05.Jul.2021
Amigaworld.net (Forum)
|
Apollo team: change in staff, new accelerator boards annouced
As announced by Apollo team at the title link, Igor Majstorovic, developer of the Vampire accelerator boards, has left the group. On the other hand, Thomas Hirsch returned, the original developer of the former Natami project.
The press release mentions the high workload Igor Majstorovic suffered from manufacturing the Vampire boards. Despite his withdrawal, he will still assume warranties for the cards he sold, though, while obviously the new board "Raptor" is affected. The latter was intended as a reduced version of the Vampire and should have been available in May already.
Instead, Apollo team announced two new accelerator boards. FireBird (for Amiga models 500, 1000 and 2000) and IceDrake (for Amiga 1200), which are based on the Vampire 4 core. At the same time, the Vampire 2 boards have reached their end of sale, remaining PCB and FPGA stock is currently being sold.
The new accelerator boards are announced for Q4 2021/Q1 2022, beginning with FireBird being available first, followed closely by IceDrake - a third board, then for Amiga 4000, would be planned as well. Production will be taking place in Germany and in high volume, thus a quick clearing of waiting lists is expected by the team. Estimated prices have not been mentioned yet.
Features of FireBird and IceDrake:
- Cyclone 5 (FPGA chip of Vampire 4)
- 512 MB DDR3 RAM
- 68080 CPU implementation
- SAGA chipset implementation
- 64-bit AMMX instruction set (accelerated multi media output)
- 165 MIPS
- 16-bit audio
- 100 MBit Ethernet adapter
- two IDE ports for CompactFlash and CD-ROM
- USB joypad support
- real-time clock
(snx)
[News message: 05. Jul. 2021, 18:44] [Comments: 0]
[Send via e-mail] [Print version] [ASCII version]
|
