Vampire 600 V2 - Amiga 600 FPGA accelerator Pre-order

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@Deling What can I say for some reason I found BGA is in every product I open the housing, they work just fine for years. Only problem with them are in new graphic cards who overheat much and work on high temperatures. Since I have ordered measuring equipment to test our temperatures we will see could this be a problem. I think not because on every core I put on old Vampire and by touching the PFGA by finger I don't feel any high temperature.

@supaduper added
 
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I have to agree about BGA reliability. I run a small business doing repairs (mostly to arcade PCB) and BGA is major issue in almost all of todays modern electronics for reliability and virtually unrepairable except for small percent of people/repair companies who have expensive BGA re-flow equipment. Especially for something Amiga-related that could possibly be run for many more years reliability is very important. If you can use QFP it would surely improve reliability. Size may not be an issue if your board has everything needed on one board. I think reliability and powerful specification is more important than physical size. Certainly in A2000/A3000/A4000 size is no issue, power and reliability is priority there (I'm waiting for this equivalent for A3000/A4000)
But overall good to see you are keeping Amiga hardware development alive and good luck with your work and future projects :thumbsup:
 
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Tnx, I really don't think that we will have problems here using BGA, all of the BGA problems are related to overheat and in small portion in physical damage of motherboard. Our temperature ranges are 2-3 times lower than on modern graphic cards.
 
@Majsta, the pictures of the newly arrived chips look great, go for it :-)
PS: I agree, the BGA package should not be a problem when the temperatures are not extreme
 
"all of the BGA problems are related to overheat " that correct but main problem is rohs , smd qfp component are easy and quick for repair BGA not , massive cheap production for people like new pc laptop and other low quality thing no need long life , Amiga is for enthusiast people . they are need long life equipment for 15-20 years minimum
 
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I must say that I don't agree in one thing you say. Why do I need to re-ball FPGA who is widely distributed and can be found anywhere. Re-balling is done for specialized chipsets ASIC or whatever based. All our core is not in FPGA, it is in flash loader. So we remove FPGA if something happens and add another one who will be programmed from that flash loader and everything ok. So if FPGA dies in let's say 5 years we replace it with new one for about 5 minutes :) All I know that I m buying all of those types of FPGA, clearing stocks in all European shops. At the end my plan is to have more than 1000 of them, why because all is telling me that this project will be full success :)
 
Dang it... Now I'll have to spend more money, and then more money for another A600 :D.

I guess USB Blaster will be needed for JTAG programming?
 
Great job, Majsta!

Do you know if it will also fit the CDTV-II ? The layout of the board is different so accelerator for Amiga 600 do not fit nicely...the Vampire 2 design seems really compact.

If it does I will take 2. But I will take 1 anyway for my Amiga 600 ;-)

PM & Payment sent.

Thanks!
 
@majsta- Payment of 95 euro sent for a Vampire V2 to support an awesome project & vision, FPGA accelerators could open the door to a whole new world of computing power within the realm of the 68k processor architecture. Love the work you and the Apollo team are doing so wanted to support it :)

Will PM you my Paypal home address. Keep up the superb work :bowdown::thumbsup:
 
Sorry for late reply, last few days my net connection is kinda dead...
@sunmax I can't tell will it fit or will it work on CDTV-II since I don't have that machine to perform tests, sorry.
@ad-rs1600i tnx for the kind words and understanding the whole concept.
 
Ok here is the quick update to explain new situation.
As the Phoenix core getting bigger and more complex (having 3 instructions per clk as we speak) with future possibility to add FPU and get into never seen performance at least in Amiga world I had to change few things regarding design. This will affect the price since I just can't find a way to produce card for 90Eur and satisfy Phoenix core needs in the same time. Inside apollo-team we had 3 day long discussion about this. 10K LE Altera Cyclone III could easily fit in that price range but simply that is not enough for Phoenix. So new redesign is taking place and we will use 40K LE Cyclone III FPGA device instead and that is something I can't get cheap. What is discovered that price needs to go up to 120Eur now to cover everything. Also I have decided to cover all loses for early pre-ordered cards so this will not have any affect to those who already ordered and paid for their cards. So from now I can only accept 120Eur for pre-orders. First page has been changed, please read it.
 
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