APOLLO 68080 is now HYPER-THREADING enabled

[kolla]

With the Gunnar, Amiga 68k is becoming more and more like OS4 - first an incompatible "tabor A1222" like modern FPU, and now multithreading and need for SMP... oh, I forgot AMMX... "Amivec" is next.

[kolla]

AROS x86 has made great strides of late as far as SMP goes, so I expect hyper-threading support to make its way into the 68K version soon.

Hmm, quite sure it was the Raspberry Pi 3 with its quad core that ignited the SMP work in AROS, so not x86, but ARM. Anyways, the AROS developers have said quite explicitly that there will not be any SMP support for AROS/m68k. So, how this hyperthreading will be utilized by Amiga products is not easy to guess.

Also, the news is that Apollo Core will have hyperthreading, not that the core running on Vampires will have it - those are two separate products, remember? The Amiga vampire platform is merely guinea pigs for the real product, which is the Apollo core.

[kolla]

"can", "may", "maybe"

So Gunnar passes on big hopes for AROS despite...

http://www.apollo-core.com/knowledge.php?b=4¬e=6171&z=UfZpZv

Kalamatee (AROS)

Posts 12
05 Jun 2017 18:28

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news - but there won't be support for smp in the m68k build ever. The m68k platform has no provision for working in an smp-like environment, and changes would make it binary incomparable with existing amigaos/aros for m68k.

If the vampire/apollo team create some "smp like" m68k core, it would need its own custom m68k flavour of aros, and most m68k apps won't work on it.

[kolla]

Like WarpUp or PowerUp, only with something 68k-ish instead of PowerPC.

[kolla]

There used to be a few multi-processor 68k unix stations back in the days, if I recall correctly. About the same time Amiga users were drewling over the prospect of having transputer cards, lol... how things go around in circles

[kolla]

Clearly Gunnar's announcement implies that the Vampire will support hyper-threading since the Vampire uses the Apollo core and not some other core.

It uses a dedicated subset of the Apollo Core, specialized for the Vampire V2 cards. Just like Phoenix was an even smaller subset, for the V1. Or else there would be an FPU (which the full core has), and binary compatibility with ColdFire and whatever else the "full" core offers.

How many times have we been told to not mix what the Apollo Core offers with what the Vampire offers? And still people talk of them as they were one and the same? Why is that?

[kolla]

@djole
Exactly.

I can't help being amused by how Gunnar is now "herding the cats" over at his forum, where... ehm... enthusiastic suppoerters... spin the speculations wheel wild. I am glad he is doing something about that now, and I bet he almost regret his announcement, lol.

[kolla]

you could actually boot these debug roms i sent you instead just posting once on the forums. that might actually contribute a bit to your platform of choice.

I am mostly posting from my phone, right now from a train passing through the highlands of Jämtland, on my way home. I did not bring the MIST on this weekend's cabintrip, sorry. I did try to boot them a few times before I left though, but instead of booting into AROS, it ended in just rebooting, with the regular kickstart. I will spend more time on it when I get home in a few hours, no worries