ADOOM on A600 running 22-35 FPS

[matthey]

One of these "plans" is an already implemented and working solution that seems to give its users the fastest 68k alternative available. No need to consider feasibility at that stage.

I'm sure people would have been interested in a processor as fast as a 20 year old Pentium and with a 30 year old ISA 15 years ago .

Cool. Wake me up from my cryo-sleep when you have a prototype ready! I'm sure people would have been interested in that DVD drive 15 years ago.

It's important to keep the price down for the masses and provide more freedom with a replaceable drive. Some people would rather have a DVD-R than a Blu-ray read only drive for example. A DVD drive may be a good enough base standard but it depends on how cheap Blu-ray drives could be bought. Consoles, DVD/Blu-ray players and TV service boxes are too limiting and not open enough. It's really frustrating to have so much power sitting there and only being able to do what they will let you.

[matthey]

I agree, FPGA is cheap enough and fast enough for m68k AmigaOS. Matthey, I understand your concerns, and I'm sure your points will materialize themselves when/if no compilers supports the changes/improvements that Gunnar has done. In the meantime, I dont think anyone/anything prevents someone else, for example you, from doing a more "conservative" m68k core for the Vampire boards.

FPGAs are wonderful tools for core development but the 68k will never be more than retro (and a slim chance for embedded) as FPGA only. A more compatible core and ISA is needed for both retro and embedded instead of an unused "performance" ISA which Gunnar is targetting. The following Atari forum link with one of the Mist creators talks about the Phoenix core on Mist:

http://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=101&t=27442&sid=20370baaedca3a502b06a214d70aa186

Compatibility is the first concern, then license, and performance is nice but less important. I bet the concerns are the same for other 68k FPGA hardware creators. I expect embedded markets to be the same way. Existing embedded 68k and ColdFire customers may want something faster but they need compatibility with their current code base. Phoenix isn't going to win over ARM customers overnight but it could win existing 68k and ColdFire customers if it was compatible enough and liked enough (radical 68k changes won't fly with these 68k fans any more than the retro guys). We are also missing an oppurtunity to have one united 68k standard which could be used in Phoenix, TG68, Suska, UAE, and with so many people using one standard, more likely an eventual ASIC. Instead, we could end up with another incompatible Amiga split like the current ones which are killing Amiga.

But yeah, a m68k cherry pi would be awesome, I would guaranteed buy a few, especially if the m68k has MMU and can run Linux, I want real hardware for my Linux/m68k again

While the 68k integer and FPU ISA need a little refreshing and modernization, the 68k MMU design needs major changes. It may not be practical to keep it compatible. It would be good to investigate ways to ease adding at least partial memory protection and/or memory isolation and extended memory into the AmigaOS while also allowing for possible future SMP (AmigaOS 3 using a custom CPU has a better chance to maintain compatibility than AmigaOS 4 using an off the shelf CPU). ThoR needs to be involved and design us a new MMU standard .

My suggestion is to ignore what Gunnar is doing and join forces with other more likeminded people and "do it right", the best solution will win, right?

Like with AmigaOS 4, MOS, AROS, AmigaOS 3, etc.? Is the best Amiga winning or is all of Amiga losing?

I am sure that you are honest with what you are writing and really mean it but for now Gunnar offers the best 68k solution ever available and a payable also. That is what we need, a major hardware upgrade including 68k (at least 68020 compatible) and better graphics and sounds. I do not know whom you know or not but I do not believe at people investing millions of dollars in the market, not before products are there and the need is obvious. When you can show a working system and proof your concept by sales then you can go to a investor, not the other way round. Investors are cold calculators, they look how big is risk, what have I to invest and what do I earn and they expect a business plan. So first step is a working FPGA based system that can already be used with software being adapted to. I think we should gunnar simply let do his job. I see (from videos) more and more software running at a very high speed (and there is no improved chipset/RTG yet) that counts for me (and most others) and not abstract discussions about ISA details.

I agree that new affordable 68k hardware is what the Amiga needs but we need to plan and work together to keep the 68k Amiga pipeline full, to put it in processor terms. It is important to have a product to show but it is also important to have a good plan to show investors. I am an investor and I know other investors. You might be surprised by what I could make happen but I'm sure not going to pull my money out of safer investments to invest in something I don't believe in and in people I can't trust. Neither will I try to convince other investors to do the same or try to find other partners to invest with. I see potential here but I do not see anything investable yet.

I recall a target of PS3 level performance, gunnar von boehn later changed his promises to PS2 level performance. gunnar always promised that the cpu will be faster than g4.

Any mention of PS3 performance must have been before I was involved with Natami which wasn't particularly early. The PS3 has a lot of potential performance but it it difficult to take advantage of. An enhanced 68k Amiga SoC ASIC with good 3D implementation added might not have as much theoretical performance but could be much easier to program perhaps making it seem surprising close to the performance of a PS3. I think a Cherry Pi could be made which could outperform the new Raspberry Pi 2 at a moderatly higher cost, with everyone working together and with proper funding (oddly never tried with the Natami despite tremendous interest).

I believe the current Phoenix core outperforms a PPC G4 clock for clock in integer performance and in memory performance. Enable the 2nd (and possibly 3rd) integer pipe, clock it up, up the caches, add branch prediction and add an FPU and it should be able to walk all over an equally clocked G4.

[matthey]

I wouldn't invest in anything that uses CDs/DVDs/BlueRays... these are sone ninetish... I don't know anybody that uses that obsolete media... terabyte sized HDs&network wins. Please no bulky and limited sized CDs/DVDs/BlueRays... I prefer to use a small Raspberry Pi as media center. If I was interested in CDs/DVDs/BlueRays I would connect it through USB. I don't plan to buy a blueray reader/burner ever anyway. I prefer hard disks. Even better, I prefer to quickly download stuff from everywhere I am rather than searching my entire collection (oh it was scratched by a friend, oh my friend didn't gave it back to me, oh where did I stored it... in my parent's house or in my gf's house).

It would make sense to sell units without a DVD/Blu-ray drive and even as a bare board to sell the most boards which lowers costs. I encourage downloadable software and software stores also. However, a DVD drive is cheap and probably should be part of a base Amiga standard. The media is cheaper than USB memory sticks where physical data is more convenient to distribute and/or where people prefer it. It makes a lot of sense for a retro emulation box where old game CDs could be inserted and played including CD32 games (see new CD32 games on EAB). It makes sense to be able to play DVD/Blu-ray movies which some people have. Some people would rather have a smaller but faster solid state hard drive rather than put several hundred GBs of games on their HD. How do you backup several hundred GBs of data on your HD? Eventually, maybe we would have an Amiga cloud for backup but everyone knows big brother has back doors to data stored on servers which some Amiga people won't like and it might not be possible to offer this service for free. A writable DVD would allow another option for backup of hard drives too large for memory sticks and they could burn their own old game CDs. I like freedom but it also means respecting the freedom of others including other users and developers. The situation can usually be better for everyone if we choose and use standards.

Please, do not make a CD/DVD/BlueRay player. No one uses that in this millenium. Do you think that Raspberry would sell better with a DVD attached? Even if it costed the same? I don't want a DVD burner even if you gave it to me free and you paid shipping.

That is a tough question. If Raspberry Pi came equipped to play HD movies and had a DVD/Blu-Ray drive, it would sell many systems as a movie player. Raspberry Pi software could be sold in stores making it more mainstream and competitive with PCs. Raspberry Pi itself could be sold in stores if it came in a box helping to sell more units. It would probably cost 2x-5x more which would turn some people off though. Overall, it would be different like the difference between Raspberry Pi and Cherry Pi.

Some kind of raspberry pi like miggy could be more interesting? Give it USB and and a PCI-E bus male connector. You want expansion and various cards? you connect the board to a PCI-Express busboard (or pc) or feed it with power from it. Give it a GPIO pins, some USB ports and HDMI/audio out. Include a mini-SDXC connector to make it boot. You can buy an ethernet-usb card for around 6Euros. WiFi usb cards are cheap too (12€?). If you want stuff like SATA, Gigabit Ethernet, Advanced soundcards you could access PCIe bus. You could even draw the final gfx on the host's gfx card memory

I would like to see more and more modern hardware expansion also but this has more potentential to increase costs and board sizes than adding a DVD/Blu-ray drive. We would have to do some cost/benefit analysis and maybe potential user opinion polls.

The Raspberry Pi 2 certainly has the guts if not the memory to be a useful emulator.
http://au.element14.com/raspberry-pi/raspberrypi-2-modb-1gb/sbc-raspberry-pi-2-model-b-1gb/dp/2461030?CMP=KNC-YAH-COM-RPI

Yea, the Raspberry Pi 2 is a nice upgrade which makes it usable as a regular computer. Each core of the processor is stronger than before but still relatively weak in order Thumb2 ARM. The extra cores will help a lot for some tasks where SMP is possible like web browsing while providing good power efficiency. Emulation and many games are single threaded needing strong integer performance which it doesn't have compared to even a low end Atom. The Neon vector unit and GPU may give a big boost in some cases but these aren't so simple to optimize for. Don't be surprised when your iPhone outperforms it. However, the price is great for the performance, it's efficient and it's open. I may pick one up myself.

[matthey]

@ above
Is it possible to build something like an Amiga on a chip? You could start with something small that would sell in great numbers, then you could move to an Amiga games console.

Certainly. It's already mostly done with an FPGA 68k CPU and FPGA Amiga chipset together in a big fpga. There are even multiple resources to choose from (CPU: Phoenix, TG68, Suska; Chipset: MiniMig, SAGA). Some things should be added, improved and modernized though. 3D would be very nice and would have to be developed or bought. After everything is debugged, an ASIC can be burned.

[matthey]

I really wonder if it makes sense to make an ASIC.

In the V600 FPGA we see an average performance of ~ 200 MHz 68020

Our expectations for the next card is a performance about 3 times higher
e.g ~ 600 MHz 68020
And the card will still be very affortable compared to 68060 cards.

Now if we would spend money on a fast FPGA - like people spend money on 68060 cards.
Then we could again double the value and reach a performance on a ballpark of over a Gigaherz 68020.

The Phoenix core offers excellent performance/price for Amiga hardware. This can help reduce the 68k market deterioration and probably even bring back some users who recently left or have NG Amigas. The performance/price of the Phoenix CPU compared to any hard CPU is only going to attract geeks who realize how awesome a customizable CPU is. An FPGA is too expensive to make it cheap enough for mass produced hardware like the Raspberry Pi and never high enough performance for the affordable high end CPU market and thus remains niche. I think there is still a smaller retro and embedded market as an FPGA if the CPU is debugged to maturity, development and OS software is improved and standards are adopted with good documentation. It would probably help proliferation to either create a business or open source the core. The current Amiga and Hyperion situation is bad for anyone wanting to do Amiga related business though. It might be worthwhile to at least look into obtaining ownership rights to the AmigaOS if the situation became investable (AROS is of course the other option). Some level of investment would probably be required to move the Amiga out of it's niche into something interesting and marketable to the rest of the world. I believe an ASIC would be a necessary part of that equation for a 68k Amiga but it would require the sacrifice and cooperation of the Amiga community which has never been seen.

Do we really need an ASIC?

No, but did necessity keep Apple from becoming the most valuable business in the world? An ASIC is not necessary to have fun with Phoenix but if you are going to the trouble of making a fast FPGA CPU then you have already done most of the work for a faster ASIC CPU. It makes me wonder, if you can do that with an FPGA, what could an ASIC do? It's like sending an unmanned rocket to the moon and then deciding we are done because we proved our point and that is good enough.

Most of us here have no interest in spending the heaps of dollars to get an ASIC developed.
There is such a lack of modern software, you would not get new customers.
Maybe at a later date when there are more potential buyers it might be nice to do.

It's the chicken and the egg syndrome. There is not enough new Amiga software because there is not enough affordable Amiga hardware and there is not enough affordable Amiga hardware because there is not enough new Amiga software. Without interfering in this tailspin, the Amiga will crash and burn at some point. IMO, the hardware situation is better to attack because it expands the number of users who can buy and develop new software. Trevor@A-Eon is working on the software approach by buying old software and using a web store which is a good idea to maximize sales to existing Amiga owners and should help sell some NG Amigas by increasing demand but I wonder if the gains are bottlenecked by the high cost of the NG Amiga hardware. Also, we may be in danger of running out of good developers as they are assigned to update his software products .

If the amiga on a chip was turned into an asic, could ram be put on board too?

Yes, there is generally high speed memory on a hard CPU or ASIC CPU but it is commonly configured as caches because that is where it provides the most advantage. There is sometimes CPU addressable SRAM especially for embedded applications. This reduces the chip count of boards but SRAM is generally not practical in large sizes (>8MB?). Modern processors like the i7 have *huge* caches which would be more than enough to run the 68k AmigaOS if it was addressable by the CPU instead of caches. Would you rather have less memory that is faster or more memory that is slower? The latter is probably more useful with modern software as most of the data could be in the 68k caches (The 68k is a cache miser so 32kB ICache and 32kB DCache should be a lot).

It would be cool to see an asic get made. Do asic's run faster and use less power?

ASICs are generally considerably faster than an FPGA but an FPGA can hold it's own in parallel tasks. ASIC and hard processors usually use less power but may require some work to improve power efficiency. FPGAs are low power already, especially for retro use. For embedded markets, the lower the power use and/or the better the performance for the power use, the better.

[matthey]

What would be the pricepoint in your opinion for the FPGA/ASIC?

Lets say we wanted to build a new retro AMIGA with 600 MHz 68020 performance, fast FPU
256 MB fast memory, SAGA (truecolor) chipset ...
What in your opinion is the price break for the FPGA of such a system?
At which price you would say the FPGA is ideal for this?

I think I know where you are going. From a business standpoint, it would be much less risky to make a limited supply of FPGA boards (and accelerators) for as cheap as is reasonable and sell for as much as possible. Looking at current FPGA stand alone boards, we see a price of $200-$300 U.S. for good quality boards with low to mid range Amiga specs. That is in competition with a $35 U.S base price for the Rasberry Pi using emulation. With 1% of the Pi sales, the FPGA boards would have sold 50,000 units. Unfortunatly, the current FPGA board prices are a little high, the CPU performance is weak, the FPGA sizes could be larger, memory sizes are inadequate for general computing and there is little in the way of a standard platform. Some retro gamers would appreciate the more accurate FPGA emulation and pay up but most are choosing the Pi. It would be difficult to make a competive FPGA board with higher specs but substantially cheaper than current FPGA boards. An ASIC could make it possible to reach the $100-$150 range with competive specs to the Pi but with a little more expansion and a few more niceties to try to grab a few percentage of the Pi market (maybe a case would allow to sell in stores too). I bet at least 10% of Pi sales have gone to people that would prefer to have an Amiga computer or 68k CPU but only Raspberry Pi was offered instead of Cherry Pi. Let's say only 3% would have payed up for the Amiga or 68k which would be 150,000 potential Amiga users. That is easily enough to make an ASIC worthwhile. The risk is higher but if the goal is to increase the Amiga user base instead of making the most short term profits, there is potential. Investing in such a plan may be more appealing to those who are already invested in the Amiga or it could be throughing good money after bad. Some of the risk could also be reduced by finding good partners to help lower costs. I was looking at embedded where the fastest 68k and ColdFire CPU on the market could sell on it's own if it was compatible enough. I believe the Pi received very good pricing and arrangments from supplies as well. The Raspberry Pi Foundation promotes computer learning and CISC Pi is very different from RISC Pi so maybe they could be approached to gain some of the same resources and support (David Braben of Elite fame is one of the founders). There is a lot more outside of the Amiga niche that could be explored if we were organized and cooperating.

Edit: There have been more than 5 million Pi sales now so I updated some numbers.

[matthey]

you compare apples and oranges.
The current FPGA boards for AMIGA have quite  high prices for what they offer.
That these board have so high prices DOES NOT mean that an FPGA is more expensive than an ASIC.

An FPGA board with 256 MB fastmem, and 68020 CPU with 600 Mhz performance and SAGA could today be sold for less than $100. If a few thousand would be produced.

How much could the Natami MX board have sold for if a few thousand would have been produced?

How much would the cost increase to have 1GB of memory?

Your specs above and estimated per unit board price may win the apples vs oranges battle using an FPGA and economies of scale but you may only win a few hundred new Amiga users than the existing FPGA boards. That's not bad and it is cheap enough to give as Christmas presents at that point but does it win the bigger battle. We could win thousands and maybe tens of thousands of Amiga users with a product that could grab a potion of the Raspberry Pi pie. There are people who like Cherry Pie but if all they get is a little piece when they could have a big piece of Raspberry Pi for less cost, which are they going to choose? Your specs above are great for the Amiga market but not very competitive against the Raspberry Pi. I'm not saying that your board with an FPGA would be wrong for a first round of production but if gaining lots of Amiga users is the goal then planning, cooperating and setting standards toward a possible ASIC design is a worthwhile strategy IMO.

why not make a crowfunding campaign in kickstarter?

We all wondered why this didn't happen with the Natami where it would have been huge with all the interest and momentum. The down sides are that you are obligated and have limited room to manuever from the advertised plan with kickstarter. I still like it as a grass roots way to raise production money from the little investors and customers. Less invested money is lost to fees if medium size to large investors would come together and do the planning ahead of time.

Of course not, ASICs, even on an older process (90/65nm) are horrendously expensive for the potential market.

ASICs are the cheapest option with high enough production quantity. Making a few thousand FPGA boards could cost $100,000-$200,000. For double that, maybe less with the right partners, you could be in the range of an ASIC that could lower per unit board costs by maybe 25%-50% and increase performance by several times. Add 1 GB of memory and you are delivering a full slice of Cherry Pi. It's risky but it is a better plan to add Amiga users than Hyperion ever had. I bet they spent millions on software development only to gain a few hundred Amiga users.

FPGAs are more than enough - a ~600Mhz 68020 equivalent is more than enough for any 68k Amiga software that's ever been written.

Is 640kB of memory enough too? The 68k has huge potential that was never developed in performance, code density and ease of use. It can blow in-order Thumb2 ARM out of the water in performance while using less memory and being easier to develop software for. I would love to throw 1GB of memory on board just because it is cheap and so overkill for a 68k Amiga. Such a board wouldn't be a Raspberry Pi killer but it could be a competitor for people who prefer Cherry Pi.

I would say this is a huge over estimate, huge huge HUGE over estimate!!!

It would surprise me a lot if a 68k Cherry pi would sell much at all, probably less than 5000. At least without a full fledge capable CPU with MMU, so that it easily can boot a relevant operating system.

I think you have misunderstood why people buy the raspberry pi, it's not just because it is cheap, it is because it is cheap and fully supported by Linux. Extremely few are interested in a lamed down EC 68k that only can run AmigaOS and maybe uCLinux if you are lucky.

What I'm guessing is that at least 10% of Raspberry Pi purchasers know and have a favorable opinion of either the Amiga or 68k (the 68k may be more popular than the Amiga). These are potential converts with a competive product (even with a somewhat inferior product overall). Such a product would need to be open, compatible and use standards where possible. Improvements need to be made in the CPU, with AmigaOS/AROS and with marketing/image to bring everything up to snuff. There are already developers willing to do the labor of love but some inflow of money could buy more of their time thereby accelerating development.

[matthey]

What makes you think this?
What do you think that an FPGA to build something comparable to ARCADE or MIST does cost?
What do you think would an ASIC cost?

It is difficult to come up with good estimates because of hidden costs. An ASIC has more variables and hidden costs. The actual unit cost is based on quantity and demand is difficult to estimate. There may not be that much difference in per unit cost between an FPGA board and an ASIC board but the performance/price goes way up with the ASIC and it's this which is probably needed to win many new Amiga customers and compete with a Raspberry Pi (but not necessary for the niche retro Amiga market). A properly enhanced hard 68k processor would help the 68k to be taken seriously again opening up markets and improving development support. IMO, a more compatible and conservative integer and FPU ISA with a modernized MMU/MPU and probably SIMD unit would be ideal. Modern and compatible sounds easy but it can be more difficult than creating something new.

Yes this is true.
An ASIC would in theory allow huge performance gain.
But to be able to build an ASIC the design needs to be 100% tested and you need to be 100% sure that you have all good ideas implemented. Also it needs to be clear that doing an ASIC release includes porting to ASIC libraries. This wil also be some work and take weeks if not month.

Before looking at an ASIC I would first try to get the max out of FPGA options.

I expect an ASIC needs early planning and experience to organize properly, debug and verify in preparation for an eventual ASIC. That is why I approached Dave@Innovasic who not only understands the embedded market but has experience with a 68k ASIC and may have tools and test cases which could accelerate development in general and ease the work needed to create an ASIC later. He is very creative and I believe would have some good ideas. I think he is somewhat interested as Phoenix shows that you guys are not amateurs with the hardware but there are a lot of loose ends in the business and financing side which are also important. I like Innovasic and Dave but there are also other potential partners which could help with development and marketing resources.

With todays Vampire600 you get 200 MHz 68020 speed.
With the new ApolloCard we think to get around 600 MHz 68020 speed
With todays better FPGA you could get over double of this. E.g 1200 MHz 68020 Speed.

The new FPGA generation which is on the horizon looks impressive.
My first impression is that performance could again be double t´with them....

I would like to see how good the next gen low cost FPGA will be.
If we could get out of a $15 FPGA 1200 MHz 68020 Speed - then I do not think that an ASIC is really needed for World domination ...

This is more of a philosophical quandary. Will people be satisfied with a slower but adequate performance CPU and more efficient OS? I think history shows the answer so far is clearly no. The majority of people would like to have the highest performance processor possible or the most performance/price as affordability becomes a factor.

Who are these 10%? You are pulling numbers out of nowhere. Again, people buy R-pi because it has HDMI, is cheap, and runs Linux, fully supported. The company I work for bought a whole bunch of r-pi to plug into big monitors that we use as info displays, the R-pi is perfect as it is tiny, powered by the TV and has HDMI, and because it runs full fledge Linux.

Haven't you heard that 97.3% of statistics were pulled out of thin air or inaccurate? Of course it's a guess. Please poll and calculate unbiased statistics and get back with me. Once we know the exact demand we can calculate the number of boards to make and investors will trust your results so much that they will pull their money out of no risk negative interest rate investments and invest in a sure thing like the Amiga .

May be of interest:
http://www.fleasystems.com/

I wandered across that site several years ago as I was search for something Amiga related. I was surprised when my search brought up some Dave Haynie quote like this:

NEVER EVER mess with a PCB jumper you don't understand, even if it's labelled "SEX AND FREE BEER".

I couldn't find it anymore so maybe they took it down.

[matthey]

You must first tell me what the poll is supposed to be about, without MMU it will have extremely limited use. With a proper implementation that is compatible and has MMU you could get it to run NeXTStep, Plan9, MiNT, Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD, SunOS etc which people would actually be interested in, especially if it was mindbogglingly fast. Without MMU, there are already plenty of hardware alternatives, and none of them very popular.

So what is your idea?

EDIT: I see now that Gunnar says Apollo has MMU, which makes it a lot more interesting.

The MMU is one of the areas we need to talk about and work out. Gunnar's MMU is very simple and incompatible with the 68k MMU in the 68030-68060. The 68030 MMU is very flexible and has some interesting ideas but is far from modern MMUs. The 68040 and 68060 MMUs are similar and very capable but the page sizes only go up to 8kB which is small and not optimum for modern large memory sizes. Enlarging the page sizes would break compatibility with the 68040 and 68060 MMU and there may be other changes necessary to modernize it. ThoR or Gunnar could probably give more details as the MMU is not my strong point. The 68060 MMU allows virtualization (virtual addresses and physical to virtual translation) which is a great modern feature but it has a cost. All cached addresses which may have a virtual address need to be flushed on context switches which has overhead. The 68060 may require this already with it's branch cache. Memory performance can degrade with many page misses from accessing memory in a dispersed or random way. More hardware can make up for this problem but at a cost. The CPU pipeline can increase by 1 stage depending on how the MMU is designed also. Gunnar and Jens know the best way to make a modern MMU and ThoR could help with the design. Gunnar is resistent to a more advanced MMU with virtual addresses in an FPGA because of the cost of performance and because the Amiga doesn't need it. The overhead of such an MMU as a percentage of performance is much smaller in an ASIC and the advantages for an open platform 68k board which would support multiple OSs is more compelling. This still leaves the question of how compatible an updated and modernized 68k MMU could be. Some changes to existing 68060 MMU support in the OSs which support the 68k would be necessary for optimal performance at least and maybe even to be usable. Personally, I think an MMU which supports virtual addresses is an important modern feature which would be important if competing against the Raspberry Pi with an ASIC. Embedded applications use memory protection more and more all the time but I expect the extra performance to be more important than virtual addressing.

As for a poll, the questions might be something like this:

Do you know about the AmigaOS, AROS or MorphOS?
If yes, what is your opinion of AmigaOS, AROS or MorphOS?
 1) Very favorable
 2) Somewhat favorable
 3) Indifferent or no opinion
 4) Somewhat unfavorable
 5) Very unfavorable
Do you know about the 68k CPU?
If yes, what is your opinion of a more modern 68k CPU with MMU, FPU and SIMD unit?
 1) Very favorable
 2) Somewhat favorable
 3) Indifferent or no opinion
 4) Somewhat unfavorable
 5) Very unfavorable

Only Raspberry Pi owners could be asked and even the wording of the questions could introduce bias. Data from international regions would probably vary (Asia likely would not be good for the Amiga or 68k). The results would be interesting although I wouldn't put to much confidence in them. My point was that a fraction of the Raspberry Pi market is a huge number of users (1%=50,000 users currently and growing). Hyperion likely spent over a million and maybe millions of U.S. dollars to gain a few hundred users which are not enough to sustain them with software or hardware purchases. It's likely that we could bake ourselves a cherry Pi and grab a slice of a bigger pie for less cost.

[matthey]

Being an 020 CPU do you need a special 060 library to fool some programs that will only run when an 060 is detected?

This would not be a good idea in general because Phoenix has the 64 bit integer MUL*.L and DIV*.L instructions in hardware and detecting a 68060 may use slower code which would avoid them. It would be a better idea if MOVE16 was implemented also (not difficult). Most code that detects for a 68060 needs a 68060 compatible FPU or MMU which Phoenix doesn't currently have. In some specific cases, changing the SysBase->AttnFlags may get some programs working but this would more commonly result in a guru. A program that changes SysBase->AttnFlags is trivial. There are other programs that would detect for a 68060 in other ways that would not be so easy to fix. Most 68060 optimized and compiled code which does not use the FPU or MMU should work on Phoenix (and a 68020) right now.

There are plenty of us running Linux on m68k, and m68k is well supported by the Linux kernel and the GNU tool chain, in parallel with ColdFire. If you manage to provide a modern and fast, and well documented 68k CPU, you will quickly find Linux running on it, as well as NetBSD.

I agree. Frank Wille is a NetBSD developer (Amiga/PPC ports) and expressed interest in a 68k version of Phoenix with MMU. The low memory footprint could make it useful for small servers. The Amiga and BSD are almost opposite ends of the spectrum as far as security so supporting Unix (and other high security OSs like Plan9) would attract a wider audiance.

For sake of compatibility for those who want hardware to run old m68k OSes (NeXTStep, Plan9, A\UX, MacOS...) I think compatibility with 68040 is favourable. It may be worthwhile to check with people over at http://www.nextcomputers.org/ if they would be interested.

There is little difference between the 68040 and 68060 MMU as already stated. The 68060 MMU has a few more restrictions. Most OSs abandoned the 68k before support for the 68060 MMU was added so a 68040 MMU interface would be more compatible. Adding support for an updated MMU would likely require more changes than from 68040 MMU to 68060 MMU. Maybe some kind of compatibility layer could be added in between to get old OSs working and to have a working system when enabling old support.

[matthey]

@ThoR
I used the term virtual address instead of logical address, hoping non-technical people would understand it better. I guess I won't be writing any technical manuals on the MMU.

I wouldn't go for a hierarchy, it's all complicating matters. A flat page table within which the MMU finds entries by trying several hash algorithms to find a suitable table entry would be entirely sufficient. Everything else, like filling the page table, or replacing descriptors in the page, can be done entirely in software. This software can do the table walk and emulate whatever 68K MMU there is.

So would support code be loaded before boot which would trap when 68040 MMU instructions not in hardware were used? Then offer a supervisor space library interface to the same code (like fpsp.resource but supervisor only) which can be used to reduce the trap overhead? This could make it easy to get an OS using a 68040 MMU up and running and then slowly replace the trapped MMU instructions?

[matthey]

Exactly, and for Amiga (and Atari) this is pretty much done deal, FPGA implementations of chipsets exists, but I don't this is the case for other m68k systems.

@matthey, a "cherry pi" would need an FPGA anyhow to be useful for AmigaOS. Price wise, what is more expencive you think, a bigger FPGA to hold both CPU and chipset and whatnot, or an ASIC for CPU and a "cheaper" FPGA for chipset++?

It should be possible to bake the Amiga chipset and possibly even other chipsets into the ASIC, although a small FPGA for a chipset would be more flexible. I believe the power could be switched off to the chipsets if someone wanted a CPU only. Then again, it would be useful if the CPU came with a chipset, more I/O support like ethernet and USB, memory controller and even a small amount of memory. One of the reasons ARM SoCs are used so much is that they are convenient, cheap to build a board and low power. If there was a decent 68k SoC on the market, I bet there would be a slew of new Amiga hardware projects pop up over night.