@Rob
The goal would be a real ASIC, but unless you are a unknown big investor that has the money for synthesizing it, there will be an FPGA (at first) in Clone-A.

@ TheDaddy & NomadofNorad
With all the Buzz about PCIe GFX cards and Cell processors, what are you actually going to use the AGA+ ChipSet for? Computers mostly have bottlenecks and this AGA+ ChipSet is surely the limiting factor in your Cell, PCIe design. If you are going that Route better leave AGA+ out or cough up enough money so that AGA++ (yes i made the second + intentionally) can compete with current Soundcards/Gfx Cards(Radeon 3800/Nvidia 8800) North & Southbridges only then it will be usefull in your computer.

I also have a wish list, but i know i won't get it as long as there is no big company to develop it, or it isn't 2032 and Hobbyist can create it in an FPGA:
AMIGA like ChipSet capable of:
1080p (Dual Monitor of course)
256 Channel 32 Bit (Surround) Paula
Powerfull DSP to assist Paula and do other Stuff
2 Cell Processors
4 Gig of XDR Ram
Tons of Software

and all that for 600¤

Last edited by Donar on 18-Jan-2008 at 09:14 AM.

_________________
<- Amiga 1260 / CD ->
Looking for:
A1200/CF CFV4/@200,256MB,eAGA,SATA,120GB,AROS

@Donar
>>With all the Buzz about PCIe GFX cards and Cell processors, what are you actually going to use the AGA+ ChipSet for?

As I have said twice already, the enhanced AGA chipset would be the onboard graphics like the one you find on millions of micro atx boards (pcs). Have a look on any of those boards and you'll see the onboard graphic chip with its VGA output. It has its uses, it can play some games pretty well , do graphics, display high resolution 32bit screens and so on. But ther there is also a PCI-Express slot which can be populated with a faster dedicated graphics card if the user wants to.

>>Computers mostly have bottlenecks and this AGA+ ChipSet is surely the limiting factor in your Cell, PCIe design. If you are going that Route better leave AGA+ out or cough up enough money so that AGA++

Well, maybe that would be the way to go but if a motherboard, micro ATX style can be made by integrating this enhanced AGA chipset with a slot for a PCI-Express card then we have a winner.

All the other things that are needed like USB 2.0, maybe Firewire, PCI or PCIe slots, DDRAM and gigabit ethernet would all be welcome.

_________________
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@Donar

>>also have a wish list, but i know i won't get it as long as there is no big company to develop it, or it isn't 2032 and Hobbyist can create it in an FPGA:
AMIGA like ChipSet capable of:
1080p (Dual Monitor of course)
256 Channel 32 Bit (Surround) Paula
Powerfull DSP to assist Paula and do other Stuff
2 Cell Processors
4 Gig of XDR Ram
Tons of Software

That will come with time, after the first model
You have got to start somewhere to get to your wish list but you won't get there if you just make an A4000+ targeted to existing Amiga afecionados.

_________________
www.loriano.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

Quote:

As I have said twice already, the enhanced AGA chipset would be the onboard graphics like the one you find on millions of micro atx boards (pcs).

So you want the AGA(+) chipset to be some kind of PCI or PCIe subsystem (like on a PC with AGA on a PCI card) that can easily be circumvented/turned off. The machine will have an AGA subsystem then, but would have nothing in common with the "Amiga" architecture anymore (except the Amigaish part on the PCI bus).

What i had in mind was this:
The ChipSet in an A1200/4000 is not only a GFX/Sound Chip that you can turn off. It is a fully integrated part of the AMIGA and it's backbone-thus limiting everything. If you are going to stick a Cell to it, you have to assure that it (AGA(+)) is fast enough to feed the Cell with Data or it will sit idle most of the time.

I lend the words of Oli_hd here, as he has put it in words quite nicely.
Quote:

Talking about hooking G4's and G5's clocking Ghz to a computer thats clocking 12Mhz is just madness, you would basically be making a PPC computer that sits in the trapdoor slot with a very low speed port talking to the Amiga's motherboard as if it was a slow ISA card.

Even if AGA+ is clocking say 100 MHz it will be the same outcome.

Basicly you and i are talking apples and oranges.

_________________
<- Amiga 1260 / CD ->
Looking for:
A1200/CF CFV4/@200,256MB,eAGA,SATA,120GB,AROS

@All

In the end all AGA does is play with memory.
If you make a copper/blitter ASIC that has some dedicated memory, it can render a screen of a certain resolution. That memory can then be sent to the 3D capable gpu as a texture and be scaled and displayed out the DVI/VGA/HDMI port of the graphics card pretty easily enough. A rewrite of Graphics.library could handle this.

Now Graphics.library could be enhanced with Akiko functions as well and those could be implemented to hit the gpu directly for CD32 games compatibility.

Graphics.library could also be expanded to have 3-D functions that communicate with a driver that hits the gpu directly. The driver is all that would need changing depending on gpu card you plug in.

None of this is un-Amiga-like. Ofcourse having a PCIe bus is un-Amiga-like but I don't see anyone designing a Zorro-4/5 bus anytime soon...much less Zorro 4/5 cards.

Graphics.library is akin to "DirectX" on Windows. Windows still has low level drivers that hit the metal directly and that's what is known as the "driver". DirectX communicates directly with the driver as a new Graphics.library would.

So an AGA(+) ASIC can be put on a motherboard (or PCIe card for that matter) and have its affected memory transformed into a texture (which is just a bitmap) and sent to whatever gpu is plugged into this motherboard. This PCIe card can have 2, 4 or 8MB of internal (chip) RAM. A process could them read a frame from the AGA(+) PCIe card and send it as a texture to the gpu.

You don't need to have a video out on this card, but the motherboard needs to be able to request a "frame" from it's internal memory.

This would give any motherboard AGA compatibility. Even an x86 motherboard which could be running a 680X0 emulator... Now if this board was PPC based, couldn't WarpOS calls be made to exectute natively on the processor? Infact wouldn't it be easy to pretend to have a Cyberstorm PPC accelerator onboard running UAE?

Again, this card would only be used when "classic" compatibility is required and moving forward, the dedicated gpu would be used directly.

All we really need is a board with a PCIe bus, a north and south bridge and a processor socket. The rest can be done with software. This is what the A1 was...but the (I forget which) north/south bridge was bugged to all hell.

Using a SoC chip reduces the costs and include the bridges and standardizes on the "little" things like ethernet and USB and DMA.

Really...all these homebrew projects really need is AGA(+) on a card. Then insert into motherboard of choice and either run UAE and you are done.

Next step - create a intermediate target language for all future applications ala .net CLR and run apps on any processor you'd like.

@Donar
Does the Mac of today have anything in common with the original Mac other than the Apple logo?

Last edited by Lou on 18-Jan-2008 at 03:58 PM.

@Lou

Yes, I'm replying to myself.

So really what we need is a classic Amiga on a PCIe card.

You can launch an "app" on the target hardware that sends keyboard and mouse events to it and receives video and sound data back as well as standard I/O requests.

A PPC accelerator can be mapped into this card, but in reality, once control is passed to the PPC side (which the card would see as the host motherboard), the 68K on the card could be shut down and things would run natively on the host motherboard. Ofcourse communication with the AGA+ chipset could still continue as needed.

Yes, give this card an SD or CF socket to launch KICKSTART and 3.1 from and call it a day.

In the future, newer AoPCIe (Amiga on PCIe) cards could be made with faster ASICs and fpgas for running classic apps faster, but wouldn't it be better to just run new & native apps on the host hardware?

Ofcourse the host hardware could be running AROS or OS4 or Leopard or XP or Linux or etc... but now you have cheap hardware and classic compatibility in one solution.

These Minimigs, CloneA's and whatever this solution is called should just be moved to a PCI(e) card and an application on your host platform of choice could be written to act as the interface. Dare I say that a PCI(e) card solution would be cheaper as well since all i/o (keyboard, mouse, sound, video, hard drive, etc...) and feedback would just be send over the PCI(e) bus for the host hardware to interpret. This could even include "fastRAM" memory access. ChipRAM would be on the card.

Heck, you could even emulate genlocks by sending a video frame back to the card...as well as audio sampling.

PCIe is that fast.

Last edited by Lou on 18-Jan-2008 at 04:39 PM.

@Lou

Quote:

Lou wrote: So really what we need is a classic Amiga on a PCIe card. You can launch an "app" on the target hardware that sends keyboard and mouse events to it and receives video and sound data back as well as standard I/O requests. A PPC accelerator can be mapped into this card, but in reality, once control is passed to the PPC side (which the card would see as the host motherboard), the 68K on the card could be shut down and things would run natively on the host motherboard. Ofcourse communication with the AGA+ chipset could still continue as needed. Yes, give this card an SD or CF socket to launch KICKSTART and 3.1 from and call it a day. In the future, newer AoPCIe (Amiga on PCIe) cards could be made with faster ASICs and fpgas for running classic apps faster, but wouldn't it be better to just run new & native apps?

Mattathias BASIC will be using shaders on the non-classic Amiga hardware to simulate some features on the Amiga chipset that were never abstracted into a library. Wouldn't this be better than always having to use custom hardware?

@Lou

Quote:

So really what we need is a classic Amiga on a PCIe card.

Aka Inside Out by Siamese Systems?

@Pleng

Quote:

Pleng wrote Aka Inside Out by Siamese Systems?

Which I'm still entitled to $50 off when it's available (or at least that's what my invoice for Siamese v2.5 says). I know it's been 11 years, but I'm still waiting.

_________________
AmigaOne X1000, A4000(T), A3000, A2000, A1200(T), A1200, A500, CD32, Minimig+ARM, FPGA Arcade, Chameleon64, C-One, C128, C128D, C64C, C64, VIC-20, CBM 8032, CBM4032, Efika, Ultimate64

@Samurai_Crow

Quote:

Samurai_Crow wrote: @Lou Quote: Lou wrote: So really what we need is a classic Amiga on a PCIe card. You can launch an "app" on the target hardware that sends keyboard and mouse events to it and receives video and sound data back as well as standard I/O requests. A PPC accelerator can be mapped into this card, but in reality, once control is passed to the PPC side (which the card would see as the host motherboard), the 68K on the card could be shut down and things would run natively on the host motherboard. Ofcourse communication with the AGA+ chipset could still continue as needed. Yes, give this card an SD or CF socket to launch KICKSTART and 3.1 from and call it a day. In the future, newer AoPCIe (Amiga on PCIe) cards could be made with faster ASICs and fpgas for running classic apps faster, but wouldn't it be better to just run new & native apps? Mattahias BASIC will be using shaders on the non-classic Amiga hardware to simulate some features on the Amiga chipset that were never abstracted into a library. Wouldn't this be better than always having to use custom hardware?

I'm not following what you are attempting to do nor do I know the target platform of Mattahais Basic. I suppose shaders could be akin to HAM effects and planar graphics... Again with an AGA+ on a card, they would seem native.

I look forward to Mattahias Basic's completion though as the bedroom coder is what make Amiga great and Amiga needs an easy gateway to turn normal people into bedroom coders...

@Donar

Quote:

What i had in mind was this: The ChipSet in an A1200/4000 is not only a GFX/Sound Chip that you can turn off. It is a fully integrated part of the AMIGA and it's backbone-thus limiting everything. If you are going to stick a Cell to it, you have to assure that it (AGA(+)) is fast enough to feed the Cell with Data or it will sit idle most of the time.

The Processot (CELL) would be feeding GFX mem not the other way around.

Please mind that a 100 Mhz AGA++ is in many ways a lot better than PCIe!

It highly depends of what you want to do:
A local CHIP of 100 Mhz with ZERO waitstates is latency wise 100 times quicker than ALL GFX cards that you can buy today.
But if you just want throughput then 16xPCIe is the was to go.

The question is: does your CPU or CELL want to copy 100 MB on block to the GFX card?
Or do you want to set many small blits?

If you want to copy a few big chunks per second there is nothing beating PCIe
If you want a card in which your CPU can write quickly without latency then the local AGA is NO #1

Cheers

_________________
APOLLO the new 68K : www.apollo-core.com

@BigGun

A Cell processor excels at being able to collect large tracts of memory into a long sustained burst fetch into its local store memory instead of using short bursts like a conventional cache controller would.

@Lou

Mattathias BASIC is going to be cross-platform and therefore target multiple operating systems. It is currently based on the Low-Level Virtual Machine so it will compile to whatever processor is needed. It is similar to the way that GCC allows cross compilers to use the same source but unlike GCC it has a much cleaner code base to make it easy to work with.

@Samurai_Crow

Quote:

Samurai_Crow wrote: @BigGun A Cell processor excels at being able to collect large tracts of memory into a long sustained burst fetch into its local store memory instead of using short bursts like a conventional cache controller would.

Thanks but I know CELL
You can visit www.powerdeveloper.org to see some posts about
my CELL performance patches to GLIBC and LINUX Kernel.

BTW what is meant by "local store" in your quote is the local SRAM of the CELL SPE.
CELL is Über cool is you process (stream) your data - that clear!
This is great for number crunching, or video stream en/de coding or for doing billions of 3D vektor transformations.

My point only was, that PCIe is a latency bottle neck.
And there is a good reason why SONY has NOT connected their GFX card over PCIe.
But of course it really depends on what you are doing.

Anyway the discussion is a bit fruitless as any old PCI Radeon is fast enough
for our Amiga titles and we all know that the chances that new titles will be released
for AMIGA that require GFX cards with 500 MB is sub zero.


Cheers

_________________
APOLLO the new 68K : www.apollo-core.com

@BigGun

>>Please mind that a 100 Mhz AGA++ is in many ways a lot better than PCIe!

I see....but is it easier to replace in case you want something faster?

_________________
www.loriano.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

@BigGun

Quote:

BigGun wrote: @wegster Quote: @Biggun - are you in contact with him? If so, can you ask him to take a look at this thread? Thomas told me that he has no account here but was trying to register one to be able to asnswer some questions. Cheers

Thanks - I did email him, but it was the email listed as his domain contact, so no idea if he checks that or not - no response as of yet. If you let me know his username, we can waive the 1 day grace period to allow him to post immediately.

_________________
Are we not done with the same silly arguments and flames yet??!

@Zardoz

Thanks for the correction.

@Donar

Watch the video of Jen's presentation "Clone-A: An Amiga chipset on an single low-cost chip" from Breakpoint 2007.

@Lou
Quote:

@Donar Does the Mac of today have anything in common with the original Mac other than the Apple logo?

No, it is just anotherWorkstation starting from EFI and then booting into OSX, Windows, Linux or "whatever OS".

@BigGun
I wonder if a 3,2 GHz clocked Cell wouldn't be a bit bored feeding AGA+ over a 32 bit wide bus clocked at 100 MHZ?

@Rob
No, i will wait till Clone-A is out, because i have heard/read several versions already.

Last edited by Donar on 18-Jan-2008 at 07:49 PM.

_________________
<- Amiga 1260 / CD ->
Looking for:
A1200/CF CFV4/@200,256MB,eAGA,SATA,120GB,AROS

@Donar

Quote:

Donar wrote: @Lou Quote: @Donar Does the Mac of today have anything in common with the original Mac other than the Apple logo? No, it is just anotherWorkstation starting from EFI and then booting into OSX, Windows, Linux or "whatever OS".

That's my point. That OS could be AROS or OS4... The AoC (Amiga on a card) would be strictly for backwards compatibility.

Quote:

@BigGun I wonder if a 3,2 GHz clocked Cell wouldn't be a bit bored feeding AGA+ over a 32 bit wide bus clocked at 100 MHZ?

Depends on the application. As a mail/web/ftp server or firewall, or for apps like Folding @ Home, it would be quite happy crunching away and serving files.

@Lou
Quote:

That's my point. That OS could be AROS or OS4... The AoC (Amiga on a card) would be strictly for backwards compatibility.

See i like interesting Hardware - and the Amiga architecture has it's beauties (See BigGuns post). I think a "AMIGA 4000+" would fit my interest quite nicely, while a PCIe add on card for my Core2Duo will not. This PCIe card may however be what you want badly since years...

_________________
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Looking for:
A1200/CF CFV4/@200,256MB,eAGA,SATA,120GB,AROS

@Donar

I am just concerned about the fact that there is NO WAY to expand with just an onboard graphics chip and no expansion slots, we have seen this happening before.

The alternative could be dedicated chipset but they would have to offer a lot more and be a lot more sophisticated and faster than anything we have seen before.

_________________
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