Motorola 68060 FPGA replacement module (idea)

[mongo]

Indeed, and I've been very excited about that. It's basically what I imagine for this discussion, only with a 68000 plug on the bottom rather than 040/060. It's not exactly shaped like a 68000, it has level shifting to be 5V safe, has power and memory onboard. But very much the same idea. He's working with the TG68, which has had some issues to work out to fit onto a standard 68000 bus. I'd really like to see the Suska 68000 code in there instead, as I think it would more readily fit the standard bus than the TG68. (Though I understand that further work on TG68 core is improving that as well, in addition to enhancing to 020 compatibility)

TobiFlex had the TG68 core running on an A500 about 3 years ago.

http://www.a1k.org/forum/showthread.php?t=20223

[freqmax]

I thought everything you needed to interface that x86 pain is in the datasheets? anyway perhaps a x86-microcontroller could do the job. But I still see that solution as flawed.
It also adds another dependency on a chip to source. With a generic HDL source you can just neareast enough powerfull FPGA to do the job. And only have one big chip to deal with.

[billt]

I thought everything you needed to interface that x86 pain is in the datasheets? anyway perhaps a x86-microcontroller could do the job. But I still see that solution as flawed.
It also adds another dependency on a chip to source. With a generic HDL source you can just neareast enough powerfull FPGA to do the job. And only have one big chip to deal with.

datasheets will talk about pinouts, such as connecting cpu to PCH(north/southbridge), pci-express, pci, etc. it won't talk about how to make a new chip to hook onto the PCH bus. it's been hypothesized that the PCH chips connect via PCI-Express, similar to AMD FCH and southbridges, which is close enough to work on X1000, but isn't trivial either from the rumors I've heard. If it's close enough to PCI-Express, design or buy a controller for that, and work our any oddities yourself. or go pci, which is easier perhaps, but requires a southbridge/PCH/FCH with a pci bus to be involved. the tiniest pc motherboards like pico_itx may or may not have exposed pci or pci-express... I don't know them, and haven't yet gone looking.

[Mrs Beanbag]

Maybe someone can find this useful:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/systems/opensparc/index.html
Obviously that is a different ISA altogether but such things as pipelining, cache etc are presumably ripe for the picking. I don't know very much about the Sparc ISA.

[JimDrew]

Would the x86 doing nothing more than emulating a 68K be higher performance than the FPGA? That's possible.

Yes.  Some glue logic (Mach or some type of small FPGA) and probably a bit of dual ported RAM would make a great 680x0 emulator.  The performance could be quite impressive even with an older x86 CPU.  The x86 CPU would be not much more than a state machine and floating point processor.  This is a project that makes sense to me... and since I have written a 68040 core in x86 assembly, I could probably lend a hand.  

[freqmax]

Lot's more chips to source, route, solder, and debug. I prefer just one FPGA and done with it.

[JimDrew]

I guess it depends on how fast you want things to go.  A 75MHz 68060 is around 110 MIPs.  An Intel Pentium Pro was 541 MIPs.  Funny thing is that the Xenon x86 used in the XBox360 is 19,200 MIPs.  If you really want to make things go, try out a Core i7 3960x at 177,730 MIPs.

I think the biggest challenge in this design would be to figure out how slow of an Intel CPU you would need to so you weren't just wasting time waiting on the bus to change.

[wawrzon]

wow?! so where we start. actually we would have to agree on hardware to use. x86 is one option. arm is another, perhaps better because of endianness and because its easier to find contemporary module witha single core cpu. i think the board would have to be assembled of a prefabricated module and a glue bridgeboard.

[mongo]

Lot's more chips to source, route, solder, and debug. I prefer just one FPGA and done with it.

You can get one of Xlinx's Zynq-7000 devices, which is basically an FPGA with a dual core ARM Cortex-A9 all in one chip.

http://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/soc/zynq-7000/silicon-devices/index.htm

[psxphill]

datasheets will talk about pinouts, such as connecting cpu to PCH(north/southbridge), pci-express, pci, etc. it won't talk about how to make a new chip to hook onto the PCH bus.

Some of Intel's processor have a much simpler bus.
 
http://www.versalogic.com/support/Downloads/PDF/Intel_Atom_Datasheet.pdf
 
I wouldn't want to solder something like that though.
 
I've tried to find a datasheet for one of the more recent atoms & they do seem to be difficult to find. If Intel want to take on Arm in the mobile phone market then they'll have to make it public at some point though.
 
I think it's unrealistic to do this in an 68060 replacement module, but an A1200 accelerator design would be awesome.

[wawrzon]

i think a tiny industrial module is a better choice than a bga cpu because it provides chipset, ram and doesnt require soldering. it should be singlecore too i guess, emulation doesnt need multiple cpus.

btw here is a corresponding thread on a1k, some people such as ratte, newamigauser, jens schoenfeld (paradroid) considering 68k, fpga and x86 emu accelerator as option:
http://www.a1k.org/forum/showthread.php?t=35374&page=11

[wawrzon]

I think it's unrealistic to do this in an 68060 replacement module, but an A1200 accelerator design would be awesome.

or an 030slot board for big box amigas. the glueboard could provide both variants.

[JimDrew]

You can get one of Xlinx's Zynq-7000 devices, which is basically an FPGA with a dual core ARM Cortex-A9 all in one chip.

http://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/soc/zynq-7000/silicon-devices/index.htm

That might be the Holy Grail!  An integrated FPGA with twin high speed ARM cores would work great @1GHz.    This means just one chip interfaced to a 040/060 PGA socket plug.  I am sure you could keep the entire thing within the form factor of a standard 040/060 chip.

edit - these are way too expensive!  You are still better off with a $50 x86 CPU.

[psxphill]

or an 030slot board for big box amigas. the glueboard could provide both variants.

Big box amiga's will always be a minority, but there should be no reason why they are ignored. I got rid of an A1500 recently because I'd given up on anyone producing anything for it. In the late 90's I was thinking of doing an A1200 to A2000 cpu slot adapter but I never really started. In fact it would probably by just as effective to produce adapters for all the different amiga's to allow an A1200 accelerator to be fitted.
 
You could do an a500 sidecar too.

[mongo]

edit - these are way too expensive!  You are still better off with a $50 x86 CPU.

The XC7Z010 is $63.75 in single quantities.

[Iggy]

The XC7Z010 is $63.75 in single quantities.

Are these even in production yet?
There is no speed rating listed for the 10 component.

Other then that, it looks like a neat device.