Amiga OS 3.9 or 4.1 for PPC (and is it worth it?)

[Niding]

My intial thought is;

For what you want to do, the Vampire FPGA accelerator is what you want to consider.
At the moment the Vampire is only available for the A600. The A500 vampire is in development (soonish to be avaible)
Im unsure when the Vampire will be released for Amiga 3000 since development is a ongoing process. A wild guess, half a year from now, but thats a stab in the dark. The Vampire will restrict you to OS 3.9 tho.
The features of the Vampire core is also constantly in discussion and being expanded. There are "strong pressures" from the people in their IRC channel to develop a more modern ethernet feature, but the Apollo Team has to be careful about "feature creep" and cost.
So wether or not that becomes a reality is uncertain.

Anyhow, list a few Vampire videos and you can judge for yourself. IF it looks intresting you could join their IRC channel, and ask questions directly to the development team. If they dont respond there, the channel got quite a few knowledgable persons that will be able to explain the features much better than I can;

irc.freenode.org  port 6667  channel #apollo-team

Atm the Vampire only got 128 megabyte of ram tho (for the moment).

http://www.amiga.org/forums/showpost.php?p=803680&postcount=34

Comment by one of the developers.

Review of Vampire II https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEjtc6JWlsk

About 1 minute 53 there is a Sysinfo test, altho its probarly not the best method of evaluating the performance

http://www.apollo-core.com/index.htm?page=performance

More detailed info.

And then a few Workbench videos;

https://vimeo.com/152867182

https://vimeo.com/152180575

https://vimeo.com/153413790

Ofcourse you will be "restricted" to OS 3.9 and 680x0, but then you will have hardware that is being developed and produced, at a reasonable price.

I realise you mentioned PPC and OS 4.1 too, but figured Id mention Vampire too, incase you havent paid attention to its development.

[Niding]

Im just going to chime in with another comment;

Since you seem to be thinking going with OS 3.9, there is the issue of development.
There are some really nice Boing Bag upgrades, but for the future, Im personally thinking about AROS68k version. Its activly being maintained/developed, and while OS 3.9 is looking really pretty (imho), AROS might be the future for the 68k line.
Thats the best way to avoid the endless "who got rights to what, and how can we figure out what component we can use here and there..."

[Niding]

I was reading in the IRC channel that Kippa (which is soldering the boards), is responding to mails as hes getting closer to your order etc.

I guess the point was; hes probarly swamped and focused on getting the boards delivered, so mails are taking second priority.

They do chat in the IRC channel tho, discussing all kinds of topics.
So maybe join the IRC channel?