ADOOM on A600 running 22-35 FPS

[Paulie85]

I've never used that benchmarking program you have on the bringup page but why does it give 6985.3 mhz as the cpu speed? I know it will be fast but I don't think that kind of speed is possible.

[jj]

Like when the rasp pi was upgraded from 256 to 512MB of ram with little extra cost involved. I believe it was a straight part swap.

up to a 1GB on current pi sitting infront of me

[cunnpole]

People should learn to have realistic expections - then the risk for dissapointment is lower.

I think the vast majority are in agreement. I'm more than happy with the idea of 80mips + 64MB in my A600. Anything else you can give us is a bonus.  

Is this still the plan? If so, how much for option 3?
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)

[Linde]

Well, lack of RAM is one of the major reasons why we lack a modern featured web browser for AmigaOS3 - modern browsers need more RAM, web pages today are resource hungry, number of open tabs alone is meaningless, try doing some work in them too! Working with gfx requires RAM too - I have done my share of animation on Amiga and know very well how limiting 128MB or even 256MB of RAM can be, and ditto if you do audio work, paging to disk is very annoying and also requires MMU features in the softcore to work - much easier to just have more *real* RAM.

There is always some specialist use case that can benefit from more RAM. I do data processing work that requires RAM in the tens and twenties of gigabytes. I browse the web with many tabs open. The question is, then, is the additional RAM worth more than the additional cost in development time, component price and board design? Is there software that will significantly benefit from it (Total Chaos and other specialist cases aside)? Would the relatively slow CPU, although fast in the 68k Amiga world, be sufficient for a modern featured web browser? Is being able to work actively in 50 tabs important enough to enough people to warrant the additional complexity?

The web browser problem is such a horribly ill-defined one as well. Tab usage seems to scale with RAM availability, and you can always make the argument that you *need* more RAM to support the weird habits you have acquired by being spoiled by a more modern, relevant and powerful architecture. Web page complexity tendencies also scale with ubiquitous RAM and CPU availability, and a lot of websites seem to operate on the assumption that I can dedicate a lot of my CPU time to rendering their Javascript animations. Animated GIFs? Outdated technology that, instead of benefitting from hi-color graphics and modern encoding technology, encodes 8-bit frames with run length compression, which with the dithering required to make most of them look somewhat acceptable, turns into huge files.

The basis of this sad development is the assumption of increasingly ubiquitous computing power, which happens at a much faster rate than the development of the 68k Amiga, and the Amiga will never catch up. The fact remains that you don't need 2 GB of RAM to surf the web.

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Here is a link to the next add-on for the Vampire:  http://www.ebay.com/itm/Cray-1-Supercomputer-Memory-Board-Re-Engraving-Certificate-of-Authentically/111586542735?_trksid=p2047675.c100009.m1982&_trkparms=aid%3D777000%26algo%3DABA.MBE%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D28795%26meid%3Dc556e9e6caa841aba49adc5e0e8a8752%26pid%3D100009%26rk%3D1%26rkt%3D1%26sd%3D251832508033

It won't add that much to the cost...

I was looking last night they have a whole Cray on there, starting at $12,000 (plus the need for a truck to haul it for you).  I'm sure @kolla and @ChaosLord would be glad to front the costs of that.  :roflmao:

[Niding]

People should learn to have realistic expections - then the risk for dissapointment is lower.


People also need to make realistic comparisons:
For example:

The ACA500 offer 2 MB memory and about 1.0 CPU MIPS

Igors V600 offers 64 MB fast memory and about 80 CPU MIPS



Realistic expectations is to double the values again.

My sentiment is the same as NovaCoder; 128/256/512 megabyte would be great, but as Olaf mentioned; its about development cost/time and production overhead. I think the majority of the posters here would be more than happy to have their A1200 upgraded to 060 and 64 megs.
But as soon as people start with a "wishlist" they tend to run a bit amok

I wouldnt take it as a critizism of your product, but people like to dream regardless of realism.
If/when this card becomes available for my A1200 I will line up for sure.
My Blizzard 030 with 16 megabytes is okish, but 060 with 64 (or more) megs would be damn sweet.

Thanks for the ADoom demostration btw!

[OlafS3]

There is always some specialist use case that can benefit from more RAM. I do data processing work that requires RAM in the tens and twenties of gigabytes. I browse the web with many tabs open. The question is, then, is the additional RAM worth more than the additional cost in development time, component price and board design? Is there software that will significantly benefit from it (Total Chaos and other specialist cases aside)? Would the relatively slow CPU, although fast in the 68k Amiga world, be sufficient for a modern featured web browser? Is being able to work actively in 50 tabs important enough to enough people to warrant the additional complexity?

The web browser problem is such a horribly ill-defined one as well. Tab usage seems to scale with RAM availability, and you can always make the argument that you *need* more RAM to support the weird habits you have acquired by being spoiled by a more modern, relevant and powerful architecture. Web page complexity tendencies also scale with ubiquitous RAM and CPU availability, and a lot of websites seem to operate on the assumption that I can dedicate a lot of my CPU time to rendering their Javascript animations. Animated GIFs? Outdated technology that, instead of benefitting from hi-color graphics and modern encoding technology, encodes 8-bit frames with run length compression, which with the dithering required to make most of them look somewhat acceptable, turns into huge files.

The basis of this sad development is the assumption of increasingly ubiquitous computing power, which happens at a much faster rate than the development of the 68k Amiga, and the Amiga will never catch up. The fact remains that you don't need 2 GB of RAM to surf the web.

it depends on what you want to do with it. If you want to use it for professional work and to browse the web including Youtube and so on 128 MB are of course not enough. If you want to run the newest ego-shooter 128 MB would not be enough either. If you want to beat standard PCs 128 MB are not enough either.

If you have a primary working system and want to have additionally a simple, affordable system that is fun to use then it is enough. It is much more than we have now. Everybody can buy a 4 GB system next door if he want, for Amiga there are no other options. If the people requesting that develop such a system fine, if they invest plenty of money in development everything is doable and fine too. If they both lack skills and money they have to take and use what is available. Nobody is forced to.

[OlafS3]

My sentiment is the same as NovaCoder; 128/256/512 megabyte would be great, but as Olaf mentioned; its about development cost/time and production overhead. I think the majority of the posters here would be more than happy to have their A1200 upgraded to 060 and 64 megs.
But as soon as people start with a "wishlist" they tend to run a bit amok

I wouldnt take it as a critizism of your product, but people like to dream regardless of realism.
If/when this card becomes available for my A1200 I will line up for sure.
My Blizzard 030 with 16 megabytes is okish, but 060 with 64 (or more) megs would be damn sweet.

Thanks for the ADoom demostration btw!

dreaming is the base of all innovations in the world but you must somehow return to earth finally.

[OlafS3]

My sentiment is the same as NovaCoder; 128/256/512 megabyte would be great, but as Olaf mentioned; its about development cost/time and production overhead. I think the majority of the posters here would be more than happy to have their A1200 upgraded to 060 and 64 megs.
But as soon as people start with a "wishlist" they tend to run a bit amok

I wouldnt take it as a critizism of your product, but people like to dream regardless of realism.
If/when this card becomes available for my A1200 I will line up for sure.
My Blizzard 030 with 16 megabytes is okish, but 060 with 64 (or more) megs would be damn sweet.

Thanks for the ADoom demostration btw!

For example we discussed about a standalone system. It would be great but it adds a lot of development time to it (for example for the drivers). We should be realistic. Behind Apollo project are a small group of dedicated hardware developers that can do a lot of things but no wonders. Custom hardware would be unaffordable for many (I know the calculation for the Natami parts), people would have moaned then why spending more money on that than for a much better standard PC. There are compromises necessary.

[Niding]

OlafS3; all understandable and valid points

Im no coder or hardware guy, so out of curiosity, what are the implications of;

"Regarding RTG, I think adding RTG to all the next card would be good.
With RTG and enough Mips Amiga will make a big jump in usability..."

Quoted Biggun on thread post #9.

I have Indivision in my A1200, and would the RTG part of the future Vipercard affect this?
That aside, any other info regarding your thoughts of performance of RTG?
I realise its just something you are thinking about, so nothing is decided/set in stone.

[OlafS3]

OlafS3; all understandable and valid points

Im no coder or hardware guy, so out of curiosity, what are the implications of;

"Regarding RTG, I think adding RTG to all the next card would be good.
With RTG and enough Mips Amiga will make a big jump in usability..."

Quoted Biggun on thread post #9.

I have Indivision in my A1200, and would the RTG part of the future Vipercard affect this?
That aside, any other info regarding your thoughts of performance of RTG?
I realise its just something you are thinking about, so nothing is decided/set in stone.

I am no "hardware guy" too so I try to explain it in my words.

For A500 there is a card in testing that uses a standard FPGA card that is normally used in industry. This includes modern monitor output, LAN, 128 MB and a bigger FPGA than on Vampire. The Vampire FPGA is only big enough for a special version of Apollo (not all features like FPU integrated/enabled) so the Vampire will stay what it is, a accellerator with 64 MB RAM running on A600 with ECS. The A500 card has a bigger FPGA so you can add fancy features like a new amiga chipset with better features and RTG so when all is included/implemented the A500 will be only keyboard and ports, the rest will run on the card.

Gunnar has promised cards for all models but you have to start somewhere . So there will certainly be something for A1200 too.

[wawrzon]

i think it seems to be going very good course. vampire is a hardware that is out of the door and proven working. it is a good demonstration of what may be yet possible, it is comparatively low cost and it is available. we can speculate about future models, with more ram more logic space, more features like fpu, additional interfaces like usb or rtg. but the general direction is right, to concentrate on general purpose improvements rather than highly specialized add ons.

[kipper2k]

Hi All,

 just thought i'd chip in with my 2 cents worth.

 For hardware addons there has to be a sliding scale, from budget to high end. As already mentioned, we can ask/expect the most possible out of future upgrades but with high end upgrades comes time and money for the development costs.

 Should we wait much much longer to get all the bells and whistles like massive ram that i think the majority of people would not get the benefit from or should we try to appeal to the masses. I think the present goals are good. Get the boards out with planned features and then if there is time/interest then do more development. So often a lot of hardware becomes vapourware due to it changing direction and real life issues that affect development. There are very few people developing for the community, Igor has done an outstanding job with the hardware and the Apollo team the same for the software, too much deviation from a planned course leads to chaos, confusion and frustration.

 Full steam ahead with the planned features

 I did another video showing a little more of the core running at 60MIPS.  Compatibility with games is very good, still some hiccups but all accel boards have them

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6KYtdpnMdA&feature=youtu.be

[B00tDisk]

I'm interested to see what kind of performance DOSBox and possibly PC-Task (or even PC-x) gets on the new core.

[fishy_fiz]

The problem with pc-task is that the timing is all sorts of wrong.
Even on my amithlon box (which reports to be running 68040@4800 mips (seems pretty close to actual speed)) the timing goes crazy, even when assigning 256Meg to the translation cache/buffer.
It's nice and fast, but it's inconsistent. Two seconds at about 100 fps for ms-dos quake, then 1 second at about 3 fps. Probably hasn't been noticed by many people as there's very few machines running 68k code as fast as my amithlon box (c2d@4.05ghz).

Win9x does work, but you're limited to vesa.
All in all it's probably the best possible option for 68k systems when it comes to pc emulation, but don't expect it to be a great option, regardless of speed for some tasks.
Considerably faster than Dosbox, but not as consistant, nor does it emulate particular hardware as Dosbox does (gfx is a simple vesa frame buffer in pc-task). Neither is ideal, but between the two you can get a pretty good experience if you have enough grunt.

As for ADoom on the a600, that's not too bad at all. Roughly half of what I used to get on my 1st Pentium system, which isn't bad for an a600.

[Linde]

it depends on what you want to do with it. If you want to use it for professional work and to browse the web including Youtube and so on 128 MB are of course not enough. If you want to run the newest ego-shooter 128 MB would not be enough either. If you want to beat standard PCs 128 MB are not enough either.

If you want to play the newest ego-shooter or watch youtube, 68K Amiga just isn't a viable alternative. I don't really mind people wanting this, but ChaosLord makes things up ("you need 2 GB to use IBrowse") and uses that as a basis to call the project "silly", and kolla outright calls the people that disagree with ChaosLord "dumbasses". That strikes me as damn rude, and there is an egotistical quality to ChaosLord's requests for more RAM. The project *needs* more RAM for what? To support his game (how does it even spend all that RAM?)? To support his obscure needs in general? That strikes me as silly, if anything.