The Apollo team will really have something interesting, if they ever get the core to the point where some company or big organization that is still using 680x0 CPU's, could use a faster 680x0 CPU chip for their products, and who thinks that Gunnar's soft core 68080 is worth the financial risk to turn it into a new ASIC 680x0 CPU chip.

I'm guessing that the expense to create a new ASIC CPU is too high for what remains of the Amiga 68k community to fund, and would need to be done in larger numbers than the Amiga community can purchase, so additional parties with deep pockets, that are interested in having a faster new 680x0 CPU chip, would need to be found to make the production of such new ASIC CPU chips feasible.

How fast could Gunnar's soft core 68080 be clocked, if produced as a new ASIC cpu chip, I don't know, but I'm guessing that it could easily be 2 to 5 times faster than any FPGA available to put the soft core into today.

I know there has been some discussion about the possibility of a new ASIC cpu chip being produced, but I don't know how feasible such discussions have been. Easy to dream of stuff, but much harder to make the dreams become real hardware. I think it is impressive that the Apollo team has gotten as far as they are today, and that they still have room to improve the design, as well as use better and faster FPGA chips to make it go faster. I also think they were smart by including Picasso96 compatibility, and getting HDMI output to work (apparently with some limitations).

[ Edited by amigadave 29.06.2017 - 16:26 ]