OK, I am not around here much, and just recently started putting together an amiga. But as I was browsing ebay and amibay looking for an accelerator, I had a thought. Someone with more knowledge than me may be able to shoot this full of holes, but maybe im on to something:
Ok, we all know UAE works great, is very fast, faster than the fastest accelerator by quite a bit. And speed upgrades are regularly released. However its not completely compatible and not "real" hardware, often in the sound/ custom chips area. They never made any faster 68060's than 100mhz, and these were never used on amiga accelerators. I have read threads about trying to use "Coldfire" chips, etc. but these all have varying issues.
With modern busses and interfaces in a pc so fast, and atleast the 68k processor emulation probably nearly perfected, why could we not use a PC as an accelerator? Follow me through here: Software program basically emulates the 68k40/60, whichever model + Co-Processor. Build an interface (Should be easy enough) to fit the CPU slot on the amiga, a short cable (Don't know the technicalities of sending CPU data on a cable?) and connect it to the pc via? I would guess PCI Express would have plenty of bandwidth. So have a small card in the pc which should be cheap enough, all it really needs to do is convert modern signals to 68k amiga compatible signals, then put these out to the cpu slot of the amiga.
As far as the amiga is concerned it would just be talking to an accelerator board, even though its a seperate pc.
Advantages? Well, you could allocate as much memory to the accelerator as you want, and adjust as needed. You can tweak the code etc quickly and easily, no need for revamping hardware / etc. You could change processor types / speeds with a simple reboot of the amiga. Obviously it would be price competitive with current accelerator cards, as you can buy a brand new high speed pc for 300$ many times. And most of us have them anyways. So price is a big advantage, if you could produce the hardware interface for 100$ish bundled with the software to make it all work.
Negatives? Well, you would have to have the pc on anytime you used your amiga ACCELERATED (Don't see any reason you could not have a switch of sorts to simply boot your amiga stand alone stock), so power would be greatly increased (Of course in this day and age pcs are faster and great on power consumption, and alot of us, myself include run a pc 24/7 so it would not make much difference). Size? I imagine though with some of the smaller form factor pc's you could make something a little bigger than a mac mini and just dedicate it beside the amiga as a sort of "External" accelerator. Or plug it into your regular pc and just use it as needed?
So anyone with some real knowledge want to tell me why it won't work? It seems feasible, but I am not a real good hardware guy. Perhaps timing issues would be insurmountable? Anyone?
