What would your ideal upgrade be right now for your Amiga(s)

[marcfrick2112]

Man, an RTG graphics card that I could afford for my A1200T!

Please!

Sorry, but 2MB CHIP RAM is lousy!!!

[platon42]

Which is certainly impressive, but 8.5MB/s, whilst fast for a classic Amiga is not high speed as per USB2 standards for bulk transfers, ~30MB/s is. My reply was on the basis of achieving the latter, ie USB2 transfer rates comparable to what everybody else is used to.

Of course, but that's an implementation issue. There's not a lot in the standard that I'm aware of that dictates how much data a hardware device should buffer. I've seen USB2 controllers that will happily generate an interrupt every packet. Likewise, I've seen ethernet adapters that seem to implement a sensible degree of buffering and don't produce quite the same overhead - very important given the speeds they can reach.

You know that most Amiga classic systems have a memory bandwidth in one direction (i.e. read OR write) of often less than 15 MB/sec? Let alone a transfer between TWO ports (i.e. read AND write). Did you ever benchmark the USB bulk performance of real USB devices? Then you would know that the theoretical 30 MB/sec raw bandwidth of the USB spec are not reached in practice. Even on a Pegasos or MacMini, I never got much faster than around 23 MB/sec.

And the fact that some Windows deseased USB devices only support single USB transfers of up to 64KB does not really help it (there is no such limit defined in the Spec).

Get real, USB1.1 maxes out at 1MB/sec, and everything over that is USB2.0 highspeed.

[Franko]

Been thinking, as I'm no expert or have much knowledge about chip design, then hopefully someone who does would be able to answer this question...

To me with all the modern technology available and with being able to quite literally cram an old computer onto a single chip. Would it not be possible for one of the big chip manufacturers to make 060 chips in a modern format that could run at speeds far in excess of the rather limited 50Mhz of most 060 chips...

Think about having an 060 Amiga accelerator board running at several hundred Mhz or more for our miggies, that would be neat...

[Karlos]

You know that most Amiga classic systems have a memory bandwidth in one direction (i.e. read OR write) of often less than 15 MB/sec?

Absolutely, which is why I said in my first post about it that actually finding something inside the amiga to connect it to that could handle full USB2 bulk transfer speeds would be a problem (the interrupt load comment came after that). I actually suggested that something like a USB2 card attached by GRexx might be a viable option *if* a sensible stack and driver set existed.

Let alone a transfer between TWO ports (i.e. read AND write). Did you ever benchmark the USB bulk performance of real USB devices? Then you would know that the theoretical 30 MB/sec raw bandwidth of the USB spec are not reached in practice. Even on a Pegasos or MacMini, I never got much faster than around 23 MB/sec.

Actually, I have several high speed external USB2 drives. The highest USB2 bulk transfer I've achieved copying data from one to another on my PC is around 28MB/s when copying files of around 1GB in size. I've never seen it go higher than that, but as I said, it does put a measurable load on the system in terms of interrupt handling. Fortunately, being a quad core system, that still leaves plenty of CPU for other tasks.

[bloodline]

Been thinking, as I'm no expert or have much knowledge about chip design, then hopefully someone who does would be able to answer this question...

To me with all the modern technology available and with being able to quite literally cram an old computer onto a single chip. Would it not be possible for one of the big chip manufacturers to make 060 chips in a modern format that could run at speeds far in excess of the rather limited 50Mhz of most 060 chips...

Think about having an 060 Amiga accelerator board running at several hundred Mhz or more for our miggies, that would be neat...

The 060 design doesn't exist for modern chip processes so it's a no go.

A better idea is to take a cheap SoC (system on a chip, the type of chip you find in smart phones) and run an emulator on it... Thus my keeness on the £15 Raspberry Pi computer