@Deniil715

Money and cost of the fabs holds back a ‘real’ cpu iteration of the 080. However, being able to update the core on the FPGA is actually a selling point in my view.

How much faster does a ‘Classic’ machine need to get? I still think that the AmigaOne is a better path for a modern Amiga machine and the Vampire is about retro fun IMHO!

Last edited by BigD on 13-Dec-2020 at 11:45 AM.

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"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@Deniil715

At the moment, such a thing (sadly) has nowhere to go that makes sense. Imagine you had a drop-in replacement for your 060/040 chip. Pairing it up with the old RAM on existing accelerators would cripple the performance. (And likely, you’d get big compatibility issues to solve.)
You’d have to design a totally new motherboard or accelerator card for it first, and then there’s a ton of work and testing that makes 'good enough for FPGA' into 'good enough for real silicon'. On top of that, adding more MHz means going around that cycle again and again...

But I’d love to see it happen. If it does ever get to that stage... it would be pretty awesome.

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"Knowledge is power. Power corrupts. Study hard, be evil."

Yeah, there's probably no market for a high-end 68k, other than for special purposes where an FPGA makes more sense. - Only have to make the core once, then put it on newer and newer FPGAs. - Have someone else worry about the hardware manufacturing and optimization.

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- Don't get fooled by my avatar, I'm not like that (anymore, mostly... maybe only sometimes)
> Amiga Classic and OS4 developer for OnyxSoft.

The price of custom ASICs has come down a lot due to lots of old fabs willing to do smaller runs at old (but perfectly serviceable) process nodes. It's gone from something only corporations can afford to the price of a luxury/sports car. I think it will happen eventually.

It's basically due to the fact that old fabs used to become immediately obsolete due to the high performance of new process nodes, but now new nodes mostly pack more transistors in without huge increases in clock rates, so if the custom chip you need doesn't need as many transistors, you can do it on an old fab that was bought and paid for 15 years ago.