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Offline Hattig

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Re: Vampire 600 boards for the Amiga 600 on the way
« Reply #29 from previous page: September 09, 2013, 05:29:07 PM »
Quote from: psxphill;747336
I'm hoping hooking up with Apollo doesn't derail it.
 
From Apollo-core.com "Fully User-Code Compatible with MC68000"
 
Sounds good, but hidden behind that lies the answer to "so what is it incompatible with?"


I wouldn't buy a Vampire A600 based upon future cores, especially one promising the world. On the other hand, I wish them the best of luck in their cut-down Phoenix core for the Vampire A600 - a 100 MIPS 68k A600 would be devastating.

But it is working currently with TG68K at a few MIPS, possibly even over 10 eventually. So buy it if that is good enough for you now.
 

Offline Hattig

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Re: Vampire 600 boards for the Amiga 600 on the way
« Reply #30 on: September 09, 2013, 05:38:58 PM »
Quote from: psxphill;747371
I'd rather have full 68060 compatibility (supervisor/user/mmu/fpu) even if that is less efficient. I'm assuming this isn't going to be open source so that someone else could adapt it to fit this requirement?


It sounds like they are creating a low-end variant called Phoenix to cater for the Vampire A600 that will be far more 68K-like than Apollo. I agree that getting ISA compatibility is the most important, either 68020 or 68060, before new instructions that might be great, but will be unused by classic software.

TBH if they get it working, and if they get 20 MIPS out of it in the end (on the Vampire) I will be impressed.  I'm glad they have a development target too, that always helps motivate people.
 

Offline matthey

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Re: Vampire 600 boards for the Amiga 600 on the way
« Reply #31 on: September 09, 2013, 07:07:26 PM »
Quote from: Hattig;747373
It sounds like they are creating a low-end variant called Phoenix to cater for the Vampire A600 that will be far more 68K-like than Apollo. I agree that getting ISA compatibility is the most important, either 68020 or 68060, before new instructions that might be great, but will be unused by classic software.


There are no user level ISA changes to the 68060 from the 68020 that a compiler would use or target except an FPU ISA which the 68020 did not have. In other words, the 68060 ISA=68020 ISA for almost all purposes.

Quote from: Hattig;747373

TBH if they get it working, and if they get 20 MIPS out of it in the end (on the Vampire) I will be impressed.  I'm glad they have a development target too, that always helps motivate people.


I too am skeptical of the performance increases over the TG68k given the limited resources. The MIPS test will probably give good results if the code fits in the ICache but the Phoenix will have smaller caches than the 68060 or even the 68040. Many of the timings are better than the 68040 but I expect overall performance similar to a 68040. There isn't any way a Cyclone 2 is going to outperform a 68060. Perhaps SysInfo will give 100MIPS result but that is meaningless.
 

Offline Iggy

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Re: Vampire 600 boards for the Amiga 600 on the way
« Reply #32 on: September 10, 2013, 04:37:45 AM »
Quote from: wawrzon;747339
there is no natami team as such for what i know. apollo is a softcore by former natami contributors, gunnar in particular. i dont know who else.


Well, you've just managed to discourage me with that statement.
Gunnar definitely wasn't my favorite member of that team.
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Offline ChaosLord

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Re: Vampire 600 boards for the Amiga 600 on the way
« Reply #33 on: September 10, 2013, 07:03:35 AM »
Quote from: matthey;747375

I too am skeptical of the performance increases over the TG68k given the limited resources. The MIPS test will probably give good results if the code fits in the ICache but the Phoenix will have smaller caches than the 68060 or even the 68040. Many of the timings are better than the 68040 but I expect overall performance similar to a 68040. There isn't any way a Cyclone 2 is going to outperform a 68060. Perhaps SysInfo will give 100MIPS result but that is meaningless.


Why is Majsta using such an old and slow FPGA?
Is it tremendously cheaper?

The Apollo needs a complete rewrite to be squished down into the Cyclone 2.

That means it has to be re-debugged all over again.  This takes time.

Then it will need to be rewritten again when someone makes a version for a newer, bigger and faster FPGA chip.  Which means it will need to be redebugged all over again.  Jens will have really a lot of work to do :)
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Offline matthey

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Re: Vampire 600 boards for the Amiga 600 on the way
« Reply #34 on: September 10, 2013, 12:57:23 PM »
Quote from: ChaosLord;747420
Why is Majsta using such an old and slow FPGA?
Is it tremendously cheaper?

Cost. The Cyclone 2 was cheap and adequate for prototyping and proof of concept although Majsta might have switched to a Cyclone 3 earlier if he had known the difficulties of such a small fpga. He has been 100% successful in his original goals. There hasn't been enough time to upgrade to a bigger fpga for production of the Vampire 600. I think he is looking at a Cyclone 5 for the AGA machines.

Quote from: ChaosLord;747420
The Apollo needs a complete rewrite to be squished down into the Cyclone 2.

That means it has to be re-debugged all over again.  This takes time.

Then it will need to be rewritten again when someone makes a version for a newer, bigger and faster FPGA chip.  Which means it will need to be redebugged all over again.  Jens will have really a lot of work to do :)

Much of what you say is true. It is a significant amount of work to shrink the Apollo and then it has less advantage over the TG68k which performs adequately with minimal resources. There are significant parts of the Apollo core that can be reused so some of the debugging would improve both cores. It should be a good learning experience and may be interesting for embedded applications.
« Last Edit: September 10, 2013, 01:02:55 PM by matthey »
 

Offline psxphill

Re: Vampire 600 boards for the Amiga 600 on the way
« Reply #35 on: September 10, 2013, 05:01:57 PM »
Quote from: matthey;747375
There are no user level ISA changes to the 68060 from the 68020 that a compiler would use or target except an FPU ISA which the 68020 did not have. In other words, the 68060 ISA=68020 ISA for almost all purposes.

68060 has a few less instructions than the 68020, so to be 100% compatible it shouldn't have them either.
 
FPU & MMU are also required for 100% compatibility. I don't believe gunnar is going to take over the soft core market, which is what he intends to do. What he's created doesn't really fit the requirement of getting us all access to 68060 accelerators either.
 

Offline matthey

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Re: Vampire 600 boards for the Amiga 600 on the way
« Reply #36 on: September 10, 2013, 08:11:38 PM »
Quote from: psxphill;747465
68060 has a few less instructions than the 68020, so to be 100% compatible it shouldn't have them either.

You must be referring to the integer 68060 ISA only. Do you really want to drop the integer 64 bit MULS/MULU instructions in hardware just to be 100% compatible with the 68060? This is silly. Maybe a 68060 version of the TG68k will be made to be as close as possible to a 68060 (a waste of time and cycle exact is not possible with <$1000 fpga) but I expect it would be a fraction of the speed of an enhanced 68k like the Apollo that should be 99.9% compatible. How many people turn off JIT and select all the most compatible settings in UAE? Without the compatibility settings, UAE provides instructions that didn't exist on the real processors and uses 64 bit instead of 80 bit floating point among other incompatibilities. Some of the UAE less compatible settings give a more tolerant and stable system like turning off alignment restrictions on the 68000 emulation. The 68060 is a great processor but we should not limit ourselves to it's bounds.

Quote from: psxphill;747465
FPU & MMU are also required for 100% compatibility. I don't believe gunnar is going to take over the soft core market, which is what he intends to do. What he's created doesn't really fit the requirement of getting us all access to 68060 accelerators either.

I will be pushing for a more 68060 compatible but further enhanced FPU. An updated FPU ISA would benefit the FPU more than a 68k integer ISA update. I believe a 25%-50% speed and code density improvement of FPU code is possible with hardware and ISA changes. I would like to make the FPU 64 bit to improve timings but if it causes too many compatibility problems then 80 bits has the advantage that it could do reasonably fast 64 bit integer math with more efficient conversion instruction enhancements (a hardware and ISA change).

An MMU is not planned in the near future. The 68060 has a Cadillac of an MMU that would be expensive and difficult to duplicate and test. A simpler MPU would be more likely at first.
« Last Edit: September 10, 2013, 08:24:56 PM by matthey »
 

Offline wawrzon

Re: Vampire 600 boards for the Amiga 600 on the way
« Reply #37 on: September 10, 2013, 10:46:14 PM »
none pushes for clock for clock 060 compatibility. a winuae type lax 68k compatibility is perfectly enough. still introducing new unique instructions may split the platform, when encouraging the newly compiled software not being full compatible with the legacy systems, that do not provide an extended instruction set.
 

Offline ChaosLord

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Re: Vampire 600 boards for the Amiga 600 on the way
« Reply #38 on: September 11, 2013, 09:05:18 AM »
Quote from: matthey;747492
You must be referring to the integer 68060 ISA only. Do you really want to drop the integer 64 bit MULS/MULU instructions in hardware just to be 100% compatible with the 68060? This is silly.

+1


Quote

An MMU is not planned in the near future. The 68060 has a Cadillac of an MMU that would be expensive and difficult to duplicate and test. A simpler MPU would be more likely at first.

I really think they should / have to include the simple MMU that the EC060 version has.  Iirc it works on 16MB blocks of memory and marks them as cacheable or not.  I think that is all it does.  No VM stuff.

If they include that then it will be really and truly "060 compatible" so AmigaOS can boot up out of the box.
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Offline persia

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Re: Vampire 600 boards for the Amiga 600 on the way
« Reply #39 on: September 12, 2013, 02:19:55 AM »
I've actually been thinking of expanding an old 600 I have in storage in the garage, is this the best way to expand a 600?
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Offline SamuraiCrow

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Re: Vampire 600 boards for the Amiga 600 on the way
« Reply #40 on: September 12, 2013, 06:51:53 AM »
Quote from: ChaosLord;747551
I really think they should / have to include the simple MMU that the EC060 version has.  Iirc it works on 16MB blocks of memory and marks them as cacheable or not.  I think that is all it does.  No VM stuff.

If they include that then it will be really and truly "060 compatible" so AmigaOS can boot up out of the box.


If by VM you mean virtualized memory-mapping then I agree.  The page tables on an MMU get unwieldy and large really fast when the page size is small.  16 Meg pages would be much more manageable.
 

Offline som99

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Re: Vampire 600 boards for the Amiga 600 on the way
« Reply #41 on: November 13, 2013, 10:51:33 AM »
I just got an email from Igor, I am next on the list to recive the Vampire 600 so I am a happy camper, can't wait to beef up the little Amiga 600 :D

Edit: I will take Pictures and post when I get it.
« Last Edit: November 13, 2013, 11:27:06 AM by som99 »
 

Offline honasvocas

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Re: Vampire 600 boards for the Amiga 600 on the way
« Reply #42 on: January 02, 2014, 04:01:48 PM »
have you got it yet?
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Offline mrmoonlight

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Re: Vampire 600 boards for the Amiga 600 on the way
« Reply #43 on: January 06, 2014, 10:09:38 PM »
Hi has any one received one of the vampire boards and got any results yet ,as it would be interesting to see how well it holds up ,if it does as well as it is suggested, this would indeed be a huge uplift for the Amiga community who I have to say deserve some encouragement  for the endeavours to keep the Amiga alive   ,I have put my name down for one so I hope I don't get missed lol ,best wishes Brian
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Offline som99

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Re: Vampire 600 boards for the Amiga 600 on the way
« Reply #44 on: January 07, 2014, 07:07:38 AM »
Quote from: honasvocas;756011
have you got it yet?

Yeah I got it in November but sadly found out my A600 was dead (haven't used it in ages since I use the A1200) So I gotta find time to fix whatever is wrong with my non booting A600 first, now when xmas is over and we are done moving to our new house I will son have time to give the Vampire 600 a go :)

« Last Edit: January 07, 2014, 09:26:42 AM by som99 »