Sam460ex available with AmigaOS 4.1

[m3x]

So only partial GFX support then. No 3D. And you can't use it together with SATA HDD's/CD-ROM's/DVD's anyway, so...

You are wrong here

There are 3 slots on the board, not two:

- 16x PCIE slot to be used with the GFX card
- PCI slot for SATA / SATA2 or Catweasel or Audio, etc
- 1x PCIE slot which is mutually exclusive with the onboard SATA2

How about the Gigabit Ethernet, is that supported?

Yes

"Notes: the SATA2 port and the PCI-e 1x slot are mutually exclusive, only one of them can be used at a time", I mean, come on!

Again, see above...

[m3x]

ive forgot one question. will i get an amigaos4.1 box with the sam board or will it only be an burned or whatever boxless media? i like big boxes on the shelves, this one would take place near my old os3.5 box and the little os3.9 jewelcase. BIG BOXES BIG BOXES BIG BOXES - this way anyone who will visit my home can see, what a big ultragigaturboNERD I AM. i like it this way.

cheers acube

You'll receive a box with printed manuals and install CD, like the one on this page:

http://www.acube-systems.biz/index.php?page=software&pid=1

[m3x]

Well, at least they put a Lattice XP2 FPGA on the thing. In previous versions of their Sam's, the FPGA's has proven to be such useful for... well, uhm... yeah... Well, maybe if they rebrand the chip "XENA Light" and the optional 80 I/O pins expansion connector "XORRO Light" the magic will happen? Because XENA and XORRO is what makes boards true Amigas, everyone knows that! :p

Just a few words to clarify the FPGA usage on the Sam boards: indeed the FPGA _is_ currently used on both 440 and 460 (more on the new 460 than on the 440)
Instead using a CPLD as a "glue chip" to control several signals on the board, we decided to use a more versatile FPGA.
Teorically speaking, if you remove the FPGA chip from the board, it won't work at all.

Plus, the presence of a FPGA open up more opportunities to personalize the board for the industrial market, since there is still free space to be used on the XP and XP2.

We know the FPGA is not currently used on the Amiga side, but this isn't the primary reason for the presence of the FPGA on our boards.

[m3x]

So basically you have no intentions to release any documentation on how to use the FPGA? Where's this Amiga custom HW emulation for SAM 440?

It's rather interesting considering the effort put to marketing FPGA a the wonder device here: http://www.acube-systems.biz/common/Bitplane15.pdf

Where I said we don't release any documentation about the FPGA ?
What an interested developer needs to use the XP/XP2 FPGA is already on LatticeSemi web site (tools, datasheet, application notes, IP etc..)
A LatticeSemi JTAG cable is needed to reprogram the FPGA with a new bitstream.
We provide some additional info how the FPGA is connected to the onboard buses under written request.

[m3x]

Does this mean that FPGA cannot be reprogrammed with the CPU? Anyone wanting to install new programming such as amiga chipset emulation needs to buy such JTAG cable? How much is it? Ah to answer myself: HW-USBN-2A, $149 USD, 139 € in some european shop.

The FPGA can be reprogrammed in several ways, and in some way directly from the CPU too.

Taking as an example the custom hw emulation, an additional little board connected to the 80 pin expansion slot may reprogramm the FPGA (the jtag pins are replicated there)
This little board may provide additional joystick ports, aga/audio output etc..

Another way to reprogram the FPGA with the CPU is using 4 GPIO pins connected to the FPGA JTAG connector.

I'm currently pondering to modify U-Boot to allow developers to use such technic.

Hmm wait. You're saying that all the current programming on the FPGA can be overwritten or that the current program can be downloaded from LatticeSemi website? I thought the board would be bricked if the original programming was overwritten.

No, the additional info how the FPGA is connected to the onboard buses includes how to not "brick" the board.

[m3x]

Hmm. So would solution like this be isolated from the rest of the system or would it be possible to use keyboard, mouse etc connected to SAM 4x0 for input? Would it be possible to read/write data from host HDD(s)? Would it be possible to have the graphics output in a window? Assuming integration at this level is possible then it could be worth the effort.

On both 440 and 460 boards the FPGA is connected to a PPC local bus (EBC, 16 bit wide) and have 4 MB addressing space available.

Currently the FPGA is mapped at address 0xFF000000 on the 440 and 0x4 FF000000 on the 460 (the 460 has 36 bit physical addressing space)
The base address may be modified by changing one register on the 440/460 cpu.

The FPGA may act as master on the EBC bus and transfer data to/from any location in main ram (maybe using DMA too, need to check if it's possible on the PLB3 bus)

Basically it's possible to reach a high level of integration, with a deep knowledge of the 440 architecture.

[m3x]

@m3x

It appears that Sam460 runs the AMCC460 slightly (15%) overclocked. Is this similar to the overclocked 440 models where the memory bus is slightly underclocked? Does this explain why 7447 166MHz DDR-333 memory interface appears to be faster than Sam460 DDR2-400 memory interface?

You have some information slight wrong and outdated

On the Sam440ep models, the DDR runs at the nominal speed (133 Mhz) on the 667 Mhz and 800 models, and run overclocked on the 733 Mhz model (147 Mhz)
There is a pci-update which overclock the PCI unit on the SoC, but due constraints in the internal multipliers, is not possibile to overclock both DDR and PCI unit, and thus on this model the user may choose to keep the original setup or to overclock the PCI unit.

On the Sam460ex the DDR is overclocked as the CPU. The reason why right now the reported speed is somewhat low is due the very conservative setup done by U-Boot, and because APM is still updating their autoconfig code.

I was able to enhance the speed just recently and now the figures are as follow:

Read: 350 MB/s - Write: 560 MB/s

Next U-Boot versions for our board will include modifications on the DDR config code to achive higher speed transfers.