Most bang for 600 USD?

[freqmax]

Provided access to chip-fab and circuit board manufacturing where the volume price must be lower than 600 USD. What kind of setup hardware wise would you use to make something that make technology minded people go OMG!!-must have!  ..?

[Lord Aga]

It would have to be a new 68K Amiga Nothing other than that.

[Mrs Beanbag]

Yes!  AGA-compatible, with DVI-out.  3GHz "68080" (quad core?).  PCiE.

I am considering a project of my own, making an accelerator for A1200 with an ARM CPU running software emulation.  What is the point of that?  Well lots of people are doing it with FPGAs but it would seem cheaper, faster and easier to do it this way as there are software emu's already available, ARM chips come in the GHz range already and are widely available (and the logical next step for desktop PCs in general if you ask me) and affordable.  The software would be in ROM on the card itself so you wouldn't know it was there.  Why not just emulate the whole Amiga on a PC?  Well because then you have to host the emulator in some other OS you have to boot up, ugh.  And it doesn't feel the same.

After that, remake an A1200 motherboard with AGA in an FPGA, no CPU but with the accelerator edge connector, and no 14MHz limit.  (This is why I asked about core licensing elsewhere, but I think I'll try the accelerator first.)

[Lord Aga]

I totally get your idea Mrs Beanbag and am looking forward to following your project

[A6000]

Amiga compatible, with AAA chipset and a GPGPU that executes 68k instruction set as a subset of its own graphics oriented instruction set.

[Mrs Beanbag]

But AAA wasn't going to be completely compatible with AGA anyway, and since it was never released there is no software for it, and graphics hardware has advanced so much since then it hardly seems worth bothering.  However PCs still maintain legacy text mode/VGA for various reasons so there's no reason we can't have AGA compatibility in there, alongside some more established GPU design from the likes of nVidia.  In fact a PCIe slot would be a must anyway.

I like the way the Sega Megadrive kept the Master System's Z80 as a co-processor, and then the Saturn had a 68000 as a co-processor!  Still, I think these days software emulation of the 68k should suffice, since it would still be faster than any real Motorolla chip that was ever put in an Amiga, as long as the emulator is part of the hardware so it's invisible, and new software can use whatever CPU it really is in its native language.  Which might require the OS to pull some tricks but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

[runequester]

Is the aim to make amiga users excited or to make general tech nerds excited?

[Mrs Beanbag]

You mean everyone wouldn't be excited by a new Amiga?

[freqmax]

I intended something that excite general tech nerds. In particular something that makes it possible to do something that isn't possible currently for that kind of economic price point. The physcal technologies of Amiga is too far away in the tech race to build something competitive upon.

Do remember that the capacity of a "normal" PC became available for really large corporations and goverments in the 1960s. The problem were size and price.

Oh and for ARM emulation of 68k, it's a nice idea but will wreck cycle accurency and lock-step.

[Iggy]

You people don't want much.
$600? That's all you want to pay?
And the seller just has to develop a new 68K processor, a new chipset, and somehow miraculously get licenses for the legacy software (as well as develop the new code that implements the new features).
 
Hey, who wouldn't want to invest in that?

[Mrs Beanbag]

Well I don't know what excites general tech nerds, except after the event, and it usually surprises me.  But the thing that really impressed people about the Amiga when it came out was raytracing.  I've read a paper about quite an impressive real-time raytracer (several frames per second) implemented in an FPGA that ran at alarmingly low clock speeds, so maybe something like that could do the trick.  Texture mapping and shading has served the games industry well so far but it's not "the real deal" and maybe it stops being the most efficient solution at some level of detail.

[Iggy]

I intended something that excite general tech nerds. In particular something that makes it possible to do something that isn't possible currently for that kind of economic price point. The physcal technologies of Amiga is too far away in the tech race to build something competitive upon.
 
Do remember that the capacity of a "normal" PC became available for really large corporations and goverments in the 1960s. The problem were size and price.
 
Oh and for ARM emulation of 68k, it's a nice idea but will wreck cycle accurency and lock-step.

 
OK, that's closer to home.
You get some big money backers.
You contract IBM to make a processor similar to what's going in the next generation of game consoles.
 
You design a basic machine that can either play games or be expanded into a real computer (add a little memory, a keyboard, a mouse, etc).
 
You pay the MorphOS developers big money to devote real time to taking their OS to where Quark could have gone - multitasking Q-Box (and A-Box can be retained for Amiga compatibility and maybe even enhanced).
 
Sell it for slightly more then a game console by appealing to hackers and technically oriented electronic enthusiasts ($600 sounds right).
 
Think it would generate some excitement?
 
And no Amiga name, so no curse.

[commodorejohn]

Oh and for ARM emulation of 68k, it's a nice idea but will wreck cycle accurency and lock-step.

Cycle-accuracy is shot with any accelerator anyway; that's pretty much the point. If you need accuracy, you pretty much just go with the built-in CPU.

Well I don't know what excites general tech  nerds, except after the event, and it usually surprises me.  But the  thing that really impressed people about the Amiga when it came out was  raytracing.  I've read a paper about quite an impressive real-time  raytracer (several frames per second) implemented in an FPGA that ran at  alarmingly low clock speeds, so maybe something like that could do the  trick.  Texture mapping and shading has served the games industry well  so far but it's not "the real deal" and maybe it stops being the most  efficient solution at some level of detail.

I'd like to see a link for that. "Done in an FPGA" sounds like the crucial factor there, anyway - raytracing is made for massive parallelization, and in an FPGA that's easy to do. On a general-purpose CPU, not so much.

[freqmax]

But it feels like the same track over again. It's still the standard setup CPU-GPU-RAM, only faster. No paradigm shift. The only real bright point is a cleverly designed CPU, but that cost plenty these days and it might be more efficient to use commercially available chips in that area.

When Amiga did color graphics, stereo sound and multitasking. IBM PC did poor color palette graphics, beeps, single task using a bus that got easily stalled.

[Mrs Beanbag]

http://www-wjp.cs.uni-saarland.de/publikationen/SWWPS04.pdf

GPUs, on the other hand, are made for massive parallelization, but aren't necessarily optimal for full on ray-tracing, for a variety of reasons, impressive though they are.