Vampire 600?

[biggun]

I like Majsta's Vampire 600.

In my opinion Igor / Majsta did prove a couple of things:

a) A single dedicated person can archieve a lot

b) that an FPGA based AMIGA accelerated with the right fpga-image
can reach both a better perfomance than many existing accelerators
and that to a better price.

This is great!
Well done Igor!


Maybe the marketing side of the whole project is missing so far.
The value for the money of the Vampire600 is great.
One would expect that the card would be advertised all over the place and that all AMIGA shops would sell them like crazy.

[biggun]

Hi Igor,

thanks for the kind words.

Phoenix core will be sent to all Vampire 600 users. Problem was in the FPGA I used because it is too small, only 8K LE and that was the only reason why apollo-team had to slowdown to shrink each part of the code. Performance, I have the values but let's keep that as a surprise, let's say that A600 will be your primary Amiga

You are right - getting the core to 100% work in the small FPGA - was a real challange.
We did spend quite some time on this. :-/

The planned release of the Core is August.
And we so far all looks good that we will be able to launch as planned.

The performance looks very promising - our sniff tests indicate roughly a
performance of 10 times of a 68030 @ 50 MHz system.

[biggun]

Using an FPGA version with big space, would be great for power user market and betatesting, I hope those will exist.

The "power" version is here.
The card is currently in testing.

[biggun]

And in essence will be a super computer with a I/O bus called Amiga motherboard.

Yes.

Its a crazy as having a Ferrari in the USA, right?
A fast car in a country with a speed limit around 80 miles.
But you know what, there are many people enjoying a Ferrari still.

[biggun]

Is the power version a 68k plug in for a500/1000/2000? Is there an onboard fast ide controller? Im thinking of building a Vlab Motion setup with an a2000 but it really needs FPU and MMU to run right..

The card plugs into the 68000 socket.
This means in theory it could be used in
A500
A1000
A2000
CDTV (not sure if the space for it is enough - need to verify this)

The card comes with
* Fast CPU
* 128 MB DDR3 - 1 GB/sec transfer speed
* MiniSDCard over IDE emulation as HD

* more features optionally ...

[biggun]

Good specs biggun. It prolly wont fit in cdtv the tolerance is very low for the top case but the board does look pretty flat... can you answer about FPU/mmu please?

As of today the plan is to release the card with the current Phoenix CPU core.
But the card is FPGA this means later versions with more bells, with FPU, etc SAGA .. could be loaded in the card.

The card comes with build in programmer to upgrade it.

[biggun]

It certainly makes more sense to put it in an A1200 or A4000 than it does in an A1000/A500/A600/CDTV.

These models are planned too.

But frankly I think an A500 equipped with this card could at some point be 100% quivalent to an A4000.

[biggun]

Should I bother to re-flash to V 0.1 core or wait for Phoenix? In other words will you release it sooner or later? Also, i'm willing to beta test phoenix core for you I run software alot of amigans dont run like music and graphics apps.

Sounds good.
Maybe you like to visit our IRC channel?
We can chat about beta-tester options there.


http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=apollo-team

[biggun]

So an A500 with AGA would be cool.

Lets dream for a second and give the A500
* a good amount of memory  128 MB ?
* a fast CPU = 200 Mips?
* a big storage = 16 GB ?
* network interface
* AGA
* hi/truecolor

Then you have a dream machine :-D