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Author Topic: Scanning the original chips  (Read 11797 times)

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Offline Hattig

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Re: Scanning the original chips
« on: December 17, 2011, 09:18:04 PM »
Quote from: Digiman;671592
What I meant was how much a single A600 (or A1200) compatible drop-in compatible motherboard with Agnus/Denise/Paula would each cost to manufacture today from scratch inc tooling up for mass production and all R&D. Assume you commit to producing one million units and exclude CPU costs. Go to China, give them the specs for everything and add R&D cost to invoice they charge for producing a million units. £100? £200? less?

It's far from easy to do, the first Amiga Technologies A1200 motherboard that rolled off the production line run at the factory in France was defective in the mid 90s!


I expect an entire A1200 could be implemented in a single ASIC on a cheap, but still reasonably modern process (e.g., 180nm). You could probably add on digital video and audio outputs, SATA, USB, etc as well whilst you are at it (so implement a typical expanded A1200 of 2011).

But with mask costs in the hundreds of thousands, you would truly want to be making tens to hundreds of thousands of the chips to make it worthwhile. But after that you would just need a sneaky "amiga in a joystick" product that accidentally left exposed pads on the PCB for all expansions, and you could get Amigas into many many homes again.