Most bang for 600 USD?

[freqmax]

Provided access to chip-fab and circuit board manufacturing where the volume price must be lower than 600 USD. What kind of setup hardware wise would you use to make something that make technology minded people go OMG!!-must have!  ..?

[freqmax]

I intended something that excite general tech nerds. In particular something that makes it possible to do something that isn't possible currently for that kind of economic price point. The physcal technologies of Amiga is too far away in the tech race to build something competitive upon.

Do remember that the capacity of a "normal" PC became available for really large corporations and goverments in the 1960s. The problem were size and price.

Oh and for ARM emulation of 68k, it's a nice idea but will wreck cycle accurency and lock-step.

[freqmax]

But it feels like the same track over again. It's still the standard setup CPU-GPU-RAM, only faster. No paradigm shift. The only real bright point is a cleverly designed CPU, but that cost plenty these days and it might be more efficient to use commercially available chips in that area.

When Amiga did color graphics, stereo sound and multitasking. IBM PC did poor color palette graphics, beeps, single task using a bus that got easily stalled.

[freqmax]

I'd like to see a link for that. "Done in an FPGA" sounds like the crucial factor there, anyway - raytracing is made for massive parallelization, and in an FPGA that's easy to do. On a general-purpose CPU, not so much.

A box with standard CPU but multiple buses that let's one exploit multiple FPGAs and DSPs? That would at least open the software defined radio area and most definitely power raytracing.




As for raytracing: Realtime Ray Tracing of Dynamic Scenes on an FPGA Chip:

Using a single FPGA chip running at 90 MHz it offers realtime rendering performance of 20 to 60 frames per second

The SaarCOR prototype is build using a Xilinx Virtex-II 6000-4 FPGA [Xil03], that is hosted on the Alpha Data ADM-XRC-II PCI-board [Alp03]. The board contains six independent banks of 32-bit wide SRAM (each 4MB) running at the FPGA clock speed, a PCI-bridge, and a general purpose I/O-channel. This channel is connected to a simple digital to analog converter implementing a standard VGA output supporting resolutions of up to 1024 x 768 at 60 Hz.

I think the above specifies what is needed in terms of hardware to accomplish realtime raytracing. One catch is that a suitable FPGA seems to cost like 100 USD at digikey.

[freqmax]

An ARM accelerator can be accomplished by making a direct link from a mobile phone that usualy feature an ARM-CPU clocked to GHz to the CPU socket in the Amiga or other suitable motherboard connection.

[freqmax]

I suspect even the TI:s "Stellaris LM4F120 LaunchPad - ARM Cortex-M4" for 5 USD would run circles round the A4000. So the thing is to get the most out of those 600 USD, and I suspect a combo of DSP-FPGA-RAM will do just that.

[freqmax]

Amiga's are not cycle exact machines in any case.
Compare models with different processors, different models, different chipsets.
None are identical, so cycle exact reproduction is unimportant as it doesn't affect software.

A lot of software for the A500 did operate in a very hardware dependent manner. I guess it's the same for A1200. The common denominator is a simple and thus cheap machine and cheap machines that are good sell a lot (usually). That's why other models doesn't really apply.

Regarding the next wow-omg machine. It's likely better to focus on the tech crowd (or artistic crowd). As the ones that are happy with plain office computer likely won't get it anyway.

Raytracing, Software radio, "hw-x11", are some of the power applications. What signal bending hasn't been done yet in a machine a that a high school can afford?

[freqmax]

Nobody wants to spend $600 on something that can only run at 7mhz, if thats what you want then buy an a500 or a minimig.

Different subjects, don't confuse them.

[freqmax]

So what makes them drool?

[freqmax]

14 MHz 16-bit word read/write cached address bus shrinked to 8-bit = 336 Mbit/s not including latency issues which for USB is at minimum 1 ms, so to write an address and then read say the next instruction would put your GHz ARM CPU at an effective clock frequency of 1000 Hz. Ie 7000 times slower than an unexpanded A500.

Any realistic solution requires a low latency and high speed interface. Thus a GPIO directly to the "guest" CPU. Perhaps the GPIO on STM32 (ARM) CPU or Raspberry-PI is capable of that.

[freqmax]

I double checked. USB2 will give no faster response than 125 µs/7 thus the equalient clock frequency is no more than 56 kHz..
In other words USB is a dead end.

BACK TO TOPIC..

Emulating 68k won't impress current market.

DSP, FPGA, etc.. has likely higher chance.

[freqmax]

The point with the different "pads" are that they offers easy access on the go due to the shape and keyboard "placement" and builtin mobilephone instead of a dongle. It's mainly a ergonomic issue. Computing wise they are nothing new at all.

If one leave the hardware side of things, what applications would one desire?

[freqmax]

But the 8088 IBM PC was not actually built until Commodore 64 era so no whatever that is it is not a PC

The IBM 360 released in 1964 had 8 kB - 8 MB of RAM, 112 MB HDD, and CPU with 0.034 MIPS. That's more than some 1981 PC:s had.

CDC 6600 accomplished 1 MFLOPS in 1964.

So mid 1960s where the point where capacity equaling to the IBM PC became available.

[freqmax]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_(graphics_chip)
or
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_(programming_language)
 ..?

[freqmax]

Think application that the best hardware for 600 USD can run. Hardware one can build, not neccessarliy existing right now.
Not specific to Amiga or it's OS.