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Minimal Accelerator With Just FPGA Chip...

Offroad Cowboy

Posts 1
21 Aug 2021 16:12


Modern FPGAs contain lotsof different memories, e.g. UltraRAM, BRAM etc.

How about creating minimal accelerator with contains only FPGA chip
which contains CPU core and FPGA internal memory is used as FAST RAM and frame buffer RAM for P96 RTG


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
21 Aug 2021 19:14


Offroad Cowboy wrote:

Modern FPGAs contain lotsof different memories, e.g. UltraRAM, BRAM etc.
   
How about creating minimal accelerator with contains only FPGA chip
which contains CPU core and FPGA internal memory is used as FAST RAM and frame buffer RAM for P96 RTG

You need to be careful reading FPGA specs.
The RAM size is always given in Bits not Bytes!
This means when you read for example FPGA RAM = 1024 Kb,
then this means 128 KByte.

The RAM inside FPGA is limited in size compared to real DDR memory outside. The FPGA internal RAM is very useful for internal buffer or Palette Registers.
 
The amount of FPGA RAM is of course enough for creating a C64 inside an FPGA. This is easy.
 
But for an Amiga accelerator I would wish for more memory than FPGA have. For example, our latests Amiga Accelerators now have 512 MB of memory. In my opinion 512 MB is a very good size, as its enables us to run bigger and more demanding games and applications.

posts 2