Quote:
Originally Posted by Megol
Actually that was the original plan - use a cheap off the shelf board with an adapter board connecting it to the Amiga hardware.
There's a reason that plan didn't work out.
You implications are either dishonest or misguided. Did you note that the FPGA board you listed also listed the manufacturers of the main components - something extremely unusual? Why? Because that board is subventioned by them. They are also manufactured in large series (compared to Vampire boards) and thus have lower overheads and lower component costs. That Altera/Intel use it as a demonstration/development board reasonably means the FPGA cost is much lower than what the Apollo team can even dream about.
The price is listed in US dollars which means it doesn't include sales tax/value added taxes which (unless I'm mistaken) the Vampire prices do. If that is true you should subtract 19-25% from the Vampire price to get something comparable. Paying for the Terasic board doesn't contribute to a continued development of hardware, software and soft core unlike doing the same for the Vampire board.
Now you can of course think the Apollo people should go back to the plan of using off the shelf boards with adapters. Up until fairly recently the team was still looking for people to join, why not offer your services if interested in doing the work? We need more people like Majsta in this world IMHO...
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I agree there is a reason that plan didn't work out. It was actually a member of the Apollo team that pointed out the Terasic board to me originally-not that this particular board is really the one to get anyway with half of the core being a 925MHz ARM.
I agree with everything you've said, a common off the shelf board would lower prices and have a common piece of hardware to swap out if you suspected you had problems with your board. I wonder what possibly could be the motivation of building something very similar and compatible to a cheap, easily attainable, off the shelf board and selling it for 3-4 times as much. I realize low volumes=higher prices and having professional assembly also costs more, those are all arguments for using a COTS board.
Last I heard about two years ago the original board (an Arrow Be Micro(?) )they were basing the V500 off of worked, but Chris just hadn't gotten the memory controller working. At which point the idea of a common off the shelf board evaporated as Majsta had finished building his initial prototypes.
As I said in my previous post to this, it is unknown what the price and performance points are so this is all just idle speculation until that stuff is known.