The argument has raged for decades (well...) - should the Amiga continue to rely on new chipsets, or have PCI slots?
In my opinion, PCI slots are by far the best option - but AGA shouldn't be ditched straight away.
I would argue that AGA should remain in the Amiga, for now at least, if for no reason apart from backward compatibility (especially seeing how slow UAE runs having to emulate ECS). At the same time, the Amiga needs a great boost to graphics (not to mention sound), and giving the Amiga PCI slots would be by far the best option. Zorro cards are expensive and inferior, and as for developing the AGA chipset, well I'll discuss this in a moment, but generally, PCI slots will give us a better solution far more quickly.
Micronik already have their Infinitiv 1500 with working PCI slots; with licensing, we should hopefully see new motherboards with PCI as standard. In the long term, we should hopefully be able to have an AmigaOS that runs fine without AGA, with virtually all programs running fine without AGA, and AGA emulation for those rare occassions it is needed.
Yes it is true, AGA as well as PCI is an additional cost, but better compared with performance decreases and lack of compatibility. And as I said, hopefully it will only be a short term solution before going PCI only (rather like having 680x0 and PPC, before going PPC only).
Amiga International have remained silent as to the fate of AGA. Even in its current state, it is not totally obselete, and useful when it comes to multimedia and video work. Where as AGA may be an embarrassment compared to a Voodoo or Permedia chipset, it is a bonus in a machine like the Access.
But there is the point; AGA uses are specialised, and most people would rather have a modern PCI card in their machine.
But of course, thanks to licensing, it should be possible to mix and match the Amiga technology. So mainstream will have PCI and AGA, and then later just PCI. On the other hand, you could also have Amigas that use just AGA.
In this situation, Amiga International could do well to develop AGA, but in my opinion, this would only be for these niche markets. To expect AI to produce a chipset that competes with the latest PCI cards, and is still compatible with AGA is just out of the question. The point is, if such a new chipset wasn't AGA compatible, well, you might as well use a PCI card.
I should also point out that I'm pretty sure that AAA was not to be AGA compatible, and Hombre (the chipset planned after AAA) was certainly incompatible with AGA. Incidentally, Hombre specifications included 3D performance of 30 million texture-mapped polygons per second - impressive, but compare that to Permedia 2 (83 million) or Voodoo 2 (90 million), and you can see it's still got a way to go. So do we expect AI to take AGA, develop it past AAA and Hombre, and still keep it AGA compatible?
No. PCI slots are a much better solution. If AI do choose to develop AGA, then it should be possible to buy Amigas that use PCI cards (the only reason for having AGA being for backwards compatibility).
Mark