What would you buy for classic Amiga?

[matthey]

That's available real soon now. It is still 2010, right?

Just 2 more weeks!

How about a completely finished Natami, or FPGA Arcade Replay board with 68060 CPU, USB, Ethernet & more RAM daughter board, or a stand alone Apollo FPGA based Amiga clone with 400MHz+ 680x0 speed, improved AGA and Picasso96 graphics, greater than 2mb of Chip RAM, USB, Ethernet, SATA2, or 3 controller and 4gb Fast RAM?

In other words, a completely modern Amiga clone using FPGA technology that is at least 10 times faster than any real Motorola 680x0 CPU and has all of the modern ports, controllers and interfaces that we need to move forward, plus new programming tools that make it easy to create new Amiga content and applications/games.  Not asking for much, just want it all!  

An Amiga 68k fpga CPU won't be hitting 400MHz any time soon. An fpga that fast would cost thousands by itself. An affordable Cyclone V with the Apollo/Phoenix CPU can do 100MHz or a little more and a superscalar 2 integer unit Apollo CPU should be 2x to 4x as fast at integer than the 68060. That's still pretty powerful as the 68060 is no slouch. I would expect it to be faster than some older ARM processors with clock speeds approaching 400MHz. I hear you on the Natami and would love to see a comeback of a higher spec complete Amiga motherboard.

[matthey]

The tests on the Apollo core website are all done on the same Arria board.  The efficiency of the Apollo core is very good.

If you are talking about the performance benchmarks here:

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

Then the fpga is a Stratix which is significantly faster and more expensive than the Arria. Some of the Arria fpgas are borderline affordable but generally the Cyclone series gives better bang for the buck and there are sizes that are large enough for everything an Amiga would need.

All the benchmarks here:

http://www.apollo-core.com/bringup/

show results for Majsta's accelerator with a tiny Cyclone II fpga. Some of the benchmark MHz numbers given are calculated by performance (some benchmark programs are not accurate).

A 120 MHz board will be faster than an overclock on a 68060 board by more than 20% and cost less as well.

You must be referring to the new sandwich accelerator with larger fpga. Yes, Phoenix in it should be better at integer performance than a 68060. Phoenix in Majsta's accelerator is probably more equivalent in performance to a 68040 at 120-160MHz. It's going to perform better with old 68000-68040 code than the 68060 which needs optimizations to fully take advantage of superscalar execution. Phoenix is handicapped severely by the small Cyclone II but it still approaches the integer performance of a 68060@50MHz and no doubt outperforms it in some areas.

would be nice if a-eon would get on board and try to push through a amiga fpga-clone so the amiga community could have also more choices and also we dont forget the classic amiga.

If A-Eon had invested $1 million in Natami and burning an ASIC based on the Phoenix fpga CPU core, the 68k wouldn't be the slow poke anymore. I bet an ASIC could outperform a SAM 440 while being compatible with most of the old 68k software. It's interesting that the problems with SMP (exec/ables.i macros) are more likely solvable in an fpga (or Phoenix+Amiga ASIC) than with a PPC based AmigaOS. It wouldn't be too difficult to add multi-threading and/or more cores (the hardware side but the software side could be tricky) with Phoenix. A lot of Amiga users like the 68k with compatibility and won't abandon it.

[matthey]

My preference to have programmers work on SAGA instead of the soft-core 68k, was based only on my misunderstanding that a soft-core 68k CPU would only be faster than a real 68060 when loaded into an FPGA that costs thousands of dollars each.

I keep getting bounced back and forth by one side or the other, when one side says that the actual performance of the (relatively cheap) FPGA based accelerator boards will provide performance slower than a real 68060, while the other side comes back with statements that the bench mark test results are from the FPGA to be used in the accelerator, not some bigger, faster, FPGA that costs thousands of dollars to purchase.

A medium to large Cyclone V fpga that would be adequate for fpga 68k CPU+FPU+Amiga SAGA custom chips is <$50. The Phoenix sandwich accelerator mates with a standard Cyclone V fpga board that costs $50 (although the Cyclone V is small and doesn't have room for a full FPU). An Altera mid-range Arria fpga starts at about $50 and goes up in price from there. An Altera high-end Stratix fpga starts at several hundred dollars and goes up to thousands of dollars.

At this point in time, I don't know what is real and what is fantasy, so I guess I will just wait until an actual product is available for purchase.  I had hoped that work on the design and firmware would be finished and production of the accelerator boards would have begun, so assembly and testing could begin, followed by sales to customers shortly afterwards.

Majsta's Amiga 600 fpga based accelerator is for sale now. Most people are still using the TG68 in it but there are people testing the Phoenix fpga CPU. I believe Majsta is planning a little larger Cyclone III fpga based Amiga 500 accelerator and the Apollo Team is working on a more universal Amiga 500, 1000, 2000, CDTV based sandwich accelerator. I don't know which of the latter accelerators will be available first or when.

[matthey]

Graphics card for Zorro slot.

How about gfx card for CPU slot without the Zorro bottleneck?