One possible future of the Amiga?

[commodorejohn]

With all the talk about possible updated Amigas lately, I just thought I'd share something I discovered today: Intel has announced the Stellarton; it amounts to a chip containing an Atom CPU @ 600-1600MHz, a whole peripheral chipset, and best of all, an Altera FPGA that's fast, fully integrated, and software-rewritable from the CPU. In other words, it's basically a whole computer on one chip, plus a giant roll-your-own-hardware sandbox. Call me crazy, but this sounds like the perfect piece of technology to build a next-gen Amiga out of.

As anyone who's tried to run an emulator on a lower-end PC knows, the big performance sink is in trying to provide accurate audio and video output; the CPU is generally trivial by comparison. Offloading the A/V emulation to an FPGA reimplementation would free up the Atom to focus on everything else, chiefly the CPU emulation (assuming that the FPGA couldn't do that faster, of course.) And since the Stellarton includes basically a full motherboard chipset in the Atom part of the package, you wouldn't even need a custom PCB to start with; whatever Intel provides in the way of a development board should suffice. Heck, you could even use the Atom natively, if you're one of those [strike]weenies[/strike] fine people who prefer AROS.

Maybe I'm talking crazy talk, but considering what's been pulled off with an FPGA alone, it seems like this could be an easy and inexpensive path to a next-gen Amiga platform. At any rate, I am definitely looking forward to 2011

[commodorejohn]

I dunno, it sounds like the Atom E600 (the Stellarton minus the FPGA) goes down as low as $20 with quantity purchases. I've asked to be notified when they come out with a development board, so we'll see what happens with that..

[commodorejohn]

Maybe I missed something, but I don't think people's problem with the X1000 was the technology...

[commodorejohn]

Yeah. I don't know if anything will actually come of this, I just think that, given that it seems to be a fairly powerful yet affordably-priced piece of hardware, it could be a potentially great tool for our purposes Time will tell.

[commodorejohn]

From a "Weenies" point of view, it sounds interesting especially if tied into the Emumiga 68k emulation software for Aros in development. Problem as ever is who is going to do it because most projects get abuse from some corner or another instead of general encouragement. So Intel may be the saviour of the Amiga, who would have thought ;-)

That's why I'm hoping there's a decent development board made available. With the peripherals from the Atom E600 and a companion peripheral chip introduced alongside it, there's basically a full motherboard on a couple chips, so there'd be no need to design a custom PCB and try to get it manufactured, at least not from the start.

I'd like to know the specs of the FPGA.  If it has enough gates to reproduce a classic Amiga, and the price is reasonable, it could be a good substitute for a minimig.

This is a good question. I don't know so much about FPGAs, but if the mock-up they're using in promotional shots is anywhere near accurate, the FPGA is actually bigger than the Atom + peripherals die.

[commodorejohn]

I dunno. If I can get a development board or something for this, I want to start playing around with FPGA development, but I'd need a lot more practice before I'd commit to something like that. But haven't projects like Minimig already implemented much of the Amiga functionality on FPGA? Could that groundwork be borrowed for use with this?