"New" amiga hardware

[biggun]

Why some developers choose the amiga 600? Is not popular like 500 or 1200.

Why not?

We have three card supporting Phoenix.

1) Vampire 600 (for Amiga 600)
64MB fast

2) Vampire 500 (for Amiga 500/ and others)
64MB fast
+ IDE Controller

3) Apollo/Phoenix (for Amiga 500/ and others)
128MB Fast
+ SDCard

[biggun]

@biggun

Vampire 500 is a project and phoenix dont know what is at the moment.

I don't understand you post.
Maybe you can rephrase this?

[biggun]

@biggun

Edited, sorry.

Hmm.
I still don't understand ....

Vampire600 is a CPU upgrade card for classic AMIGA
Of these some were sold to AMIGA users

Vampire500 is a CPU upgrade card for classic AMIGA
Of the V500 prodotypes were produced and are used by some.

APOLLO/PHOENIX is a CPU upgrade card for classic AMIGA
Of these prodotypes were produced and are used by some.

NATAMI is a complete system
Of the NATAMI several generations were produced.
And some low number of those are used by people.

The Phoenix-CPU is an 68K CPU core which can be instantiated and used by all of the above.
Pictures of the Vampire 600 and Apollo/Phoenix Card
as well as AMIGA Software running those you see on the bring up thread here.

http://www.apollo-core.com/bringup/

[biggun]

@biggun

OK... then, where can i purchase apollo/phoenix or natami?

Do you not know what bring-up means?

It means testing and debugging of new hardware after it was developed and _before_ you sell it.


You understand this right?

1) First you design something

2) Then you test it and verify that it runs 100%

3) Then you sell it to people

[biggun]

gunnar as i see it you achieve 060+ class speed on a vampire card!¿:O
this really aint bad.

Thanks.
Yes, I agree so far we are quite happy with the performance in comparison to the price of the Vampire.

as far i see the caches dont get recognized, or arent there any?

Apollo/Phoenix has 2 caches.
One for Data and one for Instruction.
Having 2 caches is good for performance.

Apollo/Phoenix is the first 68K CPU which uses transparent caches.
We have designed the CPU on purpose to have transparent caches..

The new trick that Phoenix does is it snoops updates to the DCache and automatically cleans up the ICache. Because of this Phoenix can support Selfmodifying code and the "cache-clean" functions of the later AMIGA OS versions are not needed to be used.

This means old software should run fine  - even with caches enabled.

On the Vampire cards Phoenix runs with
Icache= 4KB
DCache = 4 KB

On the Apollo/Phoenix Card we want to run with
ICache = 32 KB
DCache = 32 KB

[biggun]

The MIPS result in SysInfo is rubbish and can't be compared to a 68060.

The Sysinfo results are real and you can compare Phoenix with any other 68K with them.

As probably all people know Sysinfos benchmark is difficult for Super Scalar CPUs.
This means the benchmark is written in such a way that a Super Scalar CPU can not make full usage of a possible 2nd instruction execution per cycle.
But this drawback does affect Phoenix and 68060 the same way.
The Phoenix Core can execute several instrutions per cycle.
While this features is NOT enabled in the current Vampire loads, Phoenix can do this.

Execution of 2 instrutions per cycle can be enabled in bigger FPGA systems
Like for example in the ApolloPhoenix card or in the NATAMI.

I don't know why the system libraries still appear in "SLOW RAM".

This just depends on the mapping options used.
Phoenix has some sort of tarnsparent MMU feature.
Phoenix  supports automatic MAPROM - loading of Kickstart to fastmem and "MMU" mapping it to Kickstart memory region.
Phoenix also supports re-mapping of memory slices.

I've configured it to map 1 MB of fastmem to "slow-ram" area.
This is good for game compatibilty as some games expect to find memory at $c00000.

Memory could also be mapped to Zorro 2 and or Zorro 3 range.
This way up to 64 MB are then visible and usesable in the Vampire cards
and 128 MB are useable on the Phoenix card.

[biggun]

I just saw this thread and I have read it all. First of all it is great to see there is new hardware coming out for the A500 and possibly in the future also the A1200.

However I have some questions; Will this expansion require the Vampire board? Or will it come on it's own? Will it be just 68000 replacement or will include extra FastRAM and IDE?

There are currently 3 products:

Vampire 500 (for AMIGA 500)
CPU ~ 60-70 Mips
64 MB fast
IDE


Vampire 600 (for AMIGA 600)
CPU ~ 60-70 Mips
64 MB fast



ApolloPhoenix(for AMIGA 500)
CPU ~ 180-200 Mips (planned/unverified)
128 MB fast
SDCard as IDE
.. and more more features

[biggun]

Thank you for the quick reply. That is indeed good news.
I'll follow http://www.apollo-core.com/ for any latest updates

The two Vampire Cards : Vampire 500 and Vampire 600
are developed by Igor Majstorovik (http://www.majsta.com)
The Vampire 600 is available already.
The Vampire 500 is in testing right now.

Igor will anounce the card I suppose.


The Phoenix CPU Core is designed by me.
So all information about it is first hand.

The Phoenix CPU card was produced in 10 units for developers so far.
We are currently testing it.
As soon as we donw with testing we want to sell it.
We plan to be ready for this in the next month.

Official announcements will then be made on our website.

[biggun]

small update, small tuning with 5 Mips more

[biggun]

Your selling a separate phoenix cpu card? Is this indepenedent of the vampire 500 and 600 boards?
Is this just a stopgap before the apollo board or something different?

This is the Appolo-Card.

We have three cards atm.

1) Vampire 600
     64MB
Status: Sold by Kipper

2) Vampire 500
     64 MB
     IDE
Status: in Beta-test (mainly used by Igor)

3) Apollo/Phoenix
    128 MB
    SDCard
    (lots of extra features ...)
Status: in Beta-Testing (10 boards atm)


The testing of the Vampire500 and Apollo/Phoenix should be done soon.
Then the cards can/will produced...

[biggun]

To biggun:

Is that you in your avatar? If so, who of the two are you? Just had to ask

Yes this is me and my lovely wife.

[biggun]

Another small tuning.
Now enabling LINKSTACK

[biggun]

I think the little Vampire can do even better results if the CPU is properly setup.

What do you think about this value?

[biggun]

I think this is great news, but I do question the validity of the values when it reports 3.17(or even 4.00) times the chipspeed of an A600.

This is just the way Sysinfo calculates this,
And it makes sense if you think about it.

Look atr this code:

LOOP:
  MOVE (A0),D0
  DBF     D7,LOOP

What does it do?
It read 16bit of data in a loop
The code to do this is 6 bytes long.
This means 2 bytes data loaded and 6 bytes instruction loaded.

If you machine only has chipmem then all 8 bytes are loaded from the same bus.,
This means this AMIGA uses 25% of the bandwidth for data and 75% for instructions.

Now if your AMIGA has fastmem the instructions can come from fastmem.
Therefore your can up to 4 times the bandwidth of the chipmem.

This is in a nutshell how the calculation of SYSINFO works.