Please Apollo team, a Mini PCIE slot is a MUST have for future Vampire

[matthey]

Originally Posted by Anakirob

Could a modern GPU somehow be added for 3D acceleration and other features without actually using it as a display output device? I think that's what you mean by "parallel processing power", but I'm not 100% sure.

A separate gfx card is doing parallel processing (offloads the CPU processing and increases the total system processing power) when used for display. OpenCL and Cuda allow parallel processing units in gfx cards to do non-display parallel processing. This works well where the parallel processing is similar to what the GPU units are doing and latency is not important. The FPGA can provide high speed parallel units similar to what is available in a GPU and also usable by OpenCL. The advantages are flexibility (customizable), potentially more parallelism and potentially reduced latency. Altera (owned by Intel now) has FPGA OpenCL solutions.

https://www.altera.com/products/desi.../overview.html
https://www.altera.com/en_US/pdfs/li...173-opencl.pdf

No AmigaOS I am aware of provides standard OpenCL support although it would be possible to have a 3rd party add-on solution (worked so well for the Amiga over the years ). As Amiga CPUs become more ancient, relatively slower and less affordable, parallel processing on more modern gfx cards or in FPGAs gives more advantage.

Originally Posted by Anakirob

But then how many Amiga titles actually make use of hardware 3D acceleration anyway?

Most of the Amiga 3D software are older open source PC software ports but there is a lot which could be ported. Unfortunately, the current Amiga situation is not conducive to development or standardization .

[Juz400]

Originally Posted by plasmab

Because it makes us rage quit eventually. Thats why.

I was not trying to upset any of the Apollo team by starting this thread.
Its an honest attempt to add a feature that WILL bring more to the table of an already outstanding technological marvel.

Originally Posted by Anakirob

Why would Apollo team even bother with modern PC display hardware adaptors when their current method is functional and effective where an adaptor to allow an old PC GFX card is not?

Im not asking the team to do anything with modernish graphics cards, just the PCI-E port
(Both the CycloneIV and V can have 4 ports)
It would be up to the Amiga community to get a modernish graphics card to work.
I would suggest that ATI/AMD (being the underdogs like the Amiga) be the cards to use as they support Open Source and there
is quite a lot of documentation on thier website.

Originally Posted by Anakirob

Could a modern GPU somehow be added for 3D acceleration and other features without actually using it as a display output device? I think that's what you mean by "parallel processing power", but I'm not 100% sure.

At work recently I built a HP DL380Geb9 server with 24 Core 48 Thread, 512GB DDR4 RAM and TWO NVIDIA Quadro M6000!
https://www.hpe.com/uk/en/product-ca...009010209.html
https://www.scan.co.uk/products/24gb...dvi-i-dl-dual-
With a Beast like that, you run virtual enviroments with heavy graphics/cuda processing on the server and stream direct to
the desktop. You dont need a graphics card for each of your employees
The modernish graphics card can be thought of as a Computer in itself, you tell it where in memory its program is and it will
do its own thing without much interaction from the host computer at all.

Originally Posted by Anakirob

and one more question...
But then how many Amiga titles actually make use of hardware 3D acceleration anyway?

Not many as far as I know, we will have to wait and see what people code when they get thier hands on SAGA
Will there be an OpenGL type of driver? If so, we can expect quite alot of PC stuff to be translated over.

Back to the Original Topic (Been working on the post over a few days)

As I understand it, the Cyclone III already has the ability to talk PCI so a mediator link is a possibility already.
Im not sure on the current Logic Element requirement for the Gold2 core but I have read somewhere its around 25K
The most expensive Cyclone III listed with 24624 I could find on Mouser was £103 with a MOQ of 81

Im not sure where the team are up to with the 3D core and the extra real estate it will require in logic elements
but if we double it to 50k for future work space and have a look up the range
The Cyclone IV is able to use up to 4 PCI-E x1 lanes with root port capabitity BUT the only ones I could see on
mouser only had a 200mhz core clock which I guess could be too slow and we start to about £100 with quite large MOQ`s

CycloneV is quite an improvement over the IV in I/O and clockspeed.
The GX models also have 4 PCI-E x1 lanes but a host of other protocols too including GBe(ethernet) and SATA 150/300
The prices vary quite a bit across the models £75 (MOQ 1!! ) up to £172 (MOQ 84!!)
http://www.mouser.co.uk/Intel/Semico...yy6lwuZ1yx1iwa

I realy would not know which model would be suitable for the Apollo 68080 and 3D core
I also dont know what the price fluctuation/trends on these devices are, have they gone down over the last couple of years?
If the price trend is downwards, the CycloneV could be affordable in a couple years

How would the 68080 core perform in a V? Are they looking at them for the 1200 Version?
They list as 800Mhz, If we get half as much performance again or doubleish
That would be quite amazing!
The whole SoC Idea is great, SAGA will bring something new and much needed to the Amiga namely hardware 3D
Intel have thought the same as AMD and added 3D cores to thier CPU`s

Not to knock the team at all but there will be a limit to what you can do.
If one day they go ASIC and the Apollo core is in the 1 Ghz region, combining this with the ability to plug in a throw away
graphics card could cause quite the stir in the Amiga world
The sooner people can `Play` with the hardware, the sooner the software will be available.

Sorry for the extra long post.

[matthey]

Originally Posted by Juz400

As I understand it, the Cyclone III already has the ability to talk PCI so a mediator link is a possibility already. Im not sure on the current Logic Element requirement for the Gold2 core but I have read somewhere its around 25K The most expensive Cyclone III listed with 24624 I could find on Mouser was £103 with a MOQ of 81

Im not sure where the team are up to with the 3D core and the extra real estate it will require in logic elements but if we double it to 50k for future work space and have a look up the range The Cyclone IV is able to use up to 4 PCI-E x1 lanes with root port capability BUT the only ones I could see on mouser only had a 200mhz core clock which I guess could be too slow and we start to about £100 with quite large MOQ`s

The C3 and C4 are both end of line and C5 will be the low end. The last C3 in the Vampire already was vastly increased in size to about 40k LE which leaves available room.

Originally Posted by Juz400

CycloneV is quite an improvement over the IV in I/O and clockspeed.
The GX models also have 4 PCI-E x1 lanes but a host of other protocols too including GBe(ethernet) and SATA 150/300
The prices vary quite a bit across the models £75 (MOQ 1!! ) up to £172 (MOQ 84!!)

The C5 is nice and has a reasonable cost. There are also some LEs saved by built in memory controller(s). The Transeivers are the SerDes I was talking about for PCIe, SATA and Gb ethernet (1 transceiver needed per lane). When I was still on the Apollo Team, I suggested moving to the C5 despite the increase in cost. Availability is going to be good for longer and using fewer FPGA models is simpler. Majsta thought it was important to source as cheap of FPGAs as possible to keep the price as affordable as possible (he lost money on some counterfeit FPGAs off E-bay which doesn't help though). The cost of FPGAs is falling rapidly although pricing varies significantly.