Later. We are in the hurry now. New cards take too much time and too much money to develop...
Not necessarily. The old cards could have legal problems attached which can take much longer than development time as we know from the C= bankruptcy years. Some chips would likely not be available anymore so the board layout would have to be changed and replacement chips or FPGAs used. The Phase 5 accelerator boards are likely expensive boards to produce in low quantities and more expensive yet on a tight schedule. Using a modern FPGA makes a lot of sense as it could simplify the design and cost. An FPGA with memory controller for modern memory (cheaper and more reliable to have soldered on the card) and high speed transceivers (SerDes) for SATA/PCIe is still affordable and reduces chip counts. Ethernet and HDMI/DVI can be directly controlled from the FPGA. The FPGA needs a little support for flash, debugging, etc. and it may be easier to leave USB as a custom chip but I hope you can see that the chip count and board layout size, complexity and cost could be significantly reduced. Development could be greatly increased with a little investment. Majsta is affordable because of the country he lives in although the corruption there has already slowed him down at times (mail bribes). Thomas Hirsch has a working work of art in the Natami which is wasting away but could be rejuvenated with investment. IMO, these would be better investments than trying to bring back the P5 hardware. I'm not sure production would be feasible even if the P5 designs were open sourced.
if you are interested in warpos (im not) then strim is developing an open source compatible solution based on mediator and sonnet card. it is working already to certain extent and rather fast. csppc and bppc will not happen and it is not amigakit fault. the rights and documentation ist with a former amiga repair company in germany, probably lost. anyway they could not be produced again because of the lack of parts and because of rohs as far as it gas been discussed on a1k.
The Sonnet is no longer in production (partially because PPC is dying), the classic Amiga needs a bottle-necked PCI solution for PCI and it is not optimum to go through PCI for all I/O. At least faster PPC processors are available in the Sonnet but I don't like the economics of the project and Elbox decided likewise.
It would be easier to get that 040s from old Macs or accelerators
for them but then it would solve all need for most lucrative market
so it's kinda problematic and there is a good explanation but it's
kinda ungrateful to be so demanding and ACA1220 is all you need
anyway and people should be lucky that those are still in production.
There is currently no shortage of affordable full 68060s except the rev 6 68060 which can be overclocked to 100MHz. The price and availability may change if thousands of the FPGA Arcade 68060 expansion are sold. An FPGA accelerator or board probably makes more sense. Even the FPGA Arcade and Mist FPGA performance should be able to exceed a 68040 with less heat. A larger and better performance FPGA (but still affordable) and/or a better designed FPGA core will probably be able to exceed 68060 performance.
We can not blame the current holders of the Amiga to not want to repeat the mistakes of their predecessors (simultaneously produce and sell two competing architectures).
I'm not so sure that selling both the Amiga and a PC were a mistake, especially early on. The C= PC was sold into professional and business markets where Amiga didn't have the software. This allowed C= to offer a wider spectrum of products. PCs had good margins before competition saturated the market. The Carly Fiorina purchase of Compaq by HP has been recently criticized by some people also. Notice that she defended her performance at HP by giving the top line revenue and cash flow gains while she was in charge. I want to hear about the bottom line when buying a lower margin business. It's still debatable if the deal was bad as their were likely some advantages from synergies and reduced competition. I think it would be an exaggeration to call the buy of Compaq a disaster but HP probably would have been better off focusing on their higher margin printers.
We can not blame them for having abandoned the 68k platform. Business is business. But we could blame them for not facilitating the further development by one third partie.
There was no way forward for the 68k and the PPC was promising and big endian. Now, the PPC route is not only less compatible but very expensive and it is possible to go back to the 68k because of modern FPGA technology. The big questions:
Is Amiga performance or hardware cost more important?performance->PPC, hardware cost->68k
Is Amiga performance or compatibility more important?performance->PPC, compatibility->68k
I believe PPC CPU performance/price ratio has reached its peak and will start declining in the next 10 years (PPC CPU costs will increase and availability will decline because of supply and demand). Developing the 68k could be done cheaply with relatively low performance (68040-68060 performance level) but performance would scale nicely to more powerful FPGAs (constantly getting cheaper and availability is excellent) with custom ASICs as an option if sales grew high enough to support them. The 68k option is more scalable and flexible where a business could have complete control of their destiny and products while the PPC is controlled by market forces with strong head winds against it. The other option would be to port the AmigaOS to ARM or x86_64 but this would take a long time, the Amiga loses its uniqueness (valuable!) and compatibility. AROS has so far failed to create a market large enough to attract major software developers on these other processors after many years.
