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Author Topic: ARM based Amiga?  (Read 27373 times)

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Offline Hattig

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Re: ARM based Amiga?
« on: September 20, 2011, 11:51:59 AM »
I agree that ARM would be a good platform for AmigaOS to run upon.

And many ARM SoCs are very Amiga-like in their methodology, having dedicated co-processors for specific functions (video decode, video encode, security acceleration, graphics, audio, etc) besides the ARM core(s).

In addition they are fairly cheap for even a fairly powerful SoC. They aren't on quad-core Intel i7 territory, but they're not half bad.

The Raspberry Pi will be a $35 computer (with ethernet, etc, the $25 variant is rather too limiting). However it is only an 800MHz ARM11 - two generations behind the ARM Cortex A9 used within something like the Panda board. The A9 is competitive on a clock by clock basis with Intel's Atom cores.

And at some point there will be quad-A9s (NVIDIA Kal-El, and others), and then A15s at 2.5GHz. By then we are at the 'enough CPU power' stage for a majority of users. And a dual-A15 at 2.5GHz will beat out a 1GHz PowerPC 460 by a long way.

By the time AmigaOS (or Aros) was fully ported, with the necessary drivers, we would certainly be into A15 systems. A core requirement would be sharing the development of the hardware with other projects (e.g., next generation Pandaboard, Raspberry Pi, etc).
 

Offline Hattig

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Re: ARM based Amiga?
« Reply #1 on: September 22, 2011, 01:10:55 PM »
If you had the resources to implement a 40nm graphics chip today, you would probably find AGA backwards compatibility would be 1% of the logic squeezed into a spare bit on the die. EGA was probably implementable in under 50000 transistors back in the day (I wouldn't be surprised if it was under 10000), and VGA in 100000. Even low-end GPUs are 100,000,000 now.