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Idea to Get Innovation Circle Running

Olaf Schoenweiss

Posts 690
01 Jan 2016 10:47


I discussed recently with Daytone (developing new Wings for Aros, MorphOS and AmigaOS). He said he is interested to buy a Vampire and will evoluate if he can support it in future projects if powerful enough.

I thought about that and also remembered some comments here like 64 MB are more than enough for the old software. That view was one of the reasons why Amiga finally collapsed, even in early 90s A500 with two disk drives was standard most software developed for. At the same time new games were developed for newest hardware and people bought new hardware later to run new games. Software drove development of hardware and new hardware drove development of new software. On a smaller scale we should get there too. My idea... if possible and not too complicated and time consuming new cards that use faster FPGAs and have more RAM would be interesting too, even if they are only sold in smaller numbers because software certainly would be ported to it that requires them. People would want to use that too and will long for new better cards then. So the new software would drive the development of new hardware.


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
01 Jan 2016 11:22


Hi Olaf,

This is a complicated topic.

First of all, the FPGA on the Vampire is really good.
The Vampire has a much better FPGA than the other AMIGA FPGA products which are even sold for a higher price than the Vampire.

To make this clear the Vampire is technically good.
And I have the feeling that the Vampire is offered for really fair price - much fairer price than many other Amiga products.

To continue the FPGA discussion.
FPGA prices have a huge dynamic range.
This means you can buy FPGA for $40 per piece, $400, or for $4000 per piece.

Yes the Vampire could be twice as fast if $400 FPGA would be used. And the Vampire could be three times as fast if $4000 FPGA would be used.

The question is do people want to pay for a CPU card $150, $1000, or $10,000 ?




Olaf Schoenweiss

Posts 690
01 Jan 2016 11:33


I did not mean that current strategy to offer affordable cards that offer a lot of improvements for relative low price is wrong.
 
  What I thought of if it makes sense (if doable and not needing to much time) to extend the range with a more expensive but much faster card. $4000 would be a little much of course but the $400 FPGA would be more interesting. Perhaps current Vampire is already good enough for demanding software (expecially games) that is too early to say but we must come to a situation where 68k with both emulation and Vampire equipped amigas is seen equal to the "NG" platforms when it is about developing new software, expecially games.
 
  To answer the last question... of course the majority will prefer the cheaper card. Some will be willing and able to buy more expensive cards, that will show it to the others and those will want to have better cards in future too so if better affordable options will be there they will buy it. When no demanding software is available then they will say "for what do I need it?" and stick to the existing hardware like it happened with amiga when commodore was still alive.

Also if we want to motivate commercial developer we would need a kind of roadmap what improvements and new hardware is planned and/or in development and at least estimated time scales. A company plans investments normally in 12 month time frames so if we want commercial development (=investment) then we have to offer something. Just a idea to think about.


Andreas Koenig

Posts 9
01 Jan 2016 20:38


First of all, I am totally blown away by what you did with the Apollo Core. This is nothing short of spectacular. And you did it all in your spare time, wow!

Second, as Gunnar already mentiond in another thread [1], how about a Vampire Card with an Apollo Core implemented as an ASIC? As I understand it, ASICs will become cheap with large quantities of produced units. There might be enough demand in today's Amiga community for the project to be feasible. This might be the perfect kind of project to get crowd-funded via Kickstarter or something similar.

Philippe Lang's Kickstarter project to create new A1200 cases [2] gathered more than 150.000 EUR from over 800 contributors. I bet a lot of them would love to put a Vampire 3 using an ASIC Apollo Core into their machines. I _know_ that I do.

And that's the A1200 community only. As the core would be used unchanged in boards for different Amigas (actually, I don't know that, I'm just assuming), the potential number of users is much higher.

Philippe had to face the same problem as you would with producing the ASICs: The molds for the new cases were so darn expensive that the initial costs got up a lot and the campaign goal had to be set quite high. The initial costs for ASIC production are quite high as well, with the overall costs per unit dropping a lot with larger produced quantities.

Still, Philippe's campaign was successfully funded and so might be yours. Now the molds can be reused for A1200 cases for a long time and so could be the funded production hardware used to make the ASICs.

Of course, a project like that is a full-time job that demands lots of time and energy. I have no idea if it is even remotely possible for you to do it that way.

Again, mad respect to the Apollo Team for creating such an outstanding product. I hope the A1200 Vampire 2s will be available soon.

[1] EXTERNAL LINK  [2] EXTERNAL LINK


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
01 Jan 2016 20:58


Hallo Andreas,

Thanks for the nice words.

You are correct an ASIC could reach much higher clock.
And an 1000 Mhz Apollo would make Amiga really nice again.
But an ASIC is not a near term goal for us.

Our near goal is tuning the existing Apollo core.
We have a couple of ideas to do for Apollo, like
* improved branch prediction
* stronger fusing
* more clever caches

We like to implement these ideas in this year 2016.
We believe that we can speed up the core by about 30%
without touching the hardware.
And look forward to provide this as a soft-update later this year.

One option that we discussed was adding an expansion-bus to the V1200 to allow to upgrade the card.
We consider to develop an optional upgrade for the V1200 of which we think will double the speed off the CPU.
This might be interesting for some.

The ASIC is of course also a very tempting idea.
We will keep this in mind. But first we like to tune the core to its full extend.




Andreas Koenig

Posts 9
02 Jan 2016 00:21


Hi Gunnar,

I totally agree. As long as the Apollo Core is not more or less "finished" from your design point of view, there is no sense in making it an ASIC. ASICs cannot be changed anymore, so soft-updates like the ones planned for the Vampire cards this year would not be possible.

Making the Apollo Core an ASIC (if at all) should be the last step to give it a final giant boost after it rocked as a FPGA design already. If and only if you decide to go that way later on, a crowd funding campaign could be a possibility to realize such a project.

That being said, it is really amazing what the Vampire cards provide already. I can hardly wait to get my hands on one of those.


Thierry Atheist

Posts 644
02 Jan 2016 20:46


Hi Gunnar,

So... Is there a "drop in replacement"? A FPGA (instead of the FPGA you are using now) that is 100% pin compatible that can be put on the CURRENT board that you have made that would increase the price of the board by about 200 to 300 Euro?

Can you PLEASE offer that model too... Let us decide our $$$ tolerance for AMIGA? I mean, I paid $2,000 Canadian in 1989 for MERELY a 7.12 MHz CPU'ed A2000 with 1 floppy drive and 1 megabyte of chip RAM!!!! Then paid ANOTHER $860 in 1990 for 8 Megabytes of RAM and a SCSI 1 GVP controller! Then $900 for a SCSI 1, 180 Megabyte Fujitsu hard drive.

So, I think I saw that 300 Euro ($451.49 Canadian) is the current Vampire card price.

So + 400, makes it 700 Euro is $1,052 Canadian. That is considerably less than what I have already paid versus the equipment that I got!

Megabytes
9 - - - vs. - - - 128
80 Nanosec. - - - DDR2

CPU
7.12 MHz - vs. - ~240 MHz
68000 - - - - - - - 68060 (and enhanced)
ECS - - - - - - SUPER-AGA

Storage
180 Meg. - vs. - - 32 Gig. SD
SCSI 1 HD - - - - flash memory card

Value for money makes the Apollo Core an ENORMOUS deal.


Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6207
02 Jan 2016 21:40


To answer your questions

Thierry Atheist wrote:

So, I think I saw that 300 Euro ($451.49 Canadian) is the current Vampire card price.

The Vampire V2 price is Euro 150.
EXTERNAL LINK 

Thierry Atheist wrote:
Is there a "drop in replacement

No there is not drop in replacement.
But we are considering for the V1200 to add an expansion port which allow to add a faster FPGA.


Thierry Atheist

Posts 644
03 Jan 2016 11:19


I apologize for the mistaken price statement I made. Didn't mean to mislead anyone.
(Don't know how I came up with that amount. I certainly don't think that it's mentioned enough, must be a part of it.)

Gunnar and Co., you've just PWNed the AMIGA accelerator market!


Mr-Z EdgeOfPanic

Posts 189
01 Mar 2016 10:36


@Gunnar,

Please do create an expansion port on the A1200 version to add a faster FPGA, this would be so nice!




Johannes Schäfer

Posts 47
02 Mar 2016 19:25


In my opinion to get the innovation circle starting there should be at first Apollo-Cards for all Amiga systems. And they should be equal so that software developement is easier because there would be only one system. If you need networking or USB there are already solutions for A1200/A4000.

This should be the goal for 2016. To develop and to deliver. Then there will be an installed  base of Apollo hardware for software developement and testing, before there could be the next generation of Apollo capable hardware. (with more Ram, better FPGA, maybe networking and USB)




Jacek Rafal Tatko

Posts 19
25 Dec 2019 19:46


Olaf Schoenweiss wrote:

I discussed recently with Daytone (developing new Wings for Aros, MorphOS and AmigaOS). He said he is interested to buy a Vampire and will evaluate if he can support it in future projects if powerful enough.

Any new info on that,
WINGS on a V4SA could
be truly awesome stuff!


Vojin Vidanovic
(Needs Verification)
Posts 1916/ 1
25 Dec 2019 20:57


Jacek Rafal Tatko wrote:

  Any new info on that,
  WINGS on a V4SA could
  be truly awesome stuff!
 

 
  Daytona is doing his best to keep OS4 gaming going ... but.
 
  Wings OS4 or OS3 (HD remake) exist as half finished mess, to best of my knowledge as well as pouring money to Cinewares current shadow seems like feeding Amiga Inc.
 
  Purchased Tower 57. Need to pay for new video driver. Performs well on x1000 4GB Radeon 7000 1GB, but I prefer Chaos Engine AGA for number of reasons.
 
  Tried Spencer. Prefer Bubba n Stix, Lionheart and few more. Advanced PC Lemmings are far superior, or Worms, or 2D platformers.
 
  Tried Quake 2 conversion. Prefer Quake 68k, since Quake 1 on pain of Cyrix MMX. Turned out to be Hype bad installer that needed update and data files.
 
  Tried SImon the Sorcer 2 OS4. Turned to be well working SCUMM VM plus legal files.
 
  Tried shooter ported from Android. Boring to Apidya and some old school shooters. EVen to advanced 1942 or Banshee AGA. Stardust is boring eyecandy, and less boring.
 
Accidentaly purchased Freespace with x1000 as it was in stock. Could not work on OS 4.1.8+Enhancer 1.3, fixed recently but I am glad I have saved CD ISO and game for Vampire!

  Only Hugo is doing great work ... WOLFENSTEIN 3D !!! but he needs his 3D wrappers.


M Rickan

Posts 177
26 Dec 2019 18:38


Funny... I was reading this thread and only noticed the 2016 timeframe at the end.

Does the CPU upgrade option remain a possibility?

posts 14