| 1.5 Ghz Fabric Speed: How Fast Can You Make Natami | page 1 2
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Marcel Verdaasdonk
Netherlands
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Posts 3979
18 Apr 2011 10:44
| Gunnar if you want me to leave all you have to do is ask. Further more my conclusion was based on old data.(read the previous speedster topic) What i am certain of is that you cannot fit the entire logic of the Natami into the speedster, the ATA interface is 5 volt logic, then you have USB 5 volt plus and negative logic the joystick ports use again 5 volt logic and even need a analog input of the logic chip. you need a lot of extra logic to get the right voltage levels and a lot of pins.
I don't see how you are gonna fit a whole Natami on a single chip.
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Megol .
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Posts 680
18 Apr 2011 14:20
| Marcel Verdaasdonk wrote:
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Gunnar if you want me to leave all you have to do is ask.
Further more my conclusion was based on old data.(read the previous speedster topic)
What i am certain of is that you cannot fit the entire logic of the Natami into the speedster, the ATA interface is 5 volt logic, then you have USB 5 volt plus and negative logic the joystick ports use again 5 volt logic and even need a analog input of the logic chip.
you need a lot of extra logic to get the right voltage levels and a lot of pins.
I don't see how you are gonna fit a whole Natami on a single chip.
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No modern FPGA supports 5V I/O so what's the difference? Some even have maximum 2.5V support and others have very weak (drive) 3.3V support.
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Reperatorium Kwaku85
Poland
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Posts 40
18 Apr 2011 14:22
| I think Gunnars point is You not ask about something, but just tell something will work/fit, or not. They're the constructors of this project and last word belongs to them. If They tell something will work, we must belive them, not speculate.
If We have some doubts we should ask them and discuss about it. That's all, I think.
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Reperatorium Kwaku85
Poland
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Posts 40
18 Apr 2011 14:32
| On every modern boards are logic working on difference voltage levels. Whole logic is powered by 3.3v, but this must operate with ports working on 5V, like USB, and many others. There are speciall chips for mach levels (for example some max chips). Many controllers (USB controllers) are working on 5V, but You can operate them with 3.3v level. I thnk it's normall.
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Wojtek P
Poland
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Posts 1597
18 Apr 2011 16:01
| Gunnar von Boehn wrote:
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People, what is your opinion do you think that its good for visitors to posts there speculations here?
For example: Marcel posted that the NATAMI would not fit into the Speedster - this is nonsense of course it does fit into this FPGA.
Wojtek posted that the memory latency would be to high to keep the design, this is also non-sense.
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So do you mean that 50ns DRAM latency magically turn to 10 when you use 1.5GHz FPGA?You will have 10 times faster blitter which would mostly wait for DRAM.
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Megol .
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Posts 680
19 Apr 2011 07:12
| Wojtek P wrote:
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Gunnar von Boehn wrote:
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People, what is your opinion do you think that its good for visitors to posts there speculations here?
For example: Marcel posted that the NATAMI would not fit into the Speedster - this is nonsense of course it does fit into this FPGA.
Wojtek posted that the memory latency would be to high to keep the design, this is also non-sense.
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So do you mean that 50ns DRAM latency magically turn to 10 when you use 1.5GHz FPGA?
You will have 10 times faster blitter which would mostly wait for DRAM.
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Ever heard of caches? 10ns DRAM exists but are very specialized (requiring custom logic) but 20ns DRAM is readily available - RLDRAM.
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Megol .
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Posts 680
19 Apr 2011 07:44
| Some related news: the garage company have an additional $100M in funding and will probably be manufactured by the best silicon magicians in the world. EXTERNAL LINK EXTERNAL LINK
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Wojtek P
Poland
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Posts 1597
21 Apr 2011 14:36
| Megol . wrote:
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Wojtek P wrote:
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Gunnar von Boehn wrote:
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People, what is your opinion do you think that its good for visitors to posts there speculations here?
For example: Marcel posted that the NATAMI would not fit into the Speedster - this is nonsense of course it does fit into this FPGA.
Wojtek posted that the memory latency would be to high to keep the design, this is also non-sense.
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So do you mean that 50ns DRAM latency magically turn to 10 when you use 1.5GHz FPGA?
You will have 10 times faster blitter which would mostly wait for DRAM.
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Ever heard of caches? 10ns DRAM exists but are very s pecialized (requiring custom logic) but 20ns DRAM is readily available - RLDRAM.
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Caches doesn't magically make DRAM faster. It just reduces how often RAM have to be accessed.
With relatively 3 times slower RAM you have 3 times higher miss penalty.And blitter and copper doesn't use cache.
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Wojtek P
Poland
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Posts 1597
21 Apr 2011 14:38
| Megol . wrote:
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Some related news: the garage company have an additional $100M in funding and will probably be manufactured by the best silicon magicians in the world.
EXTERNAL LINK EXTERNAL LINK |
And may gain huge market share - to run inefficient VHDL/Verilog designs cheaper.
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Claudio Wieland
Germany
| | (Natami Team)
Posts 706
21 Apr 2011 21:36
| Using Tabula's logic time-multiplexing technology makes a lot of sense, because it enables up to eight times larger virtual die area. Maybe you are not aware of this, but chip costs directly relate to the so-called yield factor. The smaller the chips are, the higher their yield factor, or "good versus bad" chips.
There is no cleanroom on this planet where 100% of all dust is removed from the atmosphere. And hence, the bigger the chip die is, the greater chances are that there is a ruined chip by a fallen dust particle during production. Low yield factors for the bigger FPGAs make them a lot more expensive than they should be, ideally.
@Wojtek
Just because FPGAs are bigger, this does not mean that the designs get worse.. companies actually selling FPGA based products need to look strictly at the price of their designs, or else they are goners. This requirement alone ensures that companies use the smallest possible FPGAs, into which the smallest possible design fits.
What you insinuate, may partly be true for hobbyists who don't know anything about good HDL design. But for professionals, this is nowhere the case.
Greetings
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Jakob Eriksson
Sweden
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Posts 1097
21 Apr 2011 22:51
| I have always thought it strange, that partially broken FPGA chips could not have their bad areas marked as such.
Kind of like a hard disk has bad sectors marked.
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Claudio Wieland
Germany
| | (Natami Team)
Posts 706
21 Apr 2011 23:13
| At least in FPGA, this might actually make sense. Patent, anyone ^^ ? Well, I guess it would not be that easy, because one dust particle could destroy part of the routing matrix for the logic cells. And to handle that.. . Easier solution: Keep chips small.
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Gunnar von Boehn
Germany
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Posts 5775
22 Apr 2011 21:54
| Jakob Eriksson wrote:
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I have always thought it strange, that partially broken FPGA chips could not have their bad areas marked as such.
Kind of like a hard disk has bad sectors marked.
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Xilinx does this.
They sell partly broken chips for a discount.
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Ben Breeck
USA
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Posts 4
28 Apr 2012 19:18
| Well, here's some more information on the Achronix Speedster 22i
EXTERNAL LINK
The only real question is: how much will it cost?
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Wojtek P
Poland
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Posts 1597
01 May 2012 08:37
| Chuck T wrote:
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"Achronix (RAM based, 1.5 GHz fabric speed) who will be building their chips on Intels' state-of-the art 22 nm process"
Quoted from:
EXTERNAL LINK
Just how fast could you make the Natami go? I looked and I don't know if this is a consumer product as there were no prices.
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And how expensive will it be?
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Chuck T
USA
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Posts 678
01 May 2012 13:22
| Ben Breeck wrote:
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Well, here's some more information on the Achronix Speedster 22i
EXTERNAL LINK
The only real question is: how much will it cost?
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According to the PDF, it has SATA and Ethernet. SATA would give the Natami some longevity if it weren't for drives becoming obsolete after a few years because drive makers keep increasing the speed.
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Samuel D Crow
USA
| | (Natami Team)
Posts 1295
01 May 2012 16:17
| Perhaps you're all forgetting that the NatAmi multimedia chipset cores are written in AHDL. That language only generates code for Altera FPGAs. If you really want an Amiga running on that FPGA, go bug the MiniMig and FPGAArcade developers about it. At least they're using VHDL which will work on non-Altera FPGAs.
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Jakob Eriksson
Sweden
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Posts 1097
01 May 2012 17:26
| It's not like it's a super-human task to port from AHDL to VHDL. I'd take commented and modular AHDL over a morass of VHDL code any day. (Just as a fictional example.)
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Megol .
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Posts 680
01 May 2012 19:16
| Chuck T wrote:
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Ben Breeck wrote:
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Well, here's some more information on the Achronix Speedster 22i
EXTERNAL LINK
The only real question is: how much will it cost?
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According to the PDF, it has SATA and Ethernet. SATA would give the Natami some longevity if it weren't for drives becoming obsolete after a few years because drive makers keep increasing the speed.
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The ATA interface supports the oldest ATA drives on the newest ATA controller. The same applies to SATA, you can run first generation drives without problem on third generation controllers. Or even connect 6Gbps SATA SSDs to a first generation SATA controller. And that's not all, you can connect the same SSD via a SATA<->ATA bridge and run it on your old 80286 if you want! Nothing obsolete there...
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Marcel Verdaasdonk
Netherlands
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Posts 3979
01 May 2012 19:37
| Megol there are always workarounds, but when talking about board dimensions and I/O pins i rather have SATA over PATA. ;)
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Do you have questions about the Natami?