"Replicate", not "take the code and use it". I suppose AMD didn't give Intel the VHDL sources to their x64 extension either...
It is one of those "I will believe it when I see it" things.
I don't think for an FPGA project because then the code would spread. For an ASIC? I guess that would be a dream to come true.
For Amiga users only, that is a very small market for doing ASIC production of an oddball CPU.
A comparison against PowerPC makes sense in the Amiga world, even more so since the PPC softcore is actually marketed as an ASIC, too, I just forgot the part number.
Are you saying that there are AmigaOne systems around running a FPGA softcore PowerPC?
NIOS is a popular softcore and probably was available to the testers at IBM and serves the role as a neutral third for comparing both apollo and PPC.
However, those other cores have features that appeal to the real world markets and are widely supported outside of Amiga sphere.
I don't know. He may be proud of their 68k implementation which took them seven years and isn't even complete yet? He likes to point out that dropping 68k and going RISC wasn't as wise a move as it seemed in the early 90s. Perhaps he hopes that somebody will license the core for an ASIC?
That could happen if the first products would be truly compatible with existing OSes, toolchains and software. Instead it is a core that is not really compatible enough, and does not yet have any toolchain and compiler backends. Hopefully they will show up, but with an architecture only catering to how Amiga use 68k, what are the odds it will happen? I have asked around in various other 68k camps (NetBSD, Linux, NeXT, Atari), and the answer is always the same - not compatible enough, cannot be bothered.
