One company quoted $19.95.
Most slightly higher (although not as silly as US pricing).
Long time lerker .. first time poster..
I have a few questions; You are raving about these 68060FE133 chips being the best thing since sliced bread but have you actually tried any? It's very easy to say that someone should make a board based on those chips.. but it begs the question; If it is so easy why aren't *you* doing it instead of bad mouthing Jens for not doing it?
What's left of the "amiga community" seem to come up thing "I want a turbo card with n gigs of DDR, PCI blah blah" on a daily basis but there seems to actually only be three or four people actually still making serious efforts on producing new hardware (Jens, MikeJ etc).
Back to technical details.. Ok, so you can get these 68060FE133 parts from Chinese parts brokers. They don't exist according to Freescale but some of the documentation on some of the late 68k parts is a bit patchy.. i.e. what are all of the different 68SEC000 part numbers about? I suspect it's ROHS compliance or something but none of the datasheets or Product Change Notifications seem to go into any detail about what the different versions of the 68SEC000 are. The details on the 3.3v static 68040V parts is equally thin on the ground. So lets give these 68060FE133 parts the benefit of the doubt. It's possible that Motorola/Freescale produced them for one customer or something and there just happens to be a bunch of them around.
I'm not sure if you have any experience with Chinese parts brokers.. but there is a reason why Digikey etc have $200+ for certain 68k parts and a parts broker will quote you ~$20 for the same part. The reason is the Chinese broker has no idea if the parts are real or work and they don't care either. I did an experiment with 68SEC000 parts; I bought ~$200 worth of sample parts from about 5 or 6 brokers. The prices ranged from about $6 each to as low as $2 for 68SEC000FU10 (Motorola marked, 10Mhz). I have 5 - 10 parts from each broker.. To a certain extent you can use the mask revision,date code and assembly stamp on the underside of the chip to verify the parts. There are 3 masks of the 68SEC000 that I know about and via the PCNs on Freescale site I can work out if the date code is weird for that mask and from some other PCNs I can guess where a chip of that date code should have been packaged (Hong Kong or Malaysia). Out of all of the parts I think only one order *seems* like real parts. A lot of them are obviously suspect by the weird texture of the top of the chip (i.e. it feels like it has been sanded to remove the real markings) or the markings on the chip are just wrong. I have a theory that Chinese brokers will re-label chips to order (i.e. they have a pile of chips that are equivalent or at least the same form factor and they re-label them to suite whatever the customer has ordered). To test this I ordered some Freescale 68SEC000AE16 parts.. These should be Freescale marked (the part number is a freescale one, not a Motorola one) and should be a .5mm QFP not a .8mm QFP like the ones I had order up to that point.. I intentionally didn't put what package that the part should be in the Request For Quote. Out of all of the 20 or so quotes I got I had only one that stated the parts they had were LQFP as they should have. I ordered some from 2 or 3 of the brokers... guess what turned up a few weeks later? .8mm pitch QFPs with AE part numbers (If you haven't followed what I'm saying so far.. they shouldn't exist).
This is for hobby stuff so I don't really mind as long as the chips work. So I made up a small test jig with a BeagleBone that resets the chip and clocks it a few times to check if the stobes etc start doing the right things. I tested one chip from each batch (I have to solder them to a carrier, so I can't test them all) and they all seem to pass this basic "looks like a 68000 starting up" test. So .. what do you reckon is inside of these things? Without decapping them I will never know. I don't have the stuff to do it or I would have done it already.
Back to the 68060FE133 and Jens or whoever making a turbo card with them. The only place you can get them is Chinese brokers which are shady to say the least (See above). If you have followed MikeJ's FPGAArcade posts you will realise how difficult it is to get existing-according-to-Freescale 68060's that haven't been relabelled to a newer mask revision.
So any of these you buy should be treated as suspect from the get go. If you are shipping a product to end users you can't go shipping those parts without doing a lot of testing. They could be working chips with the part number changed to make them look faster.. they could be reject parts that have been saved and labelled, they could be empty plastic lumps with legs sticking out of the side. Who knows? If you could trust Chinese brokers I would have a pile of the 68040V's on my desk (They quoted $20 for those when the Digikey price is ~$200) and I would be designing a machine to use them in.. a 3.3v 68040 + FPGA sounds good to me. Hell, I can get some of those BGA 68060 parts from China for ~$20 .. maybe I should get some of those too? Maybe I would get really lucky and have real parts that worked 100% but it's more likely that they will be utter crap and the broker will disappear when I contact them about it.
The only person that seems to have actually tried those chips seems to be the Netami guy.. but I can't find anything that says if they actually worked or not, what the revision register said etc. Does anyone have a link? At least with the 68060 there is some data you can verify the revision against burnt into the chip..
The only cheap way I would recommend sourcing 68k parts is via surplus sellers in the US or similar. I have sourced some 68SEC000 parts for better than Digikey prices and recently some bog standard 68040FE parts for a tenth of the Digikey price this way. You can't be 100% sure they aren't fakes but it's a lot less likely... But for people shipping a product this is really still too risky IMHO and the quantities you can get hold of are in the tens of units (Maybe enough considering the market?). So you either have spend ages sourcing and testing the hell out of cheap parts or pay the crazy price that decent distributors want. Sounds like an awful lot of hassle for a product that might ship 50 units and for customers that harp on about how they could do better all the time..
