Just for my understanding, what would a standalone Vampire offer more than a MIST/Replay Arcade FPGA??
the cpu used on vampire, is a next generation cpu in 68k family.
it offer full compatibility with all the previous cpu.
but, also it offer completely new instructions. multimedia instructions (similar to intel 'mmx') but also a simd (similar to ppc 'altivec') and many other new features.
not to mention raw power. apollo cpu performs a lot better than the cpu found in other standalone products.
sysinfo is a bad benchmark tool,
apollo team made 'minibench' which is more reliable.
vampire score 150+ mips
as you can see here:
http://www.apollo-accelerators.com/files/Apollo_datasheet.pdfalso, all the new intructions mentionned above, have to power to speedup even more data processing, for games and multimedia for example.
so, a standalone vampire would bring
- all backward compatibility
- a lot more power
- saga (think updated, faster aga)
- modern mainboard
with possibility to use off the shelves usb mouse, keyboard, ethernet, hdd ..etc.. without needing all the adaptors. recent chips, memory, capacitors, alimentation and battery.
