The MiniMig's FPGA is 400,000 and is 80% utilized. In short, the chipset alone won't fit into the design.
You want to annoy me. Right? Check it again and figure out your error.
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@downix
The EP2C35 FPGA on the DE2 has 32,000 LE's (CLB) and 4Mbyte RAM!!
The XC3S400 used on the original minimig board has 896 LE's and 288Kbyte RAM!
Which one do you think is better?
Read before posting ;-)
@Tobiflex
How did you manage to interface to SDRAM?? I guess you had to implement a FIFO with some sort of prefetch logic? Or clock it many times faster than the design. I think the reason Dennis used SRAM was to overcome the problems with the bursty nature of SDR SDRAM.
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If someone mass manufacture Application Specific IC (ASIC) based on this FPGA CPU + modified Minimig, will there be a legal problem with Freescale?
(ie: patent/copyright infringement of 68K design)
>Cost US$ 495.
Is it possible to lower the cost using ASIC / Structured ASIC?
What is the minimum volume?
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Hi TobiFlex,
Great work you are doing much appreciated.
Could your design be used on the Trex prototype board? Cause they are like US $150
http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?Language=English&CategoryNo=39&No=14&Revision=018&PartNo=1
http://www.symbos.de/trex.htm
24Mhz Amstrad CPC design core!
Oh sorry you're using the DE2 board must have a bigger fpga my bad. Became too excited there :oops:
John
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Video output isnt suitable for Amiga
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oic that too thanks Alexh
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It's only 4-bit aka 16 colours, you'd need 12-bit (4096) colours for OCS/ECS and 24-bit for AGA
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alexh wrote:
It's only 4-bit aka 16 colours, you'd need 12-bit (4096) colours for OCS/ECS and 24-bit for AGA
Thats not true.
The TREX-C1 Board and and the DE1 Board from Treasic use 4-bit per Color (4096). The DE2 Board use 8-bit per Color.
The TREX-C1 Board is to small for the Minimig. The DE2 Board is to expensive for the most people but its very nice for debugging the Core.
My goal is to use the DE1 Board for the Minimig. It cost 150$. But I must rewrite the SPIhost to use exteral RAM.
http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?Language=English&CategoryNo=39&No=83
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alexh wrote:
@downix
The EP2C35 FPGA on the DE2 has 32,000 LE's (CLB) and 4Mbyte RAM!!
The XC3S400 used on the original minimig board has 896 LE's and 288Kbyte RAM!
Which one do you think is better?
Read before posting ;-)
I did read, just read the wrong column. Sorry for that, but it did bring the topic back to life. 8)
But I still was unaware that there was a freely available 68000 core available out there. If so, perfect system I'd have to say.
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TobiFlex, a working soft 68K cpu sounds great.
I hope that you will share some of your development work with the rest of us. Keep up the good work !
:-)
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Hi Tobiflex,
This is excellent news! This is just what I was hoping for by releasing the sources, active development to make Mimimig a better design. I have been seriously looking at the Trex C1 as an "easy" platform for the Minimig, but I can see why the DE1 would be better. Keep up the good work and keep us posted!
Dennis
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Hi Dennis,
I would like to make the source code also open source some day.
Viele Grüße
TobiFlex
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Great work!! Looking forward for more updates on this project!
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TobiFlex wrote:
The TREX-C1 Board and and the DE1 Board from Treasic use 4-bit per Color (4096). The DE2 Board use 8-bit per Color.
The TREX-C1 Board is to small for the Minimig. The DE2 Board is to expensive for the most people but its very nice for debugging the Core.
My goal is to use the DE1 Board for the Minimig. It cost 150$. But I must rewrite the SPIhost to use exteral RAM.
Did you check out the digilent boards nexus and nexus2 ?
www.digilentinc.com
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TobiFlex wrote:
Hi Dennis,
I would like to make the source code also open source some day.
Viele Grüße
TobiFlex
Any idea when ?
Grüsse zurück
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What about XtremeData FPGA plug into the CPU socket of AMD Opteron Motherboard?
Is it possible to put Tobiflex design on this device?
http://www.xtremedatainc.com/xd1000_brief.html
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asian1 wrote:
What about XtremeData FPGA plug into the CPU socket of AMD Opteron Motherboard?
Is it possible to put Tobiflex design on this device?
http://www.xtremedatainc.com/xd1000_brief.html
:-o holy carp, sanctified goldfish, and theologically inclined koi, are you thinking what I'm thinking, that could be the next amiga hardware platform. Dual opteron board, dual core in the one socket and that FPGA in the other, mastering the system, making a kickstart emulating bootloader, emulating legacy chipsets and CPUs, pawning off work to one of the other cores, also having AROS native mode, but with hardware functions for up to date graphics and sound capabilities i.e. mastering and scheduling the graphics, sound and I/O such that it behaves like a next-gen amiga, you know, format a disk, play music, throw around graphics all without loading the "CPU". CPU could be a "virtual CPU" run on the opteron cores, such that code is x86-64 or 68K independant, enabling migration of "amiga" to other architectures in future. This virtual CPU would be designed for very easy and fast "emulation" on current and future hardware, such that binaries for it would be near the native speed of x86-64 compiled binaries....
Okay sorry, got excited :-D
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RW222 wrote:
asian1 wrote:
What about XtremeData FPGA plug into the CPU socket of AMD Opteron Motherboard?
Is it possible to put Tobiflex design on this device?
http://www.xtremedatainc.com/xd1000_brief.html
:-o holy carp, sanctified goldfish, and theologically inclined koi, are you thinking what I'm thinking, that could be the next amiga hardware platform. Dual opteron board, dual core in the one socket and that FPGA in the other, mastering the system, making a kickstart emulating bootloader, emulating legacy chipsets and CPUs, pawning off work to one of the other cores, also having AROS native mode, but with hardware functions for up to date graphics and sound capabilities i.e. mastering and scheduling the graphics, sound and I/O such that it behaves like a next-gen amiga, you know, format a disk, play music, throw around graphics all without loading the "CPU". CPU could be a "virtual CPU" run on the opteron cores, such that code is x86-64 or 68K independant, enabling migration of "amiga" to other architectures in future. This virtual CPU would be designed for very easy and fast "emulation" on current and future hardware, such that binaries for it would be near the native speed of x86-64 compiled binaries....
Okay sorry, got excited :-D
All x86-64 CPU's are so powerfull you may as well just run the whole Chipset and 68K CPU emulation on the CPU... using UAE. Quicker, simpler, more compatible, cheaper.
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Falling down the stairs is quicker and simpler than going to the moon, in both instances you have a brief period of weightlessness, get knocked around by powerful forces and see stars on the way, but one's an achievement and one isn't. May as well say that about minimig too, a fine insult to the pioneers.
I get your point in reminding me of that, but really, it does nothing to advance the state of the art. 68K or PPC code running emulated on an x86-64 isn't gonna be as fast as x86-64 native code. A dual core x86-64 running with hardware enhanced pre-emptive multitasking might despite losing 5% to the virtual CPU code, be able to be significantly faster in some tasks than a dual core x86-64 running the same tasks on linux or vista. A new Amiga hardware platform might seek to be able to do realtime effects, mixing and processing at high HDTV resolutions up to cinematic quality. It's got the genetics for the job, the amount of raw x86 power required to do with x86 code what an A4000 could do with video is quite disparate, i.e. needing around 500Mhz machines, now emulating the capabilities of the A4000 with 68k code running over the top of x86 would need fairly high end x86 single cores, say 2Ghz PR. 2Ghz systems struggle to play high HDTV resolutions. However, if we were to take a dual 2Ghz PR equivalent core and enable it with an amiga derived philosophy of hardware multitasking, it might well do things that it will take 20Ghz PR technology to do on a single machine in realtime. To take Amiga to that level of performance under UAE emulation with 68K code would seem to require approx 400Ghz of equivalent PR.
Anyhoo, if you just wanna play old games, UAE would be sufficient of course. If we wanna see the kind of lead in gaming and graphics the Amiga used to have over conventional x86 architecture and M$ OSes again, then advancing the hardware is required.
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Other idea: single socket Opteron board, but with modified BIOS that enable booting from FPGA, not an x86 CPU.
Perhaps there is will be some sort of non volatile storage to store the FPGA configuration (Lattice, Xilinx).
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MiniMig will never be a next generation Amiga but it could be the ultimate classic Amiga. Judging by the demand on e-bay, most Amiga people want accelerators with memory, ethernet, and scan doublers as well as at least ECS compatibility. Minimig could handle this with...
FPGA for ECS compatibility with room inside to upgrade to AGA.
Sofware transparent/selectable promotion from 15 to 31 kHz display.
68040/68060 socket with jumper for 3.3V or 5V and a socket for the oscillator. The used 68060's would get expensive but there are plenty of cheap used 68040's. Support all caching and the fastest possible memory.
Modern memory support like a couple of DIMM or DDR2 slots.
PCI support with at least 7 PCI slots. This would allow for SCSI/IDE, USB, ethernet, graphics cards, etc. Support OpenPCI and many drivers would already be available.
Ability to use the motherboard in a standard "PC" tower with a standard "PC" power supply.
It's possible the PPC could be supported by the Elbox Shark or similar later. It would be nice if the ROM was flashable and at least 1MB also.
I think they would sell like hotcakes if the price could be kept under $500. Even in the $500-$700 price range they would sell ok unless new PPC Amiga hardware came out. I'd buy one or two already assembled motherboards.