A project I'd like to see from Jens...

[freqmax]

What has to be taken into account is also the amount of expensive and complex support circuitry to support various CPU:s. Doing GHz signal routing between CPU and memory ain't fun!

A single chip core with CPU+RAM is way simpler to deal with.

A few vendor caveats. Watch out for Intel EOL:ing chips and Broadcom tend to have their own brand of NDA and secrecy hell.

Majastas A600 accelerator is now being done by @biggun here? and Cyclone-5 being the descendant?

Has the source for the FPGA Arcade come out yet? I think it's a great platform. But stuff that actually gets used is even better

[SamuraiCrow]

Majastas A600 accelerator is now being done by @biggun here? and Cyclone-5 being the descendant?

Has the source for the FPGA Arcade come out yet? I think it's a great platform. But stuff that actually gets used is even better

Majsta is working with Biggun on the accelerator project because the original softcore used in the A600 accelerator was not as fast as the Phoenix core developed by the Apollo team (which is lead by Biggun).

I suspect that (based on previous conversations and threads on various forums) the new Cyclone 5 based accelerator is just a 68000 chip socket harness for the Sockit board and other harnesses are in development for other Amigas.

The FPGA Arcade Replay board is only in tester's hands right now.  I wonder how likely a Replay board add-on version based on the Sockit would be, given that the Cyclone 5 is likely more advanced than the FPGA on the Replay board.  I'd love a solution like this because it would free up space on the Cyclone for MMU and FPU while freeing up space on the Replay board for better graphics card emulation.  ;-)

[matthey]

The FPGA Arcade Replay board is only in tester's hands right now.  I wonder how likely a Replay board add-on version based on the Sockit would be, given that the Cyclone 5 is likely more advanced than the FPGA on the Replay board.  I'd love a solution like this because it would free up space on the Cyclone for MMU and FPU while freeing up space on the Replay board for better graphics card emulation.  ;-)

The fpgaArcade fpga is big enough for CPU+MMU+FPU+AGA. Fitment might start to get tight with more advanced and pipelined versions of the processors. The Cyclone V should have even more room which makes development easier and allows for larger caches.

[freqmax]

What FPGA does the Cyclone-5 use?

[matthey]

What FPGA does the Cyclone-5 use?

The Cyclone V is an Altera fpga.

Vampire 500/1000/2000/CDTV fpga
Brand: Altera
Family: Cyclone V
Model: unknown (to me)

fpgaArcade fpga
Brand: Xilinx
Family: Spartan-3E
Model: XC3S1600E

[freqmax]

Guess that makes doing VHDL/Verilog development on Linux a hard choice.

[matthey]

Guess that makes doing VHDL/Verilog development on Linux a hard choice.

Why? Gunnar uses Quartus under Linux for development.

[freqmax]

Yeah there is a licensed pay version asfaik. Xilinx is free for all Spartan-3E (XC3S__E).

[matthey]

Yeah there is a licensed pay version asfaik. Xilinx is free for all Spartan-3E (XC3S__E).

I believe Quartus is free for the whole Cyclone family. You may have to pay to synthesize for the Arria and Stratus.

[KimmoK]

Those specs put PowerPC to shame.

? BCM53003: 600 MHz (1200 DMIPS) ?

To me it seems similar to PPC440 in performance.

A few years back multicore MIPS chips were a little behind PPC in some performance issues like in memory handling latencies. And they were hot @1ghz.

IMO: Best thing about MIPS (&Cavium chips) is that it has made Freescale to do something after so many years of too little progress. It looked that Freescale is not going to fight back, but now the fight is on. To my understanding MIPS crowth has slowed down since.
(within one year ARM starts to shake Telecoms market, therefore we see new chips sooner also from Cavium (ThunderX) & Freescale (AMP and NGcore))

[freqmax]

crowth?

What is the most nice one to program when it comes to MIPS vs ARM?

[biggun]

crowth?

What is the most nice one to program

The most nice to program is 68k - by far.

Clock by clock a good 68K can also stand its ground and even beat the other performance wise (clock by clock).

[freqmax]

Will that stand even to other one-chip embedded architectures like C28x, Coldfire, CPU32, 603e, 200e, 300e, M-CORE, MIPS32, MPC500, RISC, TLCS-900, TMS320C28x, TriCore, TX19A, MSP430 etc ..?

And will also be available as a single chip in LQFP for less than 10 EUR per single chip and go into 1 µA @ 3,3V power usage when at sleep?

But if 68k does beat both ARM and MIPS on doing DCT, FFT, convolution etc.. And can be had for a reasonable price then I'm all for it

[biggun]

Will that stand even to other one-chip embedded architectures

A good 68K can outperform them, hands down - on a clock per clock comparison.


But what do you really want?

If you have an A500 or A600 or A1200 then you ideally look
* for a good CPU card that does not run to hot in your Amiga case. Am I right?
* and you want a card which works well with your Amiga power supply,
  so that you do not need to use a 100 Watt PC power supply for it.


This means for many chips your AMIGA does not have good enough cooling and not good enough power supply.

An FPGA based 68K would be happy with this cooling requirements.

And performance wise it can beat PowerUP PPC cards
and does beat hands down stuff like 240 Mhz Coldfire or low clocked ARMs.

So with the low end chips a good 68K has no problem to compete.

Do you want to run 68K code?
Then this means you need to run 68K in emulation on your ARM.
In this case a good 68K can easily compete and beat the absolute high end ARM chips.

[amigadave]

A good 68K can outperform them, hands down - on a clock per clock comparison.


But what do you really want?

If you have an A500 or A600 or A1200 then you ideally look
* for a good CPU card that does not run to hot in your Amiga case. Am I right?
* and you want a card which works well with your Amiga power supply,
  so that you do not need to use a 100 Watt PC power supply for it.


This means for many chips your AMIGA does not have good enough cooling and not good enough power supply.

An FPGA based 68K would be happy with this cooling requirements.

And performance wise it can beat PowerUP PPC cards
and does beat hands down stuff like 240 Mhz Coldfire or low clocked ARMs.

So with the low end chips a good 68K has no problem to compete.

Do you want to run 68K code?
Then this means you need to run 68K in emulation on your ARM.
In this case a good 68K can easily compete and beat the absolute high end ARM chips.

I have an A500 (stock, since I sold my GVP A530), an A600 (w/ACA630, A604, Subway USB, & wireless NIC) and an A1200 (w/Blizzard 060 & SCSI, Subway USB & wireless NIC), as well as many other Classic Amiga models in my collection and both flavors of PPC NG systems, using an X1000 for AmigaOS4.x and several G4 & G5 Mac's for MorphOS.  But even with all of these options available to me, I was quite saddened when the Natami project became stalled, or stopped (I don't know if it is cancelled, or just on hold).

Do you know if there is any work still going on behind the scenes on the Natami project with the few developers who actually were lucky enough to get a Natami MX motherboard?  Is there any chance that it will get restarted, revived, or taken over by other developers who are working with FPGA's?

Or is it more likely that something different, but similar might be produced by the people like you who are currently working on FPGA systems to run AmigaOS and software?

Even though I like all of the variety and capabilities of all the Amiga Inspired platforms, I still would prefer the Natami approach, if we could get a working SAGA, or AAA, or what ever you want to call an improved graphics system.  It does not have to be "State of the Art", or compete with any modern systems, it just has to be one order of magnitude better than the last Commodore AGA system, plus it needs to have some modern connectivity ports and drivers.  Some programming tools would be a big help too, or just update the old 68k programming tools to make it easy to create new software for this imaginary new updated Amiga system.

I would love to read that people are still working on making the Natami, or a similar system a reality, and that something will be finished within the next few months.

[biggun]

I was quite saddened when the Natami project became stalled, or stopped (I don't know if it is cancelled, or just on hold).

Thanks, this is nice to hear.
Let me answer it this way.

Our plan is to bring out the card for every AMIGA model.
We also plan to then create a stand alone version of the card.

As you might know the people doing this CPU card previous worked in the NATAMI team...
Does this answer your question?