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Operating System Specific Discussions => Amiga OS => Amiga OS 4.x (future) Hardware Compatibility Discussions => Topic started by: zylesea on October 10, 2015, 11:40:52 PM

Title: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: zylesea on October 10, 2015, 11:40:52 PM
Amiga-news.de reports about a new mini ITX mainboard by Acube and Aeon.
Two cores, 1.2 GHz, 8 GB RAM, and between 700-1200 EUR.
http://www.amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2015-10-00027-EN.html
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Rob on October 11, 2015, 04:21:26 AM
Good to see it has a PCIe slot.  I was unable to see that through the back of the case I saw it in.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: giZmo350 on October 11, 2015, 04:56:36 AM
Man! I'm thinkin I want one!
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: eliyahu on October 11, 2015, 05:47:29 AM
@gizmo350

i'm hoping for more information at amiwest that can be released to the public. whatever i'm allowed to talk about, i'll be sure to post back here. of course i'd rather they do an official announce.... ;)

-- eliyahu
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Lurch on October 11, 2015, 06:33:38 AM
Almost had me but the board is quite crippled. Not much upgrading going on there.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Matt_H on October 11, 2015, 07:01:23 AM
Bingo - my next NG Amiga :)
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Everblue on October 11, 2015, 08:34:19 AM
700 to 1200 is too random. I suspect it will be 1200.... and then we don't know if the price is for just the board, or a complete computer. But nonetheless, it is interesting, although I would have preferred a single core CPU with more hz, than a dual core with only 1 being supported by the OS.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: amoskodare on October 11, 2015, 10:00:04 AM
I want one!! :hat:
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: amoskodare on October 11, 2015, 10:04:17 AM
(http://www.amiga-news.de/pics/tabor/tabor_01.jpg)
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: TheDaddy on October 11, 2015, 10:59:38 AM
Mini-itx...finally! This is going to fit inside my latest X500 Pro nicely...excellent news!
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: apsturk on October 11, 2015, 11:05:47 AM
Very nice, things are moving forward very well for all involved as software is on the way with more to come as time moves on  NICE I will buy one!!!
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 11, 2015, 02:17:27 PM
Been expecting this one.
As for being "crippled", its got better specs than a SAM460.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: eliyahu on October 11, 2015, 02:41:58 PM
@Iggy

exactly. my hope is that i can use this as a replacement for my pegasos2. since my X5K will eventually be able to dual-boot AOS4 and MOS, i'll be able to get rid of my peg2 and also have this board as something nice, small, and portable. maybe stuff it into a A500 case (and use A1200 keyboard+keyrah), even.

-- eliyahu
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: BSzili on October 11, 2015, 02:51:05 PM
Quote from: Iggy;797215
Been expecting this one.
As for being "crippled", its got better specs than a SAM460.
Try to emulate the FPU in software, and you might end up with interesting results :)
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 11, 2015, 03:06:38 PM
Quote from: BSzili;797218
Try to emulate the FPU in software, and you might end up with interesting results :)

I am not that worried. If it has the processor I suspect it has, it will vastly outperform the AMCC cpu used in the SAM460.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Yasu on October 11, 2015, 03:57:38 PM
Though I did hear that they chose an incompatible FPU and that no creative programming can make it work, which will drastically lower it's performance. But I can't confirm this.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Kronos on October 11, 2015, 04:19:40 PM
@iggy

If it has to emulate a lot of FPU it will end up being slower than an Efika.....
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 11, 2015, 05:50:04 PM
Quote from: Kronos;797224
@iggy

If it has to emulate a lot of FPU it will end up being slower than an Efika.....

If this IS powered by a P1022, then they have made a serious error as software would have to be recompiled for that processor.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: ciVic on October 11, 2015, 06:34:38 PM
For me more exciting was it has GPIO pin headers!
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Fransexy_ on October 11, 2015, 08:49:27 PM
Quote from: Iggy;797226
If this IS powered by a P1022, then they have made a serious error as software would have to be recompiled for that processor.


It couldbe like in amiga classic, there was a time when you have 00, 020, 060, nofpu, fpu optimized versions of the same executable

With this board could be used the same aproach,  you use generic Amigaos powerpc executables but slower or P1022 optimiced executables that are faster

what do you think?
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: eliyahu on October 11, 2015, 09:35:16 PM
Quote from: Fransexy_;797234
It couldbe like in amiga classic, there was a time when you have 00, 020, 060, nofpu, fpu optimized versions of the same executable

With this board could be used the same aproach,  you use generic Amigaos powerpc executables but slower or P1022 optimiced executables that are faster

what do you think?
oy. while i suppose that would work, it'd be a shame if that ended up being the solution.

-- eliyahu
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: apsturk on October 11, 2015, 09:44:22 PM
Wow,
Does anybody really think Acube and A-Eon are so dumb that they would spend money time and all the rest and not have thought through every bit of what they are doing. They are the only ones that make NG hardware and both have products out and work hard to advance things in that regard. Remember 2 years ago just after Amiewest 2013 they announced a hardware partnership. This is good news all across the board for everyone. So I am one who says GREAT JOB!!! and thanks for all your efforts both Acube and A-Eon. Some on this site should just stop with the I know better than everyone but have no track record to back it up garbage. Thanks again Acube and A-Eon. You build it I and others that really do care about this hobby buy it and everyone wins.  

even the know it all naysayers win but again it is because of the people that spend money and support the work for AmigaNG. If you dont have the money to play in the sand box then get out of it  instead of pissing in it and on the people working in it.


I have spent far FAR more money this year in 2015 by a long shot than it costs to buy a new X1000 in just donations to AmigaNG software and other projects. So keep talking crap as the producers and backers move things forward. How about you put your money in and join us or go find another hobby that like the glass is half empty talk.

I play to win and I will.
I have an A=Eon AmigaOne X1000 and will have a X5000/40 and the new mb from Acube and will keep up with software donations and buy all the new software and spend more of my money. Talk is cheep. My lips don't flap in the wind and I am not cheep.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: eliyahu on October 11, 2015, 09:53:30 PM
@apsturk

well said. i just think some of us are a little concerned about the FPU compatibility, that's all. i'll still end up buying one. i'm addicted to this stuff. :lol:

-- eliyahu
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: danbeaver on October 11, 2015, 10:05:22 PM
Quote from: Everblue;797202
700 to 1200 is too random. I suspect it will be 1200.... and then we don't know if the price is for just the board, or a complete computer. But nonetheless, it is interesting, although I would have preferred a single core CPU with more hz, than a dual core with only 1 being supported by the OS.

Without an official announcement, the CPU may change, but Linux supports multi core CPU's, and the forth coming OS4.2 should support them as well.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: xeno74 on October 11, 2015, 10:05:41 PM
Hi All,

The Tabor board doesn't have a classic FPU with dedicated  FPRs found on most other PowerPC systems. It is replaced with a set of  SPE instructions which perform floating-point operations on the integer  registers.
Important: The SPE unit can execute floating-point  operations very fast. We have tested a lot of programs with FPU  operations this year.
Tabor sound, 3D acceleration, and network work  without any problems on Debian PowerPCSPE. I'm very surprised about the  performance of this board.
Note: It is also possible to install a  normal PowerPC distribution of Linux on this board. The missing FPU  instructions are emulated for PowerPC programs by the Linux kernel.


Cheers,

Christian
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: amoskodare on October 11, 2015, 10:35:58 PM
Quote from: apsturk;797237
Wow,
Does anybody really think Acube and A-Eon are so dumb that they would spend money time and all the rest and not have thought through every bit of what they are doing. They are the only ones that make NG hardware and both have products out and work hard to advance things in that regard. Remember 2 years ago just after Amiewest 2013 they announced a hardware partnership. This is good news all across the board for everyone. So I am one who says GREAT JOB!!! and thanks for all your efforts both Acube and A-Eon. Some on this site should just stop with the I know better than everyone but have no track record to back it up garbage. Thanks again Acube and A-Eon. You build it I and others that really do care about this hobby buy it and everyone wins.  

even the know it all naysayers win but again it is because of the people that spend money and support the work for AmigaNG. If you dont have the money to play in the sand box then get out of it  instead of pissing in it and on the people working in it.


I have spent far FAR more money this year in 2015 by a long shot than it costs to buy a new X1000 in just donations to AmigaNG software and other projects. So keep talking crap as the producers and backers move things forward. How about you put your money in and join us or go find another hobby that like the glass is half empty talk.

I play to win and I will.
I have an A=Eon AmigaOne X1000 and will have a X5000/40 and the new mb from Acube and will keep up with software donations and buy all the new software and spend more of my money. Talk is cheep. My lips don't flap in the wind and I am not cheep.

+1
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 11, 2015, 11:27:17 PM
@apsturk

Yes, I'd like it to be noted that I think using the P1022 with its non standard fpu is a damned stupid idea.
So, we now have to modify the OS' AND recompile software just for this one model?
That is preposterous, and any of you that don't get that have missed a serious point.
Using an e500v2 cored cpu was a mistake.
Its a dead end.
The obvious evolution would be the e5500 and then the e6500.

So the T10XX would have been the logical choice.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: nicholas on October 12, 2015, 02:35:25 AM
Quote from: apsturk;797237
Wow,
Does anybody really think Acube and A-Eon are so dumb that they would spend money time and all the rest and not have thought through every bit of what they are doing. They are the only ones that make NG hardware and both have products out and work hard to advance things in that regard. Remember 2 years ago just after Amiewest 2013 they announced a hardware partnership. This is good news all across the board for everyone. So I am one who says GREAT JOB!!! and thanks for all your efforts both Acube and A-Eon. Some on this site should just stop with the I know better than everyone but have no track record to back it up garbage. Thanks again Acube and A-Eon. You build it I and others that really do care about this hobby buy it and everyone wins.  

even the know it all naysayers win but again it is because of the people that spend money and support the work for AmigaNG. If you dont have the money to play in the sand box then get out of it  instead of pissing in it and on the people working in it.


I have spent far FAR more money this year in 2015 by a long shot than it costs to buy a new X1000 in just donations to AmigaNG software and other projects. So keep talking crap as the producers and backers move things forward. How about you put your money in and join us or go find another hobby that like the glass is half empty talk.

I play to win and I will.
I have an A=Eon AmigaOne X1000 and will have a X5000/40 and the new mb from Acube and will keep up with software donations and buy all the new software and spend more of my money. Talk is cheep. My lips don't flap in the wind and I am not cheep.


https://youtu.be/U8Kum8OUTuk
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: nicholas on October 12, 2015, 02:42:22 AM
Quote from: Iggy;797248
@apsturk

Yes, I'd like it to be noted that I think using the P1022 with its non standard fpu is a damned stupid idea.
So, we now have to modify the OS' AND recompile software just for this one model?
That is preposterous, and any of you that don't get that have missed a serious point.
Using an e500v2 cored cpu was a mistake.
Its a dead end.
The obvious evolution would be the e5500 and then the e6500.

So the T10XX would have been the logical choice.


Any Amiga program should be using the OS provided Maths libraries anyway Jim so as long as Hyperion provide libs with the same public interfaces but internally using code specific for this weird FPU then most stuff should be OK. Theoretically anyway.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Rob on October 12, 2015, 07:40:33 AM
Quote from: nicholas;797255
Any Amiga program should be using the OS provided Maths libraries anyway Jim so as long as Hyperion provide libs with the same public interfaces but internally using code specific for this weird FPU then most stuff should be OK. Theoretically anyway.


Yep, we should at least reserve judgement until we've seen OS4 running on this hardware.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: matthey on October 12, 2015, 08:03:40 AM
Quote from: nicholas;797255
Any Amiga program should be using the OS provided Maths libraries anyway Jim so as long as Hyperion provide libs with the same public interfaces but internally using code specific for this weird FPU then most stuff should be OK. Theoretically anyway.


The math libraries are ok for light use of floating point but they are a major bottleneck for heavy floating point use. Modern powerful processors use the FPU (and/or SIMD unit) directly which is much more efficient. It is too bad that what are left of embedded PPC processors have incompatible FPUs. They might as well switch to an incompatible integer unit while they are at it to get some standardization and consistency.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: BSzili on October 12, 2015, 09:32:03 AM
Quote from: apsturk;797237
Wow,
Does anybody really think Acube and A-Eon are so dumb that they would spend money time and all the rest and not have thought through every bit of what they are doing. They are the only ones that make NG hardware and both have products out and work hard to advance things in that regard. Remember 2 years ago just after Amiewest 2013 they announced a hardware partnership. This is good news all across the board for everyone. So I am one who says GREAT JOB!!! and thanks for all your efforts both Acube and A-Eon. Some on this site should just stop with the I know better than everyone but have no track record to back it up garbage. Thanks again Acube and A-Eon. You build it I and others that really do care about this hobby buy it and everyone wins.  

even the know it all naysayers win but again it is because of the people that spend money and support the work for AmigaNG. If you dont have the money to play in the sand box then get out of it  instead of pissing in it and on the people working in it.


I have spent far FAR more money this year in 2015 by a long shot than it costs to buy a new X1000 in just donations to AmigaNG software and other projects. So keep talking crap as the producers and backers move things forward. How about you put your money in and join us or go find another hobby that like the glass is half empty talk.

I play to win and I will.
I have an A=Eon AmigaOne X1000 and will have a X5000/40 and the new mb from Acube and will keep up with software donations and buy all the new software and spend more of my money. Talk is cheep. My lips don't flap in the wind and I am not cheep.
TL;DR A company making a bad decision? That's completely unheard of! :eek:
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Hattig on October 12, 2015, 10:01:58 AM
The P1022 uses e500v2 series cores.

There are three revisions of the e500 cores: v1, v2 and mc.

v1 and v2 do not support the classical FPU, but the mc does. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC_e500

Wikipedia states: "The P10xx series, P2010 and P2020 are based on the e500v2 core, P204x, P30xx and P40xx on the e500mc core, and P50xx on the e5500 core"

So choosing the P10xx, P201x or P202x would be a worse decision than picking P204x, P30xx, P40xx or P50xx (or even T1). Obviously the IEEE libraries will support things, but software compiled to hit the FPU directly is going to be trapping all over the place, until it's recompiled.

The I/O on a P3 series chip would appear to match the needs of a motherboard better - the 18 SERDES lines means more PCIe, SATA and GigE, whereas the P1022, once you've added 2 SATA, 1 GigE leaves 3 PCIe lanes.

These chips are OLD. We're talking about chips that were on the market five, six years ago. It seems strange to start using them on a new product.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: wawrzon on October 12, 2015, 10:04:13 AM
Quote
Does anybody really think Acube and A-Eon are so dumb that they would spend money time and all the rest and not have thought through every bit of what they are doing.

perhaps "dumb" is not the right word. but there is a history of questionable decissions. as example the so called minimig+. do i need to dig further?
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Niding on October 12, 2015, 11:47:27 AM
It would be intresting to hear the decisionprocess when they decided on the CPU, if for no other reason, to get an idea about their future plans.

olegil made a comment on AW "Wouldn't worry much about drivers, the QorIQ peripherals are fairly simple to support.".

And noticed during the interview with one of the Fridens that hes considering Chrome instead of Timberwolf.

Either way, with Cloanto talking/working with Toni with regards to proper PPC emulation, I can see AOS software sales (what there is available) go up a little bit.
Regarding proper PPC emulation; will that tap into MorphOS availability?
Would be intresting if we could install up to date versions of MorphOS/AROS/AOS via Amiga Forever, even if the installer require you to have a registered version inputting your details etc.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: eliyahu on October 12, 2015, 12:48:09 PM
Quote from: Niding;797269
It would be intresting to hear the decisionprocess when they decided on the CPU, if for no other reason, to get an idea about their future plans.
indeed. there may have been other, non-amiga-related reasons. i guess we just need to wait for the 'official' announcement for the details and why. since this topic has peaked everyone's interest around here, it's one of the questions i'll try and get answered at amiwest.

Quote
Either way, with Cloanto talking/working with Toni with regards to proper PPC emulation, I can see AOS software sales (what there is available) go up a little bit.
Regarding proper PPC emulation; will that tap into MorphOS availability?
Would be intresting if we could install up to date versions of MorphOS/AROS/AOS via Amiga Forever, even if the installer require you to have a registered version inputting your details etc.
i certainly hope so. 'faking' things a little to allow more RAM for the CSPPC than was possible in HW would go a long way. and maybe get support for the UAE RTG driver, or at least artificially increasing the available VRAM on a P-IV card. that'd be terrific.

we already have the ability to run AOS4 and AROS in UAE, which is nice. it would be even nicer to add MOS to that list, especially since one of the devs apparently maintains an internal PUP build.

-- eliyahu
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Niding on October 12, 2015, 01:00:44 PM
AOS is available via AF/emulation, but like with many things Amiga, it require the enduser to follow long "how to do this step by step" guides that might or might not work.
And without solid prior knowledge about the system(s), its usually not obvious why the guide didnt work. Usually the user did something wrong, but what and how?
AF/Amikit for example; select Download, and then answer yes and upgrade a few times and 3 minutes later you have a pimped out version of Workbench 3.
Personally I wont be deterred by userunfriendly procedures, but not everyone have that attitude, espesially for something they initally just take as their hobby or tour down memorylane of their youth.

Its how AOS PPC installation should be made too. Lately Ive been dabbling with my A1200 both hardware and software. Quite a few programs be it hardware support/drivers throws "require MUI", "missing abcxyz" library or wrong version.
Its quite annoying, but on the flipside, it forces me to re-learn navigating around the system again.
BUT its not really what you want OS wise, even at hobby level, if you want more people to use it. Trevor and others have made it quite clear its a hobby, even a "serious" one.
And the mantra for all OS's is development of software AND being able to actually support the coders with money thru purchases (for Daniel/Daytona that means coffe and sigarette money).
Then the bar of entry needs to be lowered; aka make it easy Amiga Forever style to use any OS.
Make it "plug and play" easy, people might even end up staying ;)
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: wawrzon on October 12, 2015, 01:16:55 PM
Quote from: Niding;797269
And noticed during the interview with one of the Fridens that hes considering Chrome instead of Timberwolf.

prepare for another bounty porting chrome to os4 in the coming years then.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Daytona675x on October 12, 2015, 01:19:18 PM
Nice board, although I don't like the price. It would be fantastic if it would be between 500 and 600 € instead, then it could be the entry system I suppose many of us are waiting for. Nevertheless a step into the right direction IMHO.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 12, 2015, 01:34:12 PM
Quote from: wawrzon;797273
prepare for another bounty porting chrome to os4 in the coming years then.

Chrome is not open source.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: OlafS3 on October 12, 2015, 01:35:44 PM
Quote from: Daytona675x;797274
Nice board, although I don't like the price. It would be fantastic if it would be between 500 and 600 € instead, then it could be the entry system I suppose many of us are waiting for. Nevertheless a step into the right direction IMHO.

for 500 or 600 EUR you get much better hardware, it is even then vastly overprized. 1.2 Ghz in 2015/2016? It is a option for AmigaOS fans but outside this small circle there will be not much interest.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 12, 2015, 01:36:39 PM
Quote from: nicholas;797255
Any Amiga program should be using the OS provided Maths libraries anyway Jim so as long as Hyperion provide libs with the same public interfaces but internally using code specific for this weird FPU then most stuff should be OK. Theoretically anyway.

No few apps are going to bother with math libraries when the instructions can be executed directly.
While I appreciate your intent to reserve judgement, this board holds no interest for me.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Oldsmobile_Mike on October 12, 2015, 05:25:25 PM
Quote from: OlafS3;797279
1.2 Ghz in 2015/2016?

Hey now, that's like, cell phone speeds.  ;)

Great to hear about new boards, but more disappointing is the FPU issue.  Hooray more fragmentation in the Amiga market!  :(
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: matthey on October 12, 2015, 06:10:41 PM
Quote from: Hattig;797263

So choosing the P10xx, P201x or P202x would be a worse decision than picking P204x, P30xx, P40xx or P50xx (or even T1). Obviously the IEEE libraries will support things, but software compiled to hit the FPU directly is going to be trapping all over the place, until it's recompiled.


Trapping direct FPU instructions would be a fraction of the speed of direct FPU support. Using the IEEE math libraries would be much faster (maybe half the speed of direct FPU use). Are developers going to compile for an incompatible FPU? It is sad that A-Eon is this desperate to keep PPC alive and affordable. Now PPC will not only be incompatible with the 68k and Amiga custom chips but also the existing PPC platform. The new board is too weak and incompatible to appeal to the classes and too incompatible and expensive to appeal to the masses. Full speed ahead with incompatible embedded PPC processors though :(.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: B00tDisk on October 12, 2015, 06:22:09 PM
Dammit, I saw "PPC board" and assumed they meant board for an A2000, 3000 or 4000 or even 1200.

tl;dr came here was disappoint
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: yssing on October 12, 2015, 06:49:54 PM
This is great news! Well done, it gives us even more options :D
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Spectre660 on October 12, 2015, 07:06:00 PM
You could always ask what programs works and what do not under the regular ppc32 Linux with the FPU instructions emulated to get an idea .

Working include
Webrowsers Qupzilla and Midori .
Libreoffice


Quote from: matthey;797298
Trapping direct FPU instructions would be a fraction of the speed of direct FPU support. Using the IEEE math libraries would be much faster (maybe half the speed of direct FPU use). Are developers going to compile for an incompatible FPU? It is sad that A-Eon is this desperate to keep PPC alive and affordable. Now PPC will not only be incompatible with the 68k and Amiga custom chips but also the existing PPC platform. The new board is too weak and incompatible to appeal to the classes and too incompatible and expensive to appeal to the masses. Full speed ahead with incompatible embedded PPC processors though :(.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 12, 2015, 07:26:11 PM
Quote from: Spectre660;797302
You could always ask what programs works and what do not under the regular ppc32 Linux with the FPU instructions emulated to get an idea .

Working include
Webrowsers Qupzilla and Midori .
Libreoffice

IF you were posting on a Linux forum, this would be valid.
So, the question then becomes, what programs will run under Amiga OS and its derivatives without re-compilation?
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Spectre660 on October 12, 2015, 08:21:00 PM
I am referring to what runs under normal Linux PPC32 (Ubuntu 12.04) on the Tabor board.
Not the Debian 8 powerpcSPE.
So many of the regular powerpc32 binaries work with emulated FPU handled by the kernel without having to be recompiled .
The ones that do not would include Firefox and Mplayer.
Iceweasel work under Debian 8 powerpc32 .
So  one could expect many AmigaOS powrepc binaries might also work
once the emulation was implemented.


Quote from: Iggy;797303
IF you were posting on a Linux forum, this would be valid.
So, the question then becomes, what programs will run under Amiga OS and its derivatives without re-compilation?
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Spectre660 on October 12, 2015, 08:57:35 PM
Just booted AROS powerpc hosted under Debian 8 PPCSPE on Tabor.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Fransexy_ on October 12, 2015, 09:05:19 PM
Quote from: OlafS3;797279
1.2 Ghz in 2015/2016? .

A 2014 Intel cpu:

http://ark.intel.com/products/80272


Ok, well, not 1,2 but 1,3 only; not big difference
There is even 2015 intel chips with mere 1,4



*I know GHZ says nothing to compare different cpu power. i only respond at the (contempt)question quoted
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: wawrzon on October 12, 2015, 09:31:22 PM
Quote from: Fransexy_;797311
A 2014 Intel cpu:

http://ark.intel.com/products/80272


Ok, well, not 1,2 but 1,3 only; not big difference
There is even 2015 intel chips with mere 1,4



*I know GHZ says nothing to compare different cpu power. i only respond at the (contempt)question quoted


one more time reffering to smartphone cpus for comparison?
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 12, 2015, 09:56:59 PM
Quote from: Spectre660;797310
Just booted AROS powerpc hosted under Debian 8 PPCSPE on Tabor.

You really want to push the Linux argument, but AROS is the only NG OS that can run under a Linux kernel and FPU trapping/emulation under OS4 will still incur a performance penalty (on an already relatively slow cpu).
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Spectre660 on October 12, 2015, 10:07:24 PM
Linux is the only OS that I can speak about :) .
You need to forgive yourself for being so sure that the CPU would from the T series. If you need to bang your head against something find a wall not another person .


Quote from: Iggy;797313
You really want to push the Linux argument, but AROS is the only NG OS that can run under a Linux kernel and FPU trapping/emulation under OS4 will still incur a performance penalty (on an already relatively slow cpu).
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: EvilGuy on October 12, 2015, 11:46:30 PM
Quote from: Oldsmobile_Mike;797294

Hooray more fragmentation in the Amiga market!  :(


How else could they justify high prices on technology that is a decade old?
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Rob on October 12, 2015, 11:53:02 PM
In spite of the obvious concerns, I'd still prefer to see OS4 running on this before making any kind of judegement on it's abilty to run current software well.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: matthey on October 13, 2015, 12:30:44 AM
Quote from: Rob;797327
In spite of the obvious concerns, I'd still prefer to see OS4 running on this before making any kind of judgement on it's ability to run current software well.


It's possible that software like OxyPatcher/CyberPatcher/MuRedox for the 68k could keep the PPC FPU instructions from trapping but it is still a poor choice of processors which makes Amiga support, development and keeping compatibility more difficult. Emulation is faster than trapping so PPC emulation on an i7 would have even more of an advantage in performance and price.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Fransexy_ on October 13, 2015, 12:51:02 AM
Quote from: wawrzon;797312
one more time reffering to smartphone cpus for comparison?

is this a smartphone perhaps?

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/compute-stick/intel-compute-stick.html
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: psxphill on October 13, 2015, 09:51:39 AM
Quote from: matthey;797330
It's possible that software like OxyPatcher/CyberPatcher/MuRedox for the 68k could keep the PPC FPU instructions from trapping but it is still a poor choice of processors which makes Amiga support, development and keeping compatibility more difficult. Emulation is faster than trapping so PPC emulation on an i7 would have even more of an advantage in performance and price.

That is assuming that running incompatible FPU opcodes will even trap (I don't have any idea whether it will or not).

Otherwise you're looking at recompiling when loading anyway, which if you're doing that you really might as well just switch to x64.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: psxphill on October 13, 2015, 11:08:44 AM
Quote from: Fransexy_;797332
is this a smartphone perhaps?

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/compute-stick/intel-compute-stick.html

It's hot, slow and power hungry, so hopefully not.

You can't install 64 bit windows on it because of a crippled UEFI. They make the excuse that with 2gb you don't need 64 bit, but there are other benefits to running x64 code. They destroy their own argument by selling a 64 bit Linux version with only 1gb of ram.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, but it's not the type of cpu you even want to compare against. If it beats you then you're in real trouble and there is no kudos in beating it.

http://gizmodo.com/intel-compute-stick-review-don-t-buy-it-1699377058
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Yasu on October 13, 2015, 11:16:17 AM
Let's assume that Acube/A-Eon knew about the FPU problem. If so, then what would be the reason to choose it anyway? Are there no price worthy alternatives they could have used instead? Or did they reason that the FPU isn't that important?

Reading everyones comments in various sites I'm not really sure how important FPU is. Some says it's used for a lot of OS and software related stuff, others that it's only used in some games. Which is it?
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 13, 2015, 11:59:27 AM
Quote from: Spectre660;797314
Linux is the only OS that I can speak about :) .
You need to forgive yourself for being so sure that the CPU would from the T series. If you need to bang your head against something find a wall not another person .

If you have a problem with me disagreeing with you, you're not going to get far with that kind of argument.
The board has a poorly chosen processor.
No one said a T10XX was essential, just better (for about the same price).

I'm not banging my head against anything except your obdurate nature.
And while I might consider the rather high priced X5000, I'm not buying this piece of crap.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 13, 2015, 12:04:36 PM
Quote from: Yasu;797354
Let's assume that Acube/A-Eon knew about the FPU problem. If so, then what would be the reason to choose it anyway? Are there no price worthy alternatives they could have used instead? Or did they reason that the FPU isn't that important?

Reading everyones comments in various sites I'm not really sure how important FPU is. Some says it's used for a lot of OS and software related stuff, others that it's only used in some games. Which is it?

Since the deficiencies of the e500v2 core have been repeatedly discussed, I'd say everyone knew.
Apparently, they thought they could sell everyone on it anyway.

I guess they weren't counting on a knowledgeable customer base.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Spectre660 on October 13, 2015, 12:21:44 PM
I thought that you had already decided to get an X5000.
If that was the case then the Tabor should not bother you.
It being good,bad or indifferent should not affect your original plans.

Quote from: Iggy;797356
If you have a problem with me disagreeing with you, you're not going to get far with that kind of argument.
The board has a poorly chosen processor.
No one said a T10XX was essential, just better (for about the same price).

I'm not banging my head against anything except your obdurate nature.
And while I might consider the rather high priced X5000, I'm not buying this piece of crap.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Spectre660 on October 13, 2015, 12:26:08 PM
In reality if Hyperion and co cant get AmigaOS 4.x working with an acceptable performance with the majority of existing software do you think that the Tabor will go into production for the AmigaOS 4.x market ?

Quote from: Iggy;797357
Since the deficiencies of the e500v2 core have been repeatedly discussed, I'd say everyone knew.
Apparently, they thought they could sell everyone on it anyway.

I guess they weren't counting on a knowledgeable customer base.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: OlafS3 on October 13, 2015, 12:43:32 PM
Quote from: Spectre660;797360
In reality if Hyperion and co cant get AmigaOS 4.x working with an acceptable performance with the majority of existing software do you think that the Tabor will go into production for the AmigaOS 4.x market ?

for the 4.x market not, at least not in big batches. Acube is selling embedded PPC devices so for them it might make sense even when AmigaOS software not runs acceptable.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Spectre660 on October 13, 2015, 12:49:21 PM
Thanks.

Quote from: OlafS3;797362
for the 4.x market not, at least not in big batches. Acube is selling embedded PPC devices so for them it might make sense even when AmigaOS software not runs acceptable.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: itix on October 13, 2015, 01:17:15 PM
Quote from: Spectre660;797360
In reality if Hyperion and co cant get AmigaOS 4.x working with an acceptable performance with the majority of existing software do you think that the Tabor will go into production for the AmigaOS 4.x market ?


Why not? ;-) just think what Commodore did ;-)
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: jj on October 13, 2015, 01:34:44 PM
Quote from: Iggy;797277
Chrome is not open source.

I guess they meant chromium
 
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Andre.Siegel on October 13, 2015, 01:39:18 PM
Quote from: OlafS3;797362
for the 4.x market not, at least not in big batches. Acube is selling embedded PPC devices so for them it might make sense even when AmigaOS software not runs acceptable.


"We sell boards also outside the Amiga market even if Amigans are the most of our customers."
Source: http://www.retroplanet.gr/content/interview-acube-srl-%CF%83%CF%85%CE%BD%CE%AD%CE%BD%CF%84%CE%B5%CF%85%CE%BE%CE%B7-acube-srl
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: OlafS3 on October 13, 2015, 01:44:00 PM
Quote from: Andre.Siegel;797369
"We sell boards also outside the Amiga market even if Amigans are the most of our customers."
Source: http://www.retroplanet.gr/content/interview-acube-srl-%CF%83%CF%85%CE%BD%CE%AD%CE%BD%CF%84%CE%B5%CF%85%CE%BE%CE%B7-acube-srl (http://www.retroplanet.gr/content/interview-acube-srl-%CF%83%CF%85%CE%BD%CE%AD%CE%BD%CF%84%CE%B5%CF%85%CE%BE%CE%B7-acube-srl)

do you really think they can earn their living with selling PPC devices to the few AmigaOS fans?

and if true then the processor choice is even more difficult to understand
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Andre.Siegel on October 13, 2015, 01:50:36 PM
Quote from: OlafS3;797370
do you really think they can earn their living with selling PPC devices to the few AmigaOS fans?


Who has ever claimed that they are making a living from any of this?

From the same interview:
"Doing hardware on the current Amiga market is just impossible."

"The price is very small compared to the low volume of a production batch. We should have sold them at a higher price to get our investment back but we wanted to keep the price as low as possible for all Amigans. We also decided to build them entirely in Italy instead of China to better control their quality and also to give work to European companies."

Does this sound like people who rely on this to make a living or like individuals who work on this as a passion project (like pretty much anybody else in this community)?
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: OlafS3 on October 13, 2015, 01:54:40 PM
Quote from: Andre.Siegel;797371
Who has ever claimed that they are making a living from any of this?

From the same interview:
"Doing hardware on the current Amiga market is just impossible."

"The price is very small compared to the low volume of a production batch. We should have sold them at a higher price to get our investment back but we wanted to keep the price as low as possible for all Amigans. We also decided to build them entirely in Italy instead of China to better control their quality and also to give work to European companies."

Does this sound like people who rely on this to make a living or like individuals who work on this as a passion project (like pretty much anybody else in this community)?

so they sell the hardware as hobby? I do not know how is it in Italy but as long you do not have got lots of money by someone else you have to earn it. I assumed Acube is a hardware company earning their money by selling hardware and offering additional services.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: kolla on October 13, 2015, 01:56:03 PM
Quote from: JJ;797368
I guess they meant chromium
 
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)


Huh, V8 exist for PowerPC now?
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: wawrzon on October 13, 2015, 02:24:31 PM
Quote from: Andre.Siegel;797371
Does this sound like people who rely on this to make a living or like individuals who work on this as a passion project (like pretty much anybody else in this community)?


not even individual computers, while serving hobby customership, is being run as charity. as long as one dedicates a finite amount of his time to what is his hobby anyway, as in case of software, and then shares it with others, it is one thing. but as soon as you yourself need to make considerable investments, as in case of hardware development, production, retail and service, if you wouldnt expect return at least at some point in the future, it would be straight out giving money away to strangers. i have hard time to believe anyone in hardware branche is operating like that, not in amiga, not even in os4 sector.

edit: after consideration the closest to what i describe above is probably majsta and his vampire boards, still he resonably tries to keep his investments covered, even if certainly his dedicated time isnt any close to generate return. from this perspective, as own development acube boards are probably being sold at some discount, which is possible as long as it is as an "in house" development. in contrary to that aeon initiatives seem to be based on a sort of shares, sold to fans with the hardware they purchase. not shares on the company though, but rather contibutions to finance certain hardware projects.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: nicholas on October 13, 2015, 02:56:15 PM
Quote from: Fransexy_;797332
is this a smartphone perhaps?

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/compute-stick/intel-compute-stick.html

 Not the best choice of argument there.  I've got an ASUS Transformer T100 TAM with a faster version of that same CPU and it's performance is terrible under 32bit Windows 10 Pro, slightly more tolerable under 64bit Linux but not much more.  (https://i.imgur.com/0SbwxqF.png)
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: eliyahu on October 13, 2015, 02:59:58 PM
@thread

since folks seem rather, er, excited by the new board previewed at nuess, let's try another approach. instead of pontificating on something without the full facts, let's get some. i'll be at amiwest in a few days (i'm on the train now, actually) and will try and get your questions answered from trevor and matthew.

so, feel free to post your questions in this thread or send them to me via PM. even if the answer is "we can't say at this time," i'll report back. to get the ball rolling, here are my questions:

anyone have any others? :)

-- eliyahu
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: nicholas on October 13, 2015, 03:00:28 PM
Quote from: kolla;797373
Huh, V8 exist for PowerPC now?

 For quite a while now.  https://developer.ibm.com/opentech/2015/06/30/ppc-support-for-google-v8-goes-mainstream/
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Andre.Siegel on October 13, 2015, 04:15:30 PM
Quote from: OlafS3;797372
I do not know how is it in Italy but as long you do not have got lots of money by someone else you have to earn it
How does operating ACube preempt any of the involved individuals from having other means of income? Do you think their Amiga customers require so much time that it would not leave time to pursue other activities?
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: kolla on October 13, 2015, 04:48:23 PM
Quote from: nicholas;797382
For quite a while now.  https://developer.ibm.com/opentech/2015/06/30/ppc-support-for-google-v8-goes-mainstream/


Cool, that is the greatest news for me on this thread, haha :D
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: broadblues on October 13, 2015, 05:52:31 PM
Quote from: Yasu;797354
Let's assume that Acube/A-Eon knew about the FPU problem. If so, then what would be the reason to choose it anyway? Are there no price worthy alternatives they could have used instead? Or did they reason that the FPU isn't that important?

Reading everyones comments in various sites I'm not really sure how important FPU is. Some says it's used for a lot of OS and software related stuff, others that it's only used in some games. Which is it?


It's used in games, programs like blender, my own SketchBlock is very floating point based as I use ARGBfloat pixels , these kind of things would benefit from a recompile, much as you might have for 68060 in the olden days.

I have read people say that FPU is also used in OS for optimised coppies etc, if so this is done inside the OS and so alternate optimisations can be used, every machine type has a slightly different kernel, there no reason to expect this one would differ in that.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: nicholas on October 13, 2015, 07:01:12 PM
Quote from: broadblues;797387
It's used in games, programs like blender, my own SketchBlock is very floating point based as I use ARGBfloat pixels , these kind of things would benefit from a recompile, much as you might have for 68060 in the olden days.
 Do you use the OS Maths libraries in your own stuff or internal routines?  I'm wondering just how big a percentage of 3rd native OS4 programs don't use the OS libs and also how this incompatible FPU would affect 68k programs that don't use them.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: matthey on October 13, 2015, 07:05:37 PM
Quote from: Yasu;797354
Reading everyones comments in various sites I'm not really sure how important FPU is. Some says it's used for a lot of OS and software related stuff, others that it's only used in some games. Which is it?

The AmigaOS does *not* use floating point much. Amigas without an FPU do the few floating point operations in software. However, many modern applications and games use floating point heavily because floating point on modern powerful processors has become cheap with a fast FPU and/or SIMD unit (using direct FPU and SIMD instructions in the code). These applications and games will be anywhere between slow and unusable on a low end processor without any hardware floating point support.

Even the Apollo 68k FPGA core recognizes the need for hardware FPU support and compatibility. Gunnar at first only wanted to create FPGA floating point code for the most important single precision (only) IEEE math library functions as this takes the least amount of FPGA space. The C language uses double precision floating point the most and by default and programs using the 68k FPU directly would need to be trapped or patched on the fly (the same as this cheap embedded PPC CPU). I strongly recommended against this and suggested that it was better to wait until there was space for a better solution. Next, Gunnar wanted to add a SIMD unit instead of the 68k FPU (the x86_64 uses the SIMD unit for floating point). There was no room even for single precision floating point support in the SIMD unit so floating point code (and algorithms) would have to be converted to integer code (which is no small task). Single precision floating point would be added to the SIMD unit when there was room but this was no floating point support at all for now. Once again I strongly recommended against adding an SIMD unit without single precision floating point (the most important IMO). A 68060 compatible FPU with direct FPU support and at least double precision is exactly what compilers and floating point using programs need so I highly recommended this. Gunnar doesn't like FPUs and was worried this would be too slow in FPGA. I figured out how to encode twice as many FPU registers allowing for faster instruction interleaving at his request. I also had a few simple suggestions for enhancements I had learned from working with the vbcc vclib floating point math libraries. It looks like the FPU was finally chosen for compatibility on an old 68k CPU which didn't even start with an FPU. PPC is *more* likely to need and expect an FPU, especially without Altivec. I wouldn't be surprised if the Apollo core with FPU support (in an FPGA) outperforms this hard PPC processor without floating point hardware support for floating point intensive programs. This is with the Apollo core being a fraction of the speed of a hard processor and having a fraction of the floating point performance of a SIMD unit for parallel operations. What developers are going to bother with such weak and incompatible floating point performance as this PPC embedded processor?
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: wawrzon on October 13, 2015, 07:16:30 PM
Quote from: nicholas;797389
Do you use the OS Maths libraries in your own stuff or internal routines?  I'm wondering just how big a percentage of 3rd native OS4 programs don't use the OS libs and also how this incompatible FPU would affect 68k programs that don't use them.


im not sure about boadblues, but given that almost all software today is more or less quick and dirty ports and that on os4 so objects support must have been added, to avoid the neccessity to build amiga dynamic libraries, which is probably a task hardly anyone is capable and patient to do anymore. id say chances are that almost everything is linked statically this days. which means the code that demands fpu needs to be recompiled for this board.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: nicholas on October 13, 2015, 07:47:13 PM
Quote from: wawrzon;797392
im not sure about boadblues, but given that almost all software today is more or less quick and dirty ports and that on os4 so objects support must have been added, to avoid the neccessity to build amiga dynamic libraries, which is probably a task hardly anyone is capable and patient to do anymore. id say chances are that almost everything is linked statically this days. which means the code that demands fpu needs to be recompiled for this board.

 That's the same suspicion i have of most OS4 ports too. I'm optimistic that stuff that Broadblues and others have written that is original OS4 software will use OS routines though.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: danwood on October 13, 2015, 07:57:21 PM
Quote from: OlafS3;797362
for the 4.x market not, at least not in big batches. Acube is selling embedded PPC devices so for them it might make sense even when AmigaOS software not runs acceptable.


I regularly read that OS4 is not A-Cube's main market, and they mostly sell their PPC boards to the embedded market.  Is there any proof of this, or is it just a forum urban-legend?
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: matthey on October 13, 2015, 08:00:30 PM
Quote from: nicholas;797395
That's the same suspicion i have of most OS4 ports too. I'm optimistic that stuff that Broadblues and others have written that is original OS4 software will use OS routines though.

It is more likely his software relies on compiler support code which may use the OS or processor specific instructions depending on compiler options. Blender needs to use the FPU and SIMD directly (FPU and SIMD instructions in the processor code) for near maximum performance.

Fastest - SIMD instructions (direct use)
Faster - FPU instructions (direct use)
Fast - IEEE libraries using the FPU
Slow - IEEE libraries without an FPU
Slower - Patch FPU instructions in the code before execution, no FPU
Slowest - Trap FPU instructions in the code during execution, no FPU
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: broadblues on October 13, 2015, 08:59:56 PM
Quote from: nicholas;797389
Do you use the OS Maths libraries in your own stuff or internal routines?  I'm wondering just how big a percentage of 3rd native OS4 programs don't use the OS libs and also how this incompatible FPU would affect 68k programs that don't use them.


There are no OS maths libraries in the sense you mean for PPC code only for backward compatabilty with 68k.

On the other hand pretty much all higher level maths functions are handled via newlib.library  which is a shared library.

AS to 68k programs that don't use the Math#?.libraies well they are running on and emulated CPU  so probably irrelavent.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Hans_ on October 13, 2015, 09:38:05 PM
Does anyone have any hard data on the performance with software trap based FPU emulation? I'd be interested to see how much of an impact it actually has, but I can't find any published benchmarks anywhere.

NOTE: When doing any benchmarks to test this, you need to make sure that you're using software compiled with hardware FPU enabled, otherwise you're testing GCC's software FPU emulation.

Hans
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Bif on October 13, 2015, 10:38:54 PM
Quote from: matthey;797390
The AmigaOS does *not* use floating point much. Amigas without an FPU do the few floating point operations in software. However, many modern applications and games use floating point heavily because floating point on modern powerful processors has become cheap with a fast FPU and/or SIMD unit (using direct FPU and SIMD instructions in the code). These applications and games will be anywhere between slow and unusable on a low end processor without any hardware floating point support.

Even the Apollo 68k FPGA core recognizes the need for hardware FPU support and compatibility. Gunnar at first only wanted to create FPGA floating point code for the most important single precision (only) IEEE math library functions as this takes the least amount of FPGA space. The C language uses double precision floating point the most and by default and programs using the 68k FPU directly would need to be trapped or patched on the fly (the same as this cheap embedded PPC CPU). I strongly recommended against this and suggested that it was better to wait until there was space for a better solution. Next, Gunnar wanted to add a SIMD unit instead of the 68k FPU (the x86_64 uses the SIMD unit for floating point). There was no room even for single precision floating point support in the SIMD unit so floating point code (and algorithms) would have to be converted to integer code (which is no small task). Single precision floating point would be added to the SIMD unit when there was room but this was no floating point support at all for now. Once again I strongly recommended against adding an SIMD unit without single precision floating point (the most important IMO). A 68060 compatible FPU with direct FPU support and at least double precision is exactly what compilers and floating point using programs need so I highly recommended this. Gunnar doesn't like FPUs and was worried this would be too slow in FPGA. I figured out how to encode twice as many FPU registers allowing for faster instruction interleaving at his request. I also had a few simple suggestions for enhancements I had learned from working with the vbcc vclib floating point math libraries. It looks like the FPU was finally chosen for compatibility on an old 68k CPU which didn't even start with an FPU. PPC is *more* likely to need and expect an FPU, especially without Altivec. I wouldn't be surprised if the Apollo core with FPU support (in an FPGA) outperforms this hard PPC processor without floating point hardware support for floating point intensive programs. This is with the Apollo core being a fraction of the speed of a hard processor and having a fraction of the floating point performance of a SIMD unit for parallel operations. What developers are going to bother with such weak and incompatible floating point performance as this PPC embedded processor?


I do think in this day and age processors with only scalar FPU support are a little bit pointless. May as well go SIMD FPU or go home. Like you said with X64 mode, scalar FPU isn't even an option, only SIMD is available. For scalar operations you just ignore the high elements of your SIMD registers. They still compute as fast as the scalar FPU would compute them.

I think you can get a ton of mileage out of just a handful of SIMD/FPU instructions - multiply, add, subtract, and enough permute and conversion operations to get your data ready for those appropriate math operations.

Anyway, I think in that sense worrying about current Amiga scalar FPU instruction sets and compatibility/performance might be slightly overblown. If we really want to crunch through a lot of floating point values at some point it might be wise to create or adopt a SIMD FPU instruction set everyone could adopt going forward.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: matthey on October 13, 2015, 10:53:21 PM
Quote from: Hans_;797401
Does anyone have any hard data on the performance with software trap based FPU emulation? I'd be interested to see how much of an impact it actually has, but I can't find any published benchmarks anywhere.

Hard data is going to be difficult to find. How are the floating point operations going to be performed after the exception?

1) full precision floating point using integer instructions
2) reduced precision floating point using integer instructions
3) partial hardware accelerated floating point (possible with this new PPC board? Lattice FPGA?)  

The following link is a paper discussing the floating point options and performance for a processor without an FPU.

http://www.ll.mit.edu/HPEC/agendas/proc08/Day1/11-Day1-PosterDemoA-Spetka-abstract.pdf

The performance difference is going to depend on the number of exceptions generated. Also, some floating point operations are much more difficult to perform with integer operations than in hardware. Light floating point use may see no difference in performance while heavy use will likely be a night and day difference. OxyPatcher/CyberPatcher/MuRedox patching of 6888x FPU code on a 68060 can be 50% faster with heavy floating point use and this is with the most common 6888x instructions available in the 68060 FPU. These patchers have partial floating point hardware acceleration by using the simpler 68060 FPU also. No hardware floating point acceleration and full precision with integer operations would be devastating to floating point performance.

Quote from: Bif;797404
I do think in this day and age processors with only scalar FPU support are a little bit pointless. May as well go SIMD FPU or go home. Like you said with X64 mode, scalar FPU isn't even an option, only SIMD is available. For scalar operations you just ignore the high elements of your SIMD registers. They still compute as fast as the scalar FPU would compute them.

If creating new floating point hardware, a combined FPU and SIMD (the result being a SIMD) like the x86_64 makes a lot of sense. An FPU with double precision support for C programs and an SIMD which is single precision only also has advantages (PPC with Altivec way).

Quote from: Bif;797404
I think you can get a ton of mileage out of just a handful of SIMD/FPU instructions - multiply, add, subtract, and enough permute and conversion operations to get your data ready for those appropriate math operations.

Right. Keep it fairly simple for hardware floating point support. Hardware designers need to pay attention to what compilers need and are using where they have made major mistakes before in cutting common and valuable instructions though.

Quote from: Bif;797404
Anyway, I think in that sense worrying about current Amiga scalar FPU instruction sets and compatibility/performance might be slightly overblown. If we really want to crunch through a lot of floating point values at some point it might be wise to create or adopt a SIMD FPU instruction set everyone could adopt going forward.

Both the 68k and PPC would probably maintain a separate FPU and SIMD for compatibility. This requires more logic but the SIMD only needs to support single precision floating point which saves some logic. Today, logic savings isn't as important as compatibility or performance.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: zylesea on October 13, 2015, 11:37:00 PM
Quote from: danwood;797397
I regularly read that OS4 is not A-Cube's main market, and they mostly sell their PPC boards to the embedded market.  Is there any proof of this, or is it just a forum urban-legend?


I asked that question several times over the recent years, too and never got much evidence tehy significantly sell to teh embedded market.
At least they tried to get more active on the embedded market as they partnered up with MasEletronica a few years ago. And indeed Acube is still listed as partner at MasElettronica's hp, but bo Acube products are listed by MasElettronica. All  in all I guess Acube is a part time biz focusing very much at the Amiga ppl but also a few non Amiga related sales.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Hans_ on October 14, 2015, 12:33:53 AM
Quote from: matthey;797406
Hard data is going to be difficult to find. How are the floating point operations going to be performed after the exception?

1) full precision floating point using integer instructions
2) reduced precision floating point using integer instructions
3) partial hardware accelerated floating point (possible with this new PPC board? Lattice FPGA?)  

I'm talking about whatever FPU emulation is currently available (under Linux), using whatever benchmarks are available. Sure, people can argue ad nauseum about whether benchmark results are meaningful, but having any data would be better than making big claims about performance based on assumptions.

Of course the emulation is going to have overhead; I'd like to know how it actually performs.

Hans
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 14, 2015, 02:04:10 AM
Quote from: Spectre660;797359
I thought that you had already decided to get an X5000.
If that was the case then the Tabor should not bother you.
It being good,bad or indifferent should not affect your original plans.


Actually, it does in that Tabor looks like a design intentionally hobbled to prevent it from competing with the higher end products.
It presents compromises not born of economic or engineering rational, but of pure marketing BS.
So, I question whether its wise to continue to support higher end A-eon products, if marketing plays such a large role in the company's design decisions.

This isn't meant to be personal, and I wasn't the first to go there.
I'm not trying to sell anything, I'm just warn my friends about a product I believe would be best avoided.

And, btw, I'm not to keen on getting blown off by you OR Andre Siegel when I have been in this trade as long or longer than either of you.
On my worst days, tin foil hat and all, I've got more brain cells firing than most Amigans.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 14, 2015, 02:41:58 AM
Quote from: matthey;797390
The AmigaOS does *not* use floating point much. Amigas without an FPU do the few floating point operations in software. However, many modern applications and games use floating point heavily because floating point on modern powerful processors has become cheap with a fast FPU and/or SIMD unit (using direct FPU and SIMD instructions in the code). These applications and games will be anywhere between slow and unusable on a low end processor without any hardware floating point support.

Even the Apollo 68k FPGA core recognizes the need for hardware FPU support and compatibility. Gunnar at first only wanted to create FPGA floating point code for the most important single precision (only) IEEE math library functions as this takes the least amount of FPGA space. The C language uses double precision floating point the most and by default and programs using the 68k FPU directly would need to be trapped or patched on the fly (the same as this cheap embedded PPC CPU). I strongly recommended against this and suggested that it was better to wait until there was space for a better solution. Next, Gunnar wanted to add a SIMD unit instead of the 68k FPU (the x86_64 uses the SIMD unit for floating point). There was no room even for single precision floating point support in the SIMD unit so floating point code (and algorithms) would have to be converted to integer code (which is no small task). Single precision floating point would be added to the SIMD unit when there was room but this was no floating point support at all for now. Once again I strongly recommended against adding an SIMD unit without single precision floating point (the most important IMO). A 68060 compatible FPU with direct FPU support and at least double precision is exactly what compilers and floating point using programs need so I highly recommended this. Gunnar doesn't like FPUs and was worried this would be too slow in FPGA. I figured out how to encode twice as many FPU registers allowing for faster instruction interleaving at his request. I also had a few simple suggestions for enhancements I had learned from working with the vbcc vclib floating point math libraries. It looks like the FPU was finally chosen for compatibility on an old 68k CPU which didn't even start with an FPU. PPC is *more* likely to need and expect an FPU, especially without Altivec. I wouldn't be surprised if the Apollo core with FPU support (in an FPGA) outperforms this hard PPC processor without floating point hardware support for floating point intensive programs. This is with the Apollo core being a fraction of the speed of a hard processor and having a fraction of the floating point performance of a SIMD unit for parallel operations. What developers are going to bother with such weak and incompatible floating point performance as this PPC embedded processor?


Thanks.
If it wasn't an important issue, I would have been using the reduced cost '060 EC and LC chips that were available at the end of production.
They easily clock from 75 to 100MHz, but with out the fpu, relying on replacement math libraries, their performance is INFERIOR to slower clocked full '60s.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Everblue on October 14, 2015, 06:04:35 AM
Quote from: Iggy;797411
Actually, it does in that Tabor looks like a design intentionally hobbled to prevent it from competing with the higher end products.
It presents compromises not born of economic or engineering rational, but of pure marketing BS.


Do you mean that they actually made a bad product (which may not even become commercially available) just to make the X5000 look better? Has anyone actually contacted A-EON so we hear their side of the story on this?
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Spectre660 on October 14, 2015, 06:35:03 AM
I am totally confused now.
http://www.amiga.org/forums/showpost.php?p=797215&postcount=12
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: itix on October 14, 2015, 08:59:01 AM
Quote from: Hans_;797410
I'm talking about whatever FPU emulation is currently available (under Linux), using whatever benchmarks are available. Sure, people can argue ad nauseum about whether benchmark results are meaningful, but having any data would be better than making big claims about performance based on assumptions.

Of course the emulation is going to have overhead; I'd like to know how it actually performs.


I am very surprised if Linux had FPU emulation there...
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 14, 2015, 11:48:30 AM
Quote from: Everblue;797416
Do you mean that they actually made a bad product (which may not even become commercially available) just to make the X5000 look better? Has anyone actually contacted A-EON so we hear their side of the story on this?

If you haven't noticed, we have been getting a hard sell on this project from people directly involved with it.

This has put me at odds with at least one MorphOS developer even though its unlikely that that OS will get ported to this board.

And the whole mess has been complicated by some personal crap that I let myself get draw into.

Frankly, I'm disgusted, disappointed with all involved (including myself), and ready to take a break.

Edit: But I DO owe Trevor this, NO compromises don't necessarily mean that the flaws are as much intentional as they are accepted. They must have thought this would be "good enough" for you all.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Everblue on October 14, 2015, 12:32:33 PM
Well to be honest I don't really know who is who, or the politics involved, I want just to be sure that if I invest my money in a Tabor (or anything else), I am not ripped off my money by a lack of important feature.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 14, 2015, 12:42:04 PM
Quote from: Everblue;797428
Well to be honest I don't really know who is who, or the politics involved, I want just to be sure that if I invest my money in a Tabor (or anything else), I am not ripped off my money by a lack of important feature.

No, I wouldn't go THAT far.
It is only MY opinion that it doesn't represent a good investment of your funds.

And I've been willing to recommend the X5000, so my views can be skewed.

You are spending a boat load of money either way, but at least one choice offers you something you can take pride in owing.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: yssing on October 14, 2015, 01:35:51 PM
I am sure no one will be ripped off.
Actually it is very simple, if you don't like, any given product, don't invest in it.

I am also sure, that Acube and A-EON, would not produce a product, with out solutions to, what ever, problems could arise.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Everblue on October 14, 2015, 01:49:27 PM
I agree my choice of words was not the best. I am sure that A-EON will explain their choices for "Tabor" and what this means for the end user so more knowledgeable purchasing decisions can be made, so no one feels "ripped off". :)

Hope that amends it :) Anyway I guess at Amiwest we will learn more.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: number6 on October 14, 2015, 02:05:35 PM
Quote from: Everblue;797435
I agree my choice of words was not the best. I am sure that A-EON will explain their choices for "Tabor" and what this means for the end user so more knowledgeable purchasing decisions can be made, so no one feels "ripped off". :)

Hope that amends it :) Anyway I guess at Amiwest we will learn more.


An almost identical comment was made on AW, so I'll post the same response:

What will come out of AmiWest is just speeches unless people take advantage of the opportunity:

Please post questions for participants (http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=69936)

#6
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: zylesea on October 14, 2015, 02:07:00 PM
Quote from: yssing;797434

I am also sure, that Acube and A-EON, would not produce a product, with out solutions to, what ever, problems could arise.

Like providing drivers for inbuild devices in a narrow time scale? Impressive track record i that regard...
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: eliyahu on October 14, 2015, 03:31:57 PM
@thread

ok, guys. this is starting to get out-of-hand. please keep conversation focused on the new tabor boards (despite not knowing terribly much about them) and no personal attacks, please. if you want sling mud and score points, do it elsewhere.

-- eliyahu
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: kolla on October 14, 2015, 03:34:16 PM
Based on previous experiences with FPU less Linux systems, you do not want to compile for FPU emulation (soft float) - it is dreadfully slow - you want to replace any software that relies on FPU with software that only does simple integer math.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: matthey on October 14, 2015, 05:39:24 PM
Quote from: Hans_;797410
I'm talking about whatever FPU emulation is currently available (under Linux), using whatever benchmarks are available. Sure, people can argue ad nauseum about whether benchmark results are meaningful, but having any data would be better than making big claims about performance based on assumptions.

The article I linked to has performance tests but they are for individual floating point instructions/functions. Obviously, a function/instruction like fabs is going to be near full speed (possibly a faster operation in an integer register) while a fsqrt is going to be slower than slow. The 3 common floating point emulations are compiler softfloat, FastFPE and NetWinder (NWFPE). The performance varies with the effective precision where the hardware FPU has the most precision for the floating point format (half, single, double, extended, quad). The effective precision of the floating point data in the IEEE floating point format is already reduced during many operations (extended precision like the 68k FPU uses can avoid this) with a hardware FPU. Some applications like games and 3D graphics probably want the best performance but math, science and engineering people would rather have extended precision floating point like the 68k FPU uses.

I could not find any good comprehensive benchmarks but I did see that one of the FastFPE authors using a StrongARM@200MHz with a Linux kernel tested 1.1 MFlops with a ~570 ns trap overhead and 0.4 MFlops with a ~2040 ns trap overhead. ARM claims 1.3 MFlops/MHz for the VFP9-S and 2.0 MFLops/MHz for the VFP10 which would be 260MFlops and 400MFlops at 200MHz respectively. I doubt any applications or games would use enough floating point to benchmark several hundred times faster on a StrongARM@200MHz with VFP but maybe it gives an idea of how handicapped software floating point can be.

http://linux-arm-kernel.infradead.narkive.com/gqDFIXbv/kernel-2-6-and-fastfpe
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: wawrzon on October 14, 2015, 05:58:45 PM
im pretty sure fpus are totally overrated. it just a fancy of chip designers. all the code is equally well executed in software. same for all other sorts of hardware acceleration btw.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: itix on October 14, 2015, 06:24:30 PM
Quote from: wawrzon;797446
im pretty sure fpus are totally overrated. it just a fancy of chip designers. all the code is equally well executed in software. same for all other sorts of hardware acceleration btw.


I would say FPUs (floating points in general) are underused on Amiga. I was portit one my app from MorphOS to AmigaOS 3 and I really had problem what FPU model I should target at. There are many options (68881, 68882, 68040, 68060 and handful of math libraries) you have to choose from. Had I written the software for the 68k target first I would have used integers only.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: wawrzon on October 14, 2015, 06:50:54 PM
@itix

as long as you are staying with and run parallax scrolling games as popular on amiga you will be fine with integers. who needs all these 3d software flooding us to the death anyway.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: matthey on October 14, 2015, 07:36:43 PM
Quote from: wawrzon;797446
im pretty sure fpus are totally overrated. it just a fancy of chip designers. all the code is equally well executed in software. same for all other sorts of hardware acceleration btw.

Nice sarcasm. Yea, the Amiga started with hardware acceleration where possible and practical and now we fall further and further behind by using outdated and embedded processors without hardware support while less expensive PCs use more and improving hardware acceleration. Trapping floating point instructions with software floating point operations vs an advanced SIMD is a good example of the extreme difference. PPC will catch up any day now though.

Quote from: itix;797448
I would say FPUs (floating points in general) are underused on Amiga. I was portit one my app from MorphOS to AmigaOS 3 and I really had problem what FPU model I should target at. There are many options (68881, 68882, 68040, 68060 and handful of math libraries) you have to choose from. Had I written the software for the 68k target first I would have used integers only.

The 68881 and 68882 are essentially the same target even if it is possible to specify one or the other. Vbcc will generate the exact same code with 68881 or 68882 specified. The 68040 and 68060 FPU are similar but the 68040 made the biggest blunder in processor history by leaving out the common FINT/FINTRZ instruction which the 68060 fixed. There are big differences in the instruction timings and exception handling between the 68040 and 68060. Code compiled for the 68040 should work on the 68060 and vise versa but with reduced performance. Code compiled for the 6888x will work on the 68040 and 68060 but with further reduced performance (from lots of trapped instructions). Code compiled for the 68040 or 68060 may not work for the 6888x (GCC=no, vbcc=yes). Heavy use floating point applications will benefit from multiple executables for all 68k CPU+FPU processors or 6888x and 68060 (telling 68040 users to use OxyPatcher/CyberPatcher/MuRedox). Light use 68k floating point can target the IEEE math libraries, 6888x-68060 or 6888x. I compiled vbcc using vbcc with both the IEEE libraries and direct 68060 FPU support and found no significant difference in speed of my test compiles (to my surprise). Testing will give a good indication of what is best for a particular application.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Hans_ on October 14, 2015, 08:25:14 PM
Quote from: matthey;797444
The article I linked to has performance tests but they are for individual floating point instructions/functions. Obviously, a function/instruction like fabs is going to be near full speed (possibly a faster operation in an integer register) while a fsqrt is going to be slower than slow. The 3 common floating point emulations are compiler softfloat, FastFPE and NetWinder (NWFPE). The performance varies with the effective precision where the hardware FPU has the most precision for the floating point format (half, single, double, extended, quad). The effective precision of the floating point data in the IEEE floating point format is already reduced during many operations (extended precision like the 68k FPU uses can avoid this) with a hardware FPU. Some applications like games and 3D graphics probably want the best performance but math, science and engineering people would rather have extended precision floating point like the 68k FPU uses.

I could not find any good comprehensive benchmarks but I did see that one of the FastFPE authors using a StrongARM@200MHz with a Linux kernel tested 1.1 MFlops with a ~570 ns trap overhead and 0.4 MFlops with a ~2040 ns trap overhead. ARM claims 1.3 MFlops/MHz for the VFP9-S and 2.0 MFLops/MHz for the VFP10 which would be 260MFlops and 400MFlops at 200MHz respectively. I doubt any applications or games would use enough floating point to benchmark several hundred times faster on a StrongARM@200MHz with VFP but maybe it gives an idea of how handicapped software floating point can be.

http://linux-arm-kernel.infradead.narkive.com/gqDFIXbv/kernel-2-6-and-fastfpe
All very interesting, and it does demonstrate how big such overhead can be. Nevertheless, none of the results in the documents you linked to are for the P1022 or even for a PowerPC processor.

The performance of such an emulator will depend on a number of factors ranging from how well the emulator itself has been designed (i.e., the software) through to the CPU architecture and indeed the design of the individual chip. I have no idea how any of these factors compare between the P1022 and the ARM CPUs in the test results, so I'd really prefer some results from the actual device.

Hans
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: itix on October 14, 2015, 08:49:33 PM
Quote from: matthey;797453


The 68881 and 68882 are essentially the same target even if it is possible to specify one or the other. Vbcc will generate the exact same code with 68881 or 68882 specified. The 68040 and 68060 FPU are similar but the 68040 made the biggest blunder in processor history by leaving out the common FINT/FINTRZ instruction which the 68060 fixed. There are big differences in the instruction timings and exception handling between the 68040 and 68060. Code compiled for the 68040 should work on the 68060 and vise versa but with reduced performance. Code compiled for the 6888x will work on the 68040 and 68060 but with further reduced performance (from lots of trapped instructions). Code compiled for the 68040 or 68060 may not work for the 6888x (GCC=no, vbcc=yes).


My programs was not using floats much. I just used floats for convenience. I think I tried using math libs first but stumbled on some issue why I couldn't use it. In the end I used 68882 target although it really requires fast 68060 (for other reasons than floats).

Quote
Heavy use floating point applications will benefit from multiple executables for all 68k CPU+FPU processors or 6888x and 68060 (telling 68040 users to use OxyPatcher/CyberPatcher/MuRedox). Light use 68k floating point can target the IEEE math libraries, 6888x-68060 or 6888x. I compiled vbcc using vbcc with both the IEEE libraries and direct 68060 FPU support and found no significant difference in speed of my test compiles (to my surprise). Testing will give a good indication of what is best for a particular application.


Is VBCC using floating point much? It is supposed to run on systems without FPU...
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: matthey on October 14, 2015, 09:46:41 PM
Quote from: Hans_;797455
All very interesting, and it does demonstrate how big such overhead can be. Nevertheless, none of the results in the documents you linked to are for the P1022 or even for a PowerPC processor.


ARM processors (usually for embedded) are the most common processors without hardware floating point. PPC processors without an FPU are highly unusual so we will have to wait for benchmarks. I do expect adding efficient software floating point support to PPC will be more work due to it being unusual. I also expect the trapping overhead of PPC to be higher than ARM where fast traps and fewer registers are an advantage.

Quote from: itix;797457

Is VBCC using floating point much? It is supposed to run on systems without FPU...


Vbcc is not using floating point much which is why the overhead of the IEEE math libraries doesn't make much difference. The 68k vbcc distributions use the IEEE math libraries so they work without an FPU but gain performance from a FPU. Vbcc and vasm primarily use floating point when compiling programs which use floating point so performance could vary substantially from my testing. I had originally wanted to create optional higher performance vbcc distributions compiled for the 68020+6888x and 68060 but the performance difference wasn't enough to warrant them. Floating point precision is better with direct FPU support than the IEEE math libraries and it was important to test the vbcc vclib floating point work I had done (new m060.lib) so it wasn't a complete waste of time.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Spectre660 on October 14, 2015, 11:49:33 PM
No official price for Tabor has been announced.
Figure quoted is not correct.


http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?mode=viewtopic&topic_id=40622&forum=2&start=300&viewmode=flat&order=0#770615
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: SACC-guy on October 14, 2015, 11:56:02 PM
@thread

To My Knowledge, No price and NO specs have been announced!
Please inform us when these details are announced.

M
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Everblue on October 15, 2015, 07:47:53 AM
Quote from: Spectre660;797463
No official price for Tabor has been announced.
Figure quoted is not correct.


http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?mode=viewtopic&topic_id=40622&forum=2&start=300&viewmode=flat&order=0#770615


Thanks for that link :)
Would be nice if the board is much cheaper than 700 Euro!

Anyway, what does the following bit imply/mean, as I am not a technical person:

"The demo at the show was Debian 8 running an HD video concurrently with the 3D Gears demo and an animated Libre Office presentation."
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Oldsmobile_Mike on October 15, 2015, 08:12:23 AM
Quote from: Everblue;797477
Anyway, what does the following bit imply/mean, as I am not a technical person:

"The demo at the show was Debian 8 running an HD video concurrently with the 3D Gears demo and an animated Libre Office presentation."

Means that it doesn't bog down when multitasking like a single-core Athlon XP trying to play multiple YouTube videos at the same time (ask me how I know this, LOL).  ;)
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: wawrzon on October 15, 2015, 11:40:30 AM
Quote from: Oldsmobile_Mike;797478
Means that it doesn't bog down when multitasking like a single-core Athlon XP trying to play multiple YouTube videos at the same time (ask me how I know this, LOL).  ;)


ill just copy my considerations from aw.net in here:

i would expect linux to decode and play video content on the gpu, the machine merely shoving video data through the bus. also i would expect linux to have working hardware mesa/gallium acceleration, so it shouldnt have problem with playing the simplest gl demo. i dont know what the libre office presentation do, but i expect that, similarly to video, displaying demo of office software isnt demanding what concerns the cpu or fpu. taking into account that so far i know neither full gpu, nor 3d acceleration, nor even libre office is available for os4, i doubt that such a presentation gives a reliable estimation about, how os4 would run on particular hardware.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: psxphill on October 15, 2015, 02:13:45 PM
Quote from: itix;797457
My programs was not using floats much. I just used floats for convenience.

What does that mean? Floats have a very specific use, which is to trade accuracy for a greater range (they effectively are lossy compression).

Quote from: wawrzon;797487
i would expect linux to decode and play video content on the gpu, the machine merely shoving video data through the bus.

I wouldn't expect that on any operating system, especially Linux, even if your gpu supports H264 acceleration. Although you can help the planets align https://github.com/erkserkserks/h264ify (but I still wouldn't expect it).
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 15, 2015, 03:12:34 PM
Quote from: Spectre660;797463
No official price for Tabor has been announced.
Figure quoted is not correct.


http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?mode=viewtopic&topic_id=40622&forum=2&start=300&viewmode=flat&order=0#770615
'

AND, with that in mind, I've buried my hatchet (and, no, not in this guy's skull).
IF priced in line with its value...it could start a trend that leads to future affordable hardware.
So...I'm not buying one, BUT I could see a market for it.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: itix on October 15, 2015, 05:16:18 PM
Quote from: psxphill;797493
What does that mean? Floats have a very specific use, which is to trade accuracy for a greater range (they effectively are lossy compression).

I had audio settings (can't remember what, this was 10 years ago) where accepted range was from 0.0 to 1.0. Obviously, I could have used integers, but when doing arithmetic you must remember scale factor and be careful to not run out of integer range.

With floats it is just easier to code and the precision is good enough.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: jj on October 15, 2015, 05:39:28 PM
you would have to do well to run out of an integer range on the scale you are suggesting.  Float doesn't seem like the sensible thing to use in that example
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: matthey on October 15, 2015, 06:27:27 PM
Quote from: psxphill;797493
What does that mean? Floats have a very specific use, which is to trade accuracy for a greater range (they effectively are lossy compression).

Floating point does trade precision for range but it has other uses. There are standard C support functions to handle floating point including fractions while there are none for fixed point integer fractions. This is very convenient and probably the most common reason to use floating point. There are other less obvious advantages and disadvantages.

Quote from: Iggy;797496
AND, with that in mind, I've buried my hatchet (and, no, not in this guy's skull).
IF priced in line with its value...it could start a trend that leads to future affordable hardware.

I see the trend to less standardized and weak handicapped hardware as a negative regardless of price. It is kind of like a 68EC060 in a classic Amiga accelerator which is a bastard. It may be cheaper and it may work with AmigaOS but enough 68060 software will fail that the mistake will become evident. Compatibility and standardization are two of the few advantages the Amiga has left. Throw these away and the value of even relatively low priced hardware is reduced. I believe the Amiga masses will accept reduced performance before reduced compatibility. My priorities for new Amiga hardware are:

1) compatibility (not an Amiga without it)
2) price
3) performance

PPC is acceptable at performance but will never be good at compatibility and price. Insistence of PPC only is likely ignoring the Amiga masses (biggest Amiga market). The Amiga classes are already buying more expensive PPC hardware. I hope there is an embedded customer for these boards.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: psxphill on October 16, 2015, 01:16:11 PM
Quote from: matthey;797504
Floating point does trade precision for range but it has other uses. There are standard C support functions to handle floating point including fractions while there are none for fixed point integer fractions.

True, C does lack a fixed floating point type. That doesn't mean that using a float is in any way a good idea though. Just that the consequences doesn't trump the laziness of implementing with fixed point maths. You can also stir paint with a screwdriver.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 16, 2015, 01:32:09 PM
Quote from: psxphill;797527
True, C does lack a fixed floating point type. That doesn't mean that using a float is in any way a good idea though. Just that the consequences doesn't trump the laziness of implementing with fixed point maths. You can also stir paint with a screwdriver.

Weird analogy.
"That doesn't mean that using a float is in any way a good idea though."

Seriously?
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: matthey on October 16, 2015, 06:36:04 PM
Quote from: psxphill;797527
True, C does lack a fixed floating point type. That doesn't mean that using a float is in any way a good idea though. Just that the consequences doesn't trump the laziness of implementing with fixed point maths. You can also stir paint with a screwdriver.

It's surprising that neither C99 nor C11 have added 16.16 and 32.32 integer fixed point data types and support. They could be useful as a standard optional feature, especially for embedded processors without an FPU.

The best case overhead of using hardware floating point is not much in a modern processor. A few more pipeline stages are required (compared to a similar length integer) for normalization but this provides saturation saving min/max or saturating integer operations for some algorithms. The longer pipeline adversely affects floating point branches (I advocated new branchless FMIN/FMAX 68k FPU instructions for this reason) and integer<->fp conversions. The worst case overhead for out of range subnormal/denormal handling depends on the hardware implementation but can be very high for mostly software handling. More hardware precision like extended precision floating point can avoid some of the overhead while SIMD units may do a simple rounding of subnormals (giving inaccurate results).
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: psxphill on October 16, 2015, 11:41:16 PM
Quote from: Iggy;797528
Weird analogy.
"That doesn't mean that using a float is in any way a good idea though."

Seriously?

Yes. For example a float can't accurately store the number "0.4"

Anything that deals with money should never use floating point, anything where the results have to be the same on different platforms shouldn't use floating point (or use http://www.jhauser.us/arithmetic/SoftFloat.html).

There are some circumstances where floats are ok to use, but most people who try to use floats have no idea when it's ok to use them and when it isn't.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16595668/any-risk-of-using-float-variables-as-loop-counters-and-their-fractional-incremen

In multiple projects I've had to remove the use of floats because people thought they should use them because "the C library supports them so they must be a good idea".

However there are situations where software does require the use of an FPU (both 68k & PPC) so new hardware should support them.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 17, 2015, 02:14:14 PM
Quote from: psxphill;797537
...However there are situations where software does require the use of an FPU (both 68k & PPC) so new hardware should support them.


Your last statement seems to run counter to the "That doesn't mean that using a float is in any way a good idea though" argument.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Spectre660 on October 17, 2015, 03:58:48 PM
Comment from Hyperion .

http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?mode=viewtopic&topic_id=40622&forum=2&start=460&viewmode=flat&order=0#770947
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: utri007 on October 17, 2015, 04:48:42 PM
Similar comment from Jens Schöenfelt

http://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p=1045850&postcount=7
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: OlafS3 on October 17, 2015, 05:14:29 PM
Quote from: Spectre660;797557
Comment from Hyperion .

http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?mode=viewtopic&topic_id=40622&forum=2&start=460&viewmode=flat&order=0#770947

we will see what people report when AmigaOS runs on it
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Everblue on October 17, 2015, 06:07:28 PM
Yeah, cos what would Hyperion know about that :D
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 17, 2015, 08:07:27 PM
Quote from: Everblue;797561
Yeah, cos what would Hyperion know about that :D


Not that much actually, since they subbed the OS out to the Friedens.

And I am willing to give the brothers more credit than many, as they have gotten OS4 this far.

But we now know they are expecting to emulate unsupported fpu instructions.
Calling those illegal ops traps 'transparent' isn't exactly accurate nor is the claim that the impact will not exist.
And the OS will have to implement the emulation code, BUT its not nearly as bad as I may have made out originally.

However...you guys can consider whether or not you want to buy it.
If I buy anything its still going to be an X5000 with its e5500 cored processors.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Everblue on October 17, 2015, 08:27:31 PM
Well X5000 is way too funky pricewise for me. So that basically means either a Sam460CR (assuming these are still in production) or wait for a Tabor board hoping that considering the price "it won't be THAT bad".

Alternatively, MorphOS on an x86 board, but thats probably years away.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: eliyahu on October 18, 2015, 06:29:32 PM
@thread

there's tons of great discussion on MOS and AROS PPC alternatives, but it's getting off-topic. so i've moved that discussion to a new thread (http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=69945). please continue the MOS/AROS discussion there and keep this thread focused on tabor itself. thanks!


-- eliyahu
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: psxphill on October 18, 2015, 07:58:19 PM
Quote from: Iggy;797548
Your last statement seems to run counter to the "That doesn't mean that using a float is in any way a good idea though" argument.

Backwards compatibility is purely about preserving the previous generations bad ideas. It's why I think that at the very least there should be support for a full 060 with compatible MMU & FPU in FPGA reproductions, not because everything about the 060 implementation was a good idea but because it existed.

I think you misunderstood my point though. Just because C includes printf() etc support for floats doesn't mean you should use floats when you decide whether to use fixed point or floats. Floating point is a huge compromise and unless you understand all the compromises then you can't say whether it's a good idea or not. If you are writing anything that involves money then you should definitely avoid floating point, cross platform code where the results need to be consistent (even across x86 platforms) should avoid floating point.

Sure in your example you can justify it because you are unlikely to get any bug reports if the volume is slightly wrong, although you shouldn't compile it to require an fpu as that is putting an unnecessary requirement.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: itix on October 18, 2015, 08:59:39 PM
Quote from: psxphill;797629
Sure in your example you can justify it because you are unlikely to get any bug reports if the volume is slightly wrong, although you shouldn't compile it to require an fpu as that is putting an unnecessary requirement.


Why not? If I have used floats to save some typing and it works then why on earth I should care if it won't work on some non-FPU machine? It is same reason why I don't support palette based displays. I could do that but I have other tasks to do.

Anyway, just checked what my floats do. It is for real time effects in audio playback (it is a CD player,, so it is useless today).
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: matthey on October 18, 2015, 09:40:05 PM
Quote from: psxphill;797629
Backwards compatibility is purely about preserving the previous generations bad ideas. It's why I think that at the very least there should be support for a full 060 with compatible MMU & FPU in FPGA reproductions, not because everything about the 060 implementation was a good idea but because it existed.


I don't understand your seemingly contrary statements. You say that backward compatibility is "preserving the previous generations bad ideas" which implies that an 060 compatible MMU and FPU were a mistake yet you want to keep them? Was a standard PPC FPU a bad idea since the P1022 CPU dropped the standard FPU?

Quote from: psxphill;797629

I think you misunderstood my point though. Just because C includes printf() etc support for floats doesn't mean you should use floats when you decide whether to use fixed point or floats. Floating point is a huge compromise and unless you understand all the compromises then you can't say whether it's a good idea or not. If you are writing anything that involves money then you should definitely avoid floating point, cross platform code where the results need to be consistent (even across x86 platforms) should avoid floating point.


While you have correctly highlighted some of the problems of floating point data types, I believe you have also exaggerated the problems. Some numbers can not be represented exactly but choosing a floating point data type with adequate precision usually gives a good enough approximation. It is important to realize that the effective floating point precision is commonly several bits less than the data type precision due to cumulative rounding errors and more precision needed in some algorithms to maintain full data type precision (thus the usefulness of extended precision fp for simpler and higher effective precision double precision fp calculations). Cross platform floating point results can vary but this is usually not a problem unless precision or accuracy are lost. The IEEE standard reduces variance but there are still several reasons why results may vary. Money calculations in high precision floating point should give a good approximation although an exact data type is preferable for financial use.

Quote from: psxphill;797629

Sure in your example you can justify it because you are unlikely to get any bug reports if the volume is slightly wrong, although you shouldn't compile it to require an fpu as that is putting an unnecessary requirement.


It would be nice if a version of the program is available which does not require an FPU. Should or shouldn't isn't really up to us though.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: psxphill on October 18, 2015, 10:49:07 PM
Quote from: itix;797630
Why not? If I have used floats to save some typing and it works then why on earth I should care if it won't work on some non-FPU machine?

Why would you bother writing software if you don't care if it will work or not?

Quote from: matthey;797631
I don't understand your seemingly contrary statements. You say that backward compatibility is "preserving the previous generations bad ideas" which implies that an 060 compatible MMU and FPU were a mistake yet you want to keep them?

I want to keep them for backward compatibility. It's not contradictory at all. Of course they weren't necessarily bad ideas at the time, but some things make less sense now than they did but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be supported. Otherwise we might as well just switch to x64. I personally wouldn't even think about extending the ISA until a compatible CPU+MMU+FPU was implemented & then I'd work on adding switchable 64 bit mode to the CPU+MMU.

Quote from: matthey;797631
Was a standard PPC FPU a bad idea since the P1022 CPU dropped the standard FPU?

I don't know enough about PPC, but from an outsider the entire CPU seems like a bad idea.

Quote from: matthey;797631
Cross platform floating point results can vary but this is usually not a problem unless precision or accuracy are lost.

They are. Precision on x87 is variable per process on Windows and Direct3D changes it under you (I have no idea what precision Linux selects). The same software compiled for x64 will behave differently because the accuracy is different again (floating point appears to use SSE and not x87 on x64).

It makes noticeable differences in some software, stuff like collision detection in multiplayer games becomes horrendously complicated. You have to have a huge QA team to find all the problems. If you can avoid that then it's much easier. Sometimes you can't avoid floating point because of performance, but in the code I worked I never found switching to float with 68882 to be faster than integer (x86 performs differently though).

Quote from: matthey;797631
It would be nice if a version of the program is available which does not require an FPU. Should or shouldn't isn't really up to us though.

I said should, not must. Although releasing something that needs an FPU purely for loading a preference would still deserve criticism.

Quote from: utri007;797559
Similar comment from Jens Schöenfelt

http://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p=1045850&postcount=7

Running integer code on one core and having it switch to another to emulate the FPU would be horrendously slow. If it is just a couple of commands that throw exceptions then it probably isn't a big deal, but it would surely be done on the same core. The fpu in the e500v2 (P10xx series, P2010 and P2020) appears to be completely incompatible to the classic PowerPC, but the e500mc (P204x, P30xx and P40xx) is supposed to be compatible to the classic PowerPC fpu. It would have seemed more logical to use a P204x instead of a P102x. The announcement is a little strange as it said 1.2ghz (which is the speed of the P202x) and not 800mhz (which is the P102X).

There are some details here: https://wiki.debian.org/PowerPCSPEPort
and http://community.qnx.com/sf/wiki/do/viewPdf/projects.core_os/wiki/E500_SPE_support

It appears you have to emulate the fpu (at least in part) using integer instructions (the SPE isn't IEEE compatible).
Every FPU instruction is going to need to hit memory a lot because the SPE uses the integer registers and they are obviously already in use.

Either Jens or the guy he talked to was being economical with the truth, or there was some form of information lost in translation. None of the FPU instructions can be run natively, they all trap to one of 2 exceptions. So yeah, you have to catch a couple of exceptions and emulate the whole chip. Not like the 68060 at all, where the most common instructions (according to motorola) get executed natively.

The e200mc (used in the P204x and later) is just missing two instructions from the PowerPC FPU.

There have been enough Amiga announcements made in good faith because the developers believed something was achievable and then they didn't achieve it. They can probably make it do something, I'll believe it is something worth doing when you can buy it and try it.

We could all just buy http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/P2041RDB-PC/P2041RDB-PC-ND/4234547 http://www.farnell.com/datasheets/1854648.pdf which is likely going to be cheaper than the slower A1222
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: matthey on October 19, 2015, 02:04:34 AM
Quote from: psxphill;797634

I want to keep them for backward compatibility. It's not contradictory at all.


Logically then, I must infer that you want to keep compatibility even though it is "preserving the previous generations bad ideas". This was not clear to me in what you wrote.

Quote from: psxphill;797634

Of course they weren't necessarily bad ideas at the time, but some things make less sense now than they did but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be supported. Otherwise we might as well just switch to x64. I personally wouldn't even think about extending the ISA until a compatible CPU+MMU+FPU was implemented & then I'd work on adding switchable 64 bit mode to the CPU+MMU.


Supported can mean trapping every FPU or MMU instruction though. The Apollo Team discussed trapping all FPU and MMU instructions for the 68k. I didn't like it, especially for the minimal 68060 FPU which has a nice ISA considering its age. The MMU is more of a problem as adding modern enhancements while maintaining high compatibility is more difficult. There is not much Amiga software using the MMU though.

Quote from: psxphill;797634

I don't know enough about PPC, but from an outsider the entire CPU seems like a bad idea.


I don't see anything inherently bad about PPC other than it is currently out of favor and losing market share. Sure, instruction acronyms and aliases are out of control, the ISA is so broad that hardware implementations are incomplete, assumptions about what the compiler could do and assembler programmers would not have to do were incorrect and the ISA is overall less friendly and the code not as compact compared to the 68k but the new ARMv8 (AArch64) is very similar and makes some of the same mistakes.

Quote from: psxphill;797634

They are. Precision on x87 is variable per process on Windows and Direct3D changes it under you (I have no idea what precision Linux selects). The same software compiled for x64 will behave differently because the accuracy is different again (floating point appears to use SSE and not x87 on x64).


The x87 FPU was a poor design that was more difficult than the 68k FPU to modernize. Newer x86 software has been using the SIMD for floating point since 1997, except for a few programs needing higher precision, trig instructions or logarithm instructions. Yes, the precision of each floating point data type can vary by compiler (with options) even on the same computer. It is up to the programmer cross compiling or porting software to be aware of these kinds of problems which are not uncommon. Integer formats vary by data type (according to the ABI) as well.

Quote from: psxphill;797634

It makes noticeable differences in some software, stuff like collision detection in multiplayer games becomes horrendously complicated. You have to have a huge QA team to find all the problems. If you can avoid that then it's much easier. Sometimes you can't avoid floating point because of performance, but in the code I worked I never found switching to float with 68882 to be faster than integer (x86 performs differently though).


Some uses of floating point are bad and some programmers are amateurs. This doesn't mean everyone should stop using floating point and hardware floating point should be removed.

The 6888x FPUs were very slow, as most external FPUs were, because of the slow communications between the CPU and FPU. It made sense to do complex instructions on the FPU which reduced the communications overhead. As the processors became faster and integrated FPUs reduced the overhead, simple FPU instructions made more sense. This is why the 68040 and 68060 trapped many complex instructions while keeping many of the common ones. This was a good idea, IMO, although I would have kept a few more simple but useful FPU instructions (they did keep the most common core instructions in hardware). The x87 FPU kept all their instructions as it became integrated but they had this crazy stack based (no FPU registers like the 68k or PPC "standard" FPU) instruction argument scheme which was not easy for compilers or good for superscalar execution so they deprecated the whole FPU and added more floating point support to the SIMD. The x87 FPU also had more inconsistencies and bugs than the better designed and more IEEE compliant 68k FPU which may have added extra incentive to deprecate it.

Quote from: psxphill;797634

Running integer code on one core and having it switch to another to emulate the FPU would be horrendously slow. If it is just a couple of commands that throw exceptions then it probably isn't a big deal, but it would surely be done on the same core. The fpu in the e500v2 (P10xx series, P2010 and P2020) appears to be completely incompatible to the classic PowerPC, but the e500mc (P204x, P30xx and P40xx) is supposed to be compatible to the classic PowerPC fpu. It would have seemed more logical to use a P204x instead of a P102x. The announcement is a little strange as it said 1.2ghz (which is the speed of the P202x) and not 800mhz (which is the P102X).


I only saw disadvantages to having the 2nd core handle the 1st core's trap but then I don't have much multi-core programming experience (maybe Jens doesn't either). I at least looked at some P1022 CPU documentation that seemed to suggest that all "standard" PPC FPU instructions (and registers) have disappeared and would need to be trapped. The documentation I found was not very good but no one has claimed I was wrong yet.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: OlafS3 on October 19, 2015, 09:47:40 AM
one news... despite different rumours AmigaOS is still not running on Tabor

FPU emulation is slow and not tested. They have plans for a better one later.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 19, 2015, 12:47:28 PM
Quote from: OlafS3;797642
one news... despite different rumours AmigaOS is still not running on Tabor

FPU emulation is slow and not tested. They have plans for a better one later.

Well that wasn't completely unexpected, otherwise they could have shown it running at AmiWest.

It DOES take time to do the porting work.

We will have to wait and see how this compares to the SAM460.

But remember, even though this only has a 100MHz advantage, it could turn out that even with the disadvantage of having to trap and emulate fpu instructions that the Freescale cpu is still more powerful than the Applied Micro cpu used in the SAM.

Yes, I still maintain the e500v2 is not the best choice, but it may not be the worst either.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Spectre660 on October 19, 2015, 01:33:13 PM
The P1022 core should be about 30% faster than the 460ex in single core integer performance . The Mplayer decode benchmarks single core results under Linux are Tabor (SPE) 214s . Sam460ex 469s .
By the way Trever did confirm in his Amiwest 2015 presentation the the T series cpus were not available when the Tabor design was started.

Quote from: Iggy;797649
Well that wasn't completely unexpected, otherwise they could have shown it running at AmiWest.

It DOES take time to do the porting work.

We will have to wait and see how this compares to the SAM460.

But remember, even though this only has a 100MHz advantage, it could turn out that even with the disadvantage of having to trap and emulate fpu instructions that the Freescale cpu is still more powerful than the Applied Micro cpu used in the SAM.

Yes, I still maintain the e500v2 is not the best choice, but it may not be the worst either.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 19, 2015, 03:06:26 PM
Quote from: Spectre660;797651
The P1022 core should be about 30% faster than the 460ex in single core integer performance . The Mplayer decode benchmarks single core results under Linux are Tabor (SPE) 214s . Sam460ex 469s .
By the way Trever did confirm in his Amiwest 2015 presentation the the T series cpus were not available when the Tabor design was started.

Then Sir, I owe you an apology for being a rather obnoxious, aggressive  and somewhat self centered a-hole.

I rather suspected that the e500 core would outperform an Applied Micro core.
So it is a move forward, especially in consideration of the fact that it is a dual core cpu.

That 30% will more than cover any deficit that fpu emulation will cost.

Further, Applied Micro has essentially abandoned further PPC development in favor of ARM.

While Freescale is also moving in this direction, they are still planning a few new cpus.
And their existing product line is stronger.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: psxphill on October 19, 2015, 04:24:54 PM
Quote from: matthey;797639
Logically then, I must infer that you want to keep compatibility even though it is "preserving the previous generations bad ideas". This was not clear to me in what you wrote.


I thought I spelt that out in my original post, you shouldn't need to infer anything.

Quote from: matthey;797639
Supported can mean trapping every FPU or MMU instruction though. The Apollo Team discussed trapping all FPU and MMU instructions for the 68k. I didn't like it, especially for the minimal 68060 FPU which has a nice ISA considering its age. The MMU is more of a problem as adding modern enhancements while maintaining high compatibility is more difficult. There is not much Amiga software using the MMU though.


There is enough that MMU compatibility would be more than a nice to have, it would mean the difference between choosing a real 060 or an FPGA. Anything that creates fragmentation is bad.

Quote from: matthey;797639
Some uses of floating point are bad and some programmers are amateurs. This doesn't mean everyone should stop using floating point and hardware floating point should be removed.


Again I think you misunderstood what I was saying. I was merely saying that just because printf() supports float and doesn't support fixed point, doesn't mean using floating point is a good idea. You should choose the type carefully, most programmers don't really have a clue what floating point even means & get caught out.

Quote from: matthey;797639

I only saw disadvantages to having the 2nd core handle the 1st core's trap but then I don't have much multi-core programming experience (maybe Jens doesn't either).


Multiple cores work great if you have a large amount of work to split out that has no reliance on data calculated by another core, so you don't need to synchronise the cores until the end. Trying to use the second core as an fpu will generally just add overhead with thread synchronisation and the first core will end up waiting for the second core to finish.

Quote from: Iggy;797653
That 30% will more than cover any deficit that fpu emulation will cost.


I find that unlikely, but until they actually get it working it's all speculation.

A mini-ITX with a P204x is available now for the bottom of the projected cost of the Tabor and it has four cores, a much faster clock speed and an FPU that will mostly just work. This Tabor board is a waste of time.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: matthey on October 19, 2015, 05:25:17 PM
Quote from: Spectre660;797651

By the way Trever did confirm in his Amiwest 2015 presentation the the T series cpus were not available when the Tabor design was started.


Maybe we need a poll. Which of the following choices best applies to the P1022 PPC CPU choice without a compatible PPC FPU for the Tabor motherboard?

1) poor decision
2) bad decision
3) desperation

Is the writing on the wall not clear enough? It says, "PPC is dying and the remaining choices are slower, more expensive and/or handicapped". Freescale being bought out makes it easier for the new parent company to say we didn't promise anything regarding PPC. If there is not desperation yet then there could be at any time and very likely will be in the future. If not wanting to give up PPC then diversifying outside of PPC could allow Hyperion and/or A-Eon to survive the demise of PPC (if it is not already too late). Maybe Amiga Inc. understands and is patiently waiting to get their now "developed" intellectual property back for free.

Quote from: Iggy;797653

I rather suspected that the e500 core would outperform an Applied Micro core.
So it is a move forward, especially in consideration of the fact that it is a dual core cpu.

That 30% will more than cover any deficit that fpu emulation will cost.


30% faster integer performance will make some applications feel snappier while others with heavy floating point use (like Blender) will likely run at a fraction of the speed of a PPC with standard FPU. It's kind of like hiring a motivated worker who is missing one arm. He may be a little faster than average at some jobs but is going to have major trouble doing some work.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Bennymee on October 19, 2015, 06:29:06 PM
Quote from: psxphill;797661
I thought I spelt that out in my original post, you shouldn't need to infer anything.



There is enough that MMU compatibility would be more than a nice to have, it would mean the difference between choosing a real 060 or an FPGA. Anything that creates fragmentation is bad.



Again I think you misunderstood what I was saying. I was merely saying that just because printf() supports float and doesn't support fixed point, doesn't mean using floating point is a good idea. You should choose the type carefully, most programmers don't really have a clue what floating point even means & get caught out.



Multiple cores work great if you have a large amount of work to split out that has no reliance on data calculated by another core, so you don't need to synchronise the cores until the end. Trying to use the second core as an fpu will generally just add overhead with thread synchronisation and the first core will end up waiting for the second core to finish.



I find that unlikely, but until they actually get it working it's all speculation.

A mini-ITX with a P204x is available now for the bottom of the projected cost of the Tabor and it has four cores, a much faster clock speed and an FPU that will mostly just work. This Tabor board is a waste of time.


Isn't the P204x much more expensive then the P1xxx dual core ?
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Spectre660 on October 19, 2015, 06:49:17 PM
@matthey

I already have a Tabor and I am enjoying it.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Niding on October 19, 2015, 06:53:16 PM
@Spectre660    

Ignoring all the indepth discussion about pros and cons;

I guess you have had expirience with SAM440 or 460.
How do you feel (subjectivly) about the performance of Tabor vs the SAM lineup?
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Spectre660 on October 19, 2015, 07:00:07 PM
I have run AmigOS 4.1 update6 on Sam440ep-Flex,FE on Sam460ex.
Linux on both Sams and the Tabor.
I have run Both the Special FPE Debian on the Tabor and the regular
Debian with the emulated floating point on the Tabor.
The Tabor is much faster than the Sams under Linux .

Quote from: Niding;797670
@Spectre660    

Ignoring all the indepth discussion about pros and cons;

I guess you have had expirience with SAM440 or 460.
How do you feel (subjectivly) about the performance of Tabor vs the SAM lineup?
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 19, 2015, 07:01:05 PM
Quote from: matthey;797666
30% faster integer performance will make some applications feel snappier while others with heavy floating point use (like Blender) will likely run at a fraction of the speed of a PPC with standard FPU. It's kind of like hiring a motivated worker who is missing one arm. He may be a little faster than average at some jobs but is going to have major trouble doing some work.

Well, one vote for 'poor decision' but not a lethal one.

Is there an NG port of Blender?

I have two different dual cpu systems (one a dual quad Xeon the other dual hex core Opteron) both with 32GB of memory for that monster.

I can't picture it working well on a single core system with memory limitations.

And PPCs won't die out for awhile.

Current e6500 based cpus could extend the life of the platform for several years.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: zylesea on October 19, 2015, 08:12:05 PM
Quote from: Spectre660;797671
I have run AmigOS 4.1 update6 on Sam440ep-Flex,FE on Sam460ex.
Linux on both Sams and the Tabor.
I have run Both the Special FPE Debian on the Tabor and the regular
Debian with the emulated floating point on the Tabor.
The Tabor is much faster than the Sams under Linux .


Would the Tabor still be much faster than Sam if you disable one of teh two p1022 cores? I mean it's no wonder that an SMP aware OS is faster on a system with two cores than on a system woth one core.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: nicholas on October 19, 2015, 08:27:34 PM
Quote from: Spectre660;797671
I have run AmigOS 4.1 update6 on Sam440ep-Flex,FE on Sam460ex.
Linux on both Sams and the Tabor.
I have run Both the Special FPE Debian on the Tabor and the regular
Debian with the emulated floating point on the Tabor.
The Tabor is much faster than the Sams under Linux .

What are the Prometheus Trailer benchmark results running mplayer on regular Debian with the emulated floating point?
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: itix on October 19, 2015, 08:27:54 PM
Quote from: psxphill;797634
Quote
Why not? If I have used floats to save some typing and it works then why on earth I should care if it won't work on some non-FPU machine?
Why would you bother writing software if you don't care if it will work or not?


For fun. I am not a slave.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: matthey on October 19, 2015, 08:42:24 PM
Quote from: Spectre660;797671
I have run AmigOS 4.1 update6 on Sam440ep-Flex,FE on Sam460ex.
Linux on both Sams and the Tabor.
I have run Both the Special FPE Debian on the Tabor and the regular
Debian with the emulated floating point on the Tabor.
The Tabor is much faster than the Sams under Linux .


Linux is probably using both cores of the Tabor CPU so it would be significantly faster at integer math than the SAM. FPU trapping probably isn't going to be noticeable for light floating point use while being devastating to heavy use floating point programs. Run a MFlops benchmark under Linux using the traps on the Tabor board and let us know how it performs. The AMCC (SAM) 460EX gives 2.0 MFLOPS/MHz. I would be surprised if the P1022 can do 10% of the SAM's MFLOPS with trapping. Traps have a huge amount of overhead (20+ cycles per trap) and allow no superscalar parallelism.

Quote from: Iggy;797672
Well, one vote for 'poor decision' but not a lethal one.


I'll wait to place my vote but I have low expectations. My scale would go something like this:

0) acceptable decision as better than half the FLOPS of the SAM 460
1) poor decision as 1/2 - 1/4 the FLOPS of the SAM 460
2) bad decision as 1/4 - 1/8 the FLOPS of the SAM 460
3) desperation as worse than 1/8 the FLOPS of the SAM 460

Quote from: Iggy;797672

Is there an NG port of Blender?


Andy Broad did a port of Blender to AmigaOS 4.

http://www.broad.ology.org.uk/amiga/blender/

Quote from: Iggy;797672

I can't picture it working well on a single core system with memory limitations.


What makes you think the 68k can't do multi-core? It is not much more difficult than copy and paste of an existing FPGA CPU core. The FPGA has an advantage of being able to deal with problems like the executive base forbid counter in a more compatible way. I believe the 68k in FPGA has a better chance of preserving compatibility while exceeding the 4GB addressing barrier. The PPC can not use 64 bit pointers and keep compatibility with AmigaOS 3 or AmigaOS 4 because structure sizes would change. Better code density (smaller code size) is an advantage with a memory extension like XMS for the PC. How many Amiga 68k users complain about 128MB of memory not being enough compared to Amiga PPC users complaining about 512MB not being enough? I wonder how much memory the Tabor FPU trapping support code will take up?
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Spectre660 on October 19, 2015, 08:51:16 PM
Unfortunately the regular Debian Mplayer powerpc32 wont run.
Would have to try to compile a non-altivec version but
I suspect that  other components may also causes  problems .
Same issue on the Sam460ex but I compiled a non-altivec version some time ago and that works.Interestingly the regular Mplayer version in Ubuntu-mate 15.10 works ok on the Sam460ex . Tabor does not work with X windows stuff under Lubuntu 15.10. I can experiment and see if I can get a regular Debian benchmark by some means .
 
Quote from: nicholas;797680
What are the Prometheus Trailer benchmark results running mplayer on regular Debian with the emulated floating point?
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: nicholas on October 19, 2015, 09:03:20 PM
Quote from: Spectre660;797686
Unfortunately the regular Debian Mplayer powerpc32 wont run.


I hope that isn't a bad omen for regular pp32 OS4 programs running on the Tabor.

Quote

Would have to try to compile a non-altivec version but
I suspect that  other components may also causes  problems .
Same issue on the Sam460ex but I compiled a non-altivec version some time ago and that works.Interestingly the regular Mplayer version in Ubuntu-mate 15.10 works ok on the Sam460ex . Tabor does not work with X windows stuff under Lubuntu 15.10. I can experiment and see if I can get a regular Debian benchmark by some means .


Cool. :)
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: wawrzon on October 19, 2015, 09:11:23 PM
Quote from: Spectre660;797686
Unfortunately the regular Debian Mplayer powerpc32 wont run.
Would have to try to compile a non-altivec version but
I suspect that  other components may also causes  problems .
Same issue on the Sam460ex but I compiled a non-altivec version some time ago and that works.Interestingly the regular Mplayer version in Ubuntu-mate 15.10 works ok on the Sam460ex . Tabor does not work with X windows stuff under Lubuntu 15.10. I can experiment and see if I can get a regular Debian benchmark by some means .


well. thats just the taste whats gonna happen i guess. prepare for more threads like this while interesting stuff happens elsewhere.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: itix on October 19, 2015, 09:31:24 PM
Quote from: matthey;797684
Better code density (smaller code size) is an advantage with a memory extension like XMS for the PC. How many Amiga 68k users complain about 128MB of memory not being enough compared to Amiga PPC users complaining about 512MB not being enough? I wonder how much memory the Tabor FPU trapping support code will take up?


In modern computing code density and code size have very little to do with memory requirements. PPC code requires 50% more space (versus 68k code) but we are still talking few hundred kilobytes.

It is the data that counts.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: matthey on October 19, 2015, 10:29:41 PM
Quote from: itix;797692
In modern computing code density and code size have very little to do with memory requirements. PPC code requires 50% more space (versus 68k code) but we are still talking few hundred kilobytes.

It is the data that counts.

It depends on the programs (streaming data needs little memory and no DCache for example) and sometimes 68k "data" is smaller also because of less alignment restrictions. Code density is more important to processor performance where the 68k can have 40%-50% more code in the ICache and to bandwidths which allow code to be transferred 40%-50% faster. DCaches are rarely larger than ICaches despite some programs using much more data. Memory is cheap now days but even tens of MBs are important to the AmigaOS where 64 bit pointers will break compatibility. Code density is important enough that most modern 32 bit mobile and embedded devices use ARM with Thumb 2 or Android's Dalvik byte code which have good but inferior code density to the 68k. IMO, it makes sense for the Amiga to leverage all the advantages of compatibility and a small footprint with the 68k using 32 bit for the low end. The high end could break compatibility converting to 64 bit pointers while adding SMP and using a sandbox for AmigaOS 3 and 4 compatibility but I don't think there is enough market for it currently and especially with the price/performance and future prospects of PPC. The same technology used to make an enhanced 68k CPU (and learn from it) could be used to make a new 68k like 64 bit SuperCISC ISA and CPU design (if necessary) which is better than x86_64 (an average ISA at best while the CISC advantages giving the most powerful consumer processors in the world are continuously overlooked). It would require some investment but at least the Amiga could control its destiny, standardize and innovate instead of being dependent on the last small customer PPC manufacturer and aging embedded designs.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: broadblues on October 19, 2015, 11:36:32 PM
Quote

Amiga 68k users complain about 128MB of memory not being enough compared to Amiga PPC users complaining about 512MB not being enough?


Ridiculous thing to say, modern memory usage is all about data, code is like 1% of it.

eg SketchBlock is 3.5MB unstripped (plus some small libraries and filters) but as I'm working in quad float pixels I can max out on 1.5Gb of free ram when dealing with modern digital camera images.

blender needs about 100MB to start but only 10% of that is code.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: itix on October 20, 2015, 05:37:58 AM
Quote from: broadblues;797698
Ridiculous thing to say, modern memory usage is all about data, code is like 1% of it.

eg SketchBlock is 3.5MB unstripped (plus some small libraries and filters) but as I'm working in quad float pixels I can max out on 1.5Gb of free ram when dealing with modern digital camera images.


Unstripped exec just contains debug information (function names etc.). The instruction section is much much smaller than that...
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: matthey on October 20, 2015, 06:10:29 AM
Quote from: broadblues;797698
Ridiculous thing to say, modern memory usage is all about data, code is like 1% of it.

eg SketchBlock is 3.5MB unstripped (plus some small libraries and filters) but as I'm working in quad float pixels I can max out on 1.5Gb of free ram when dealing with modern digital camera images.


The AmigaOS libraries and devices are probably 95% code. They have to be counted too. The AmigaOS requirements:

AmigaOS 3.1 no requirement, 2MB recommended
AmigaOS 3.5 4MB required, 8MB recommended
AmigaOS 3.9 6MB required, 8MB recommended
AmigaOS 4.0 64MB required
AmigaOS 4.1 Classic 96MB required

Many classic users consider AmigaOS 3.9 to be bloated but PPC requires another ~60MB of memory. Why does PPC need another ~60MB for "data"?

What kind of floating point range and precision are needed to require quad precision floating point in SketchBlock? If only increased range is required then extended precision should be adequate (both have 15 bits of exponent) but extended precision only has 11 more bits of precision than double precision while quad precision has 60 more bits of precision.

Quote from: broadblues;797698

blender needs about 100MB to start but only 10% of that is code.


Data used once, infrequently and streamed shouldn't count as it isn't necessary to be persistent in memory. Code in the AmigaOS which is persistent should be counted as code used.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: itix on October 20, 2015, 07:15:13 AM
Quote from: matthey;797696
It depends on the programs (streaming data needs little memory and no DCache for example) and sometimes 68k "data" is smaller also because of less alignment restrictions. Code density is more important to processor performance where the 68k can have 40%-50% more code in the ICache and to bandwidths which allow code to be transferred 40%-50% faster.


It doesnt really matter when my PPC is still much faster at executing code (68k or PPC) than a real 68060.

Quote
DCaches are rarely larger than ICaches despite some programs using much more data. Memory is cheap now days but even tens of MBs are important to the AmigaOS where 64 bit pointers will break compatibility.


With 68k code you dont save tens of MBs. You could port the latest OWB to 68k and it still would not run well with 128 MB. 68060 is still too slow to run the latest webkit engine, 128 MB is still too little to run the latest webkit engine.

Quote
Code density is important enough that most modern 32 bit mobile and embedded devices use ARM with Thumb 2 or Android's Dalvik byte code which have good but inferior code density to the 68k. IMO, it makes sense for the Amiga to leverage all the advantages of compatibility and a small footprint with the 68k using 32 bit for the low end.


But the small footprint is just due to lack of features. Lack of Unicode support, no built-in USB stack, rudimentary GUI toolkit (unless you install MUI but then it is not small footprint anymore), lack of text antialiasing and truetype font support, simple 4 colour icons (versus true color PNG icons) i.e. it is stuck in 90s.

Quote
The high end could break compatibility converting to 64 bit pointers while adding SMP and using a sandbox for AmigaOS 3 and 4 compatibility but I don't think there is enough market for it currently and especially with the price/performance and future prospects of PPC. The same technology used to make an enhanced 68k CPU (and learn from it) could be used to make a new 68k like 64 bit SuperCISC ISA and CPU design (if necessary) which is better than x86_64 (an average ISA at best while the CISC advantages giving the most powerful consumer processors in the world are continuously overlooked). It would require some investment but at least the Amiga could control its destiny, standardize and innovate instead of being dependent on the last small customer PPC manufacturer and aging embedded designs.


I dont see point in new super 68k but I get your idea. The PPC is obviously stuck in year 2005 forever.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: broadblues on October 20, 2015, 12:18:54 PM
Quote
Why does PPC need another ~60MB for "data"?

Not sure where you get youtr 60 MB number from but:

3.1 plain backdrop 4 colour icons. 24 pixels square icons, really small HD at most with few disk buffers and no caching

4.1 full colour backdrop 32bit icons 64 bit square, potentially teratbytes of HD space, many more disk buffers per partition, other caching (SFS has write through caching I think FFS2 has cache hooks that may be enabled) etc etc.

Quote
What kind of floating point range and precision are needed to require quad precision floating point in SketchBlock?

Sorry not quad precision floats, I meant 4 floats per pixel, ARGBFloat. Size of buffers still mounts up when dealing with modern image data sizes.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: psxphill on October 20, 2015, 03:56:11 PM
Quote from: Bennymee;797668
Isn't the P204x much more expensive then the P1xxx dual core ?

Yes, you can buy a p1021 reference design board cheaper.

http://uk.farnell.com/freescale-semiconductor/p1021rdb-pc/reference-design-board-qoriq-p1021/dp/2315643

But the cpu is only one part of the price, so it doesn't make a huge difference.

Reference boards aren't really designed for end users and are low volume. They are only made so you can prototype products where you'll eventually buy a cpu and stick it on your own board. At that point the cost of the cpu is more relevant.

However if you can't compete with the freescale's reference boards on volume then you won't be able to compete with them on price, so you might as well buy freescale reference boards.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: eliyahu on October 20, 2015, 04:03:55 PM
@psxphill

Quote
The high price of the Trebor is not because it costs a lot to make each  board. Reference boards are normally expensive and just used for  prototyping your own devices. The P102x is designed for being used in  printers etc. Quite how they can justify the Trebor price when  freescales own board is cheaper is quite astonishing. They must hope  that their customers really are desperate.
really?! could you point me to where the tabor price has been released? perhaps you should actually find out the price before making accusations about how 'astonishing' it is how they can 'justify' it. it might save you some embarassment later. ;)

-- eliyahu
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: psxphill on October 20, 2015, 04:16:55 PM
Quote from: eliyahu;797727
@psxphill

really?! could you point me to where the tabor price has been released? perhaps you should actually find out the price before making accusations about how 'astonishing' it is how they can 'justify' it. it might save you some embarassment later. ;)

-- eliyahu


Ok, so I've assumed that the price is going to be in the range here.

http://www.amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2015-10-00027-EN.html

If instead they sell it for around 400 euros instead then yes I would have to apologise.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: eliyahu on October 20, 2015, 04:17:43 PM
@psxphill

the price quoted there is incorrect. it will be lower. and given that you seem to think that tabor will be more expensive than the reference board you linked to -- which is priced at GBP482.60 -- i think you'll need to apologize if it's lower than that, not EUR400.

by the way, i'm not trying to pick on you. i'm just pointing out that there's tons of conjecture out there, much of it based on incorrect information. :)

-- eliyahu
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: psxphill on October 20, 2015, 04:22:41 PM
Quote from: eliyahu;797731
@psxphill

the price quoted there is incorrect. it will be lower. :)

Don't you think that it's pretty stupid that they haven't made an official announcement about it then? Not that this choice of CPU is particularly suitable for AmigaOS even if it is cheaper. A board with a P204x that has double the clock speed and double the number of cores wouldn't be four times the price, it shouldn't even double the price.

Quote from: itix;797681
For fun. I am not a slave.

You get fun from releasing software that people would like to run but can't because they don't have an FPU, even though your software doesn't really require a FPU? That is twisted.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: eliyahu on October 20, 2015, 04:34:54 PM
Quote from: psxphill;797732
Don't you think that it's pretty stupid that they haven't made an official announcement about it then? Not that this choice of CPU is particularly suitable for AmigaOS even if it is cheaper. A board with a P204x that has double the clock speed and double the number of cores wouldn't be four times the price, it shouldn't even double the price.
no, i don't. it's not for sale yet. i would expect an announcement  when they're ready to make one. i do, however, think it's rather  shortsighted to draw conclusions from conjecture and rumor. even trevor has had to come out to clarify (http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=40622&forum=2&start=300&viewmode=flat&order=0#770615) the numbers being passed around were incorrect.

as for it being unsuitable, apparently A-EON disagree, and i suspect they know their market pretty well. if they're going for higher volume than in the past -- and they are, producing at least 1000 boards -- and lower cost than in the past -- and they are -- then it might well have made sense. again, perhaps you should wait a little and see what the finished product is before passing judgement?

-- eliyahu
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: psxphill on October 20, 2015, 04:58:59 PM
Quote from: eliyahu;797735
again, perhaps you should wait a little and see what the finished product is before passing judgement?

I'll take it for what it is then, a vague vapourware announcement.

As hyperion have admitted that AmigaOS isn't actually working on it yet, then no I don't think A-EON have any idea whether it's suitable. Trevor is an evangelist, not an engineer.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Yasu on October 20, 2015, 04:59:53 PM
According to the AmigaOS 4 developer "Cyborg", lack of FPU is a problem, they will fix it with emulation, it will be slow but they have a plan to eventually speed it up a lot with a JIT emulation. Sounds sensible. Maybe we can stop arguing now?
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: aperez on October 20, 2015, 05:00:53 PM
Quote from: psxphill;797634

The e200mc (used in the P204x and later) is just missing two instructions from the PowerPC FPU.


This is factually incorrect, though it may be a typo. P2040/P2041 is e500mc based.l

Quote from: psxphill;797634

We could all just buy http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/P2041RDB-PC/P2041RDB-PC-ND/4234547 http://www.farnell.com/datasheets/1854648.pdf which is likely going to be cheaper than the slower A1222


No, you couldn't, because it's no longer manufactured. See the Freescale page for it. Freescale has legitimate business reasons for only making a finite number of reference development boards. The distributors may have small quantities of stock, but they rarely stock more than one or two, and once they're gone, they're gone for good.

Regardless, this is a thread about Tabor, not about what you think Tabor should have been. If you want to discuss other Freescale parts, start a thread about it, or better yet, don't :)
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: eliyahu on October 20, 2015, 05:04:40 PM
Quote from: psxphill;797738
I'll take it for what it is then, a vague vapourware announcement.

As hyperion have admitted that AmigaOS isn't actually working on it yet, then no I don't think A-EON have any idea whether it's suitable. Trevor is an evangelist, not an engineer.
i see. you know better. i guess that clears that up, then. :lol:

-- eliyahu
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: number6 on October 20, 2015, 05:06:56 PM
Quote from: aperez;797740
This is factually incorrect, though it may be a typo. P2040/P2041 is e500mc based.l



No, you couldn't, because it's no longer manufactured. See the Freescale page for it. Freescale has legitimate business reasons for only making a finite number of reference development boards. The distributors may have small quantities of stock, but they rarely stock more than one or two, and once they're gone, they're gone for good.

Regardless, this is a thread about Tabor, not about what you think Tabor should have been. If you want to discuss other Freescale parts, start a thread about it, or better yet, don't :)


Too late:
Alternatives to Tabor (from New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor") (http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=69945)

#6
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: aperez on October 20, 2015, 05:10:55 PM
Quote from: matthey;797666
Maybe we need a poll. Which of the following choices best applies to the P1022 PPC CPU choice without a compatible PPC FPU for the Tabor motherboard?

1) poor decision
2) bad decision
3) desperation


Listen, trollmaster...statements such as this do not contribute anything of value to this discussion. Give it a rest. Don't you have something more constructive you could be doing?

Quote from: matthey;797666

30% faster integer performance will make some applications feel snappier while others with heavy floating point use (like Blender) will likely run at a fraction of the speed of a PPC with standard FPU. It's kind of like hiring a motivated worker who is missing one arm. He may be a little faster than average at some jobs but is going to have major trouble doing some work.


I'd like to steer this conversation back towards reality for a moment... If someone buys a dual-core PPC32 machine and expects to be running Blender on it, well, that's just crazy. This isn't a machine for that. The recommended hardware for Blender at the moment is a 64-bit, quad-core CPU with 8GB RAM. This is not the type of hardware you would EVER seriously consider running Blender on.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: psxphill on October 20, 2015, 05:22:06 PM
Quote from: eliyahu;797741
i see. you know better. i guess that clears that up, then. :lol:

Anybody without a vested interest knows better. I would let Trevor off because it will have been over sold to him.

They don't know anything about how well it will work, because it's not actually working. Making everything they say a guess, their guess is financially influenced and therefore should be taken with a huge pinch of salt.

Hyperion have never been very good with guesses anyway.

Quote from: aperez;797740
Regardless, this is a thread about Tabor, not about what you think Tabor should have been. If you want to discuss other Freescale parts, start a thread about it, or better yet, don't :)

What I said is relevant to Tabor as it is showing how much of a bad idea it is, but enjoy the car crash.... *grabs popcorn*
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: nicholas on October 20, 2015, 05:54:46 PM
Quote from: aperez;797744
Listen, trollmaster...statements such as this do not contribute anything of value to this discussion. Give it a rest. Don't you have something more constructive you could be doing?



I'd like to steer this conversation back towards reality for a moment... If someone buys a dual-core PPC32 machine and expects to be running Blender on it, well, that's just crazy. This isn't a machine for that. The recommended hardware for Blender at the moment is a 64-bit, quad-core CPU with 8GB RAM. This is not the type of hardware you would EVER seriously consider running Blender on.

Yet many masochists *do* choose to run it on AmigaONE branded hardware. ;-)
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 20, 2015, 06:21:44 PM
Quote from: nicholas;797749
Yet many masochists *do* choose to run it on AmigaONE branded hardware. ;-)

Nicholas, I am a PPC fanatic, but even if I get a chance to buy an X5000/040 next year, I won't be running something like Blender on it (even if it is quad core, that feature isn't supported by NG OS' yet).

I have X64 hardware that is cheaper and more powerful set up specifically for that.
Frankly, I wasn't even aware that there was a PPC NG port.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: nicholas on October 20, 2015, 08:16:23 PM
Quote from: Iggy;797752
Nicholas, I am a PPC fanatic, but even if I get a chance to buy an X5000/040 next year, I won't be running something like Blender on it (even if it is quad core, that feature isn't supported by NG OS' yet).

I have X64 hardware that is cheaper and more powerful set up specifically for that.
Frankly, I wasn't even aware that there was a PPC NG port.


It might run under Linux ok on an x5000, though lack of SIMD might cripple it.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: matthey on October 20, 2015, 08:23:30 PM
Quote from: itix;797705
It doesnt really matter when my PPC is still much faster at executing code (68k or PPC) than a real 68060.

Even an affordable FPGA 68k CPU core can be faster at executing integer code than a 68060. It just shows how old the 68060 design and fab process is. The most modern PPC processors blow away the original Pentium processor but we know the PPC vs x86 situation today.

Quote from: itix;797705
With 68k code you dont save tens of MBs. You could port the latest OWB to 68k and it still would not run well with 128 MB. 68060 is still too slow to run the latest webkit engine, 128 MB is still too little to run the latest webkit engine.

With smaller memory then less memory is saved. I would add 1GB-2GB to a 68k standalone board as it is relatively cheap. The AmigaOS (mostly code) overhead must be counted in determining free memory for applications and this is substantially higher for the PPC as I have shown.

Quote from: itix;797705
But the small footprint is just due to lack of features. Lack of Unicode support, no built-in USB stack, rudimentary GUI toolkit (unless you install MUI but then it is not small footprint anymore), lack of text antialiasing and truetype font support, simple 4 colour icons (versus true color PNG icons) i.e. it is stuck in 90s.

The AmigaOS uses shared libraries which can be dynamically loaded and flushed as needed. The AmigaOS allows many settings (preferences) which can reduce memory use. I use a 800x600x16 RTG Workbench with AmigaOS 3.9, use PFS with lots of partitions and buffers, use Peter K's icon.library which allows planar, Glow, PNG and AmigaOS 4 style icons, have a system friendly truetype engine, use MUI and ReAction GUIs, etc. but only a few MB of memory are taken at boot and I can use most of the features above together in 16-32MB of memory.

Quote from: itix;797705
I dont see point in new super 68k but I get your idea. The PPC is obviously stuck in year 2005 forever.

A new clean 64 bit 68k like big endian CISC ISA could allow easier Amiga 68k and PPC migration while improving processor efficiency. The x86_64 ISA and processors would probably be close enough for migrating to if big endian was supported. ARMv8 is similar to PPC and bi-endian but the hardware is usually customized for customers which license and control their synthesizable FPGA code in a similar way as I have proposed for the Amiga but with a processor team developing CPU cores (instead of paying license fees to ARM). There are many advantages to this route as I have pointed out but it requires investment and quantity production.

Quote from: broadblues;797711
Not sure where you get your 60 MB number from but:

3.1 plain backdrop 4 colour icons. 24 pixels square icons, really small HD at most with few disk buffers and no caching

4.1 full colour backdrop 32bit icons 64 bit square, potentially teratbytes of HD space, many more disk buffers per partition, other caching (SFS has write through caching I think FFS2 has cache hooks that may be enabled) etc etc.

For the AmigaOS 4.0 "at least 64 MB RAM" requirement, my reference was:

http://www.vesalia.de/e_amigaos4.htm

Most later versions of AmigaOS 4.x are for specific hardware and do not list a minimum memory requirement. Your comparison compares a minimal AmigaOS 3.1 setup to a well equipped AmigaOS 4.1 setup. The minimum requirement mentions "200MB free hard disk space" so disk buffers aren't going to be outrageous. Can AmigaOS 4.x use 8 bit gfx without a backdrop at least? What happened to the advantages of a scalable AmigaOS with a small footprint?

Quote from: Yasu;797739
According to the AmigaOS 4 developer "Cyborg", lack of FPU is a problem, they will fix it with emulation, it will be slow but they have a plan to eventually speed it up a lot with a JIT emulation. Sounds sensible. Maybe we can stop arguing now?

Emulation (and especially JIT) of FPU instructions instead of trapping should substantially improve floating point performance but it is a complex solution prone to errors. How much development time is going to be wasted by using a non-standard FPU? How much processing power and memory usage will JIT take for a low end motherboard? Limited Amiga software development would benefit from standardized and reduced hardware options but we seem to be headed in the other direction.

Quote from: aperez;797744
Listen, trollmaster...statements such as this do not contribute anything of value to this discussion. Give it a rest. Don't you have something more constructive you could be doing?

I could do some constructive Amiga work but the Amiga situation takes away my motivation.

Quote from: aperez;797744
I'd like to steer this conversation back towards reality for a moment... If someone buys a dual-core PPC32 machine and expects to be running Blender on it, well, that's just crazy. This isn't a machine for that. The recommended hardware for Blender at the moment is a 64-bit, quad-core CPU with 8GB RAM. This is not the type of hardware you would EVER seriously consider running Blender on.

Let's get back to reality then and remember that AmigaOS 4 only supports one CPU core and can't take advantage of 64 bit addressing without breaking Amiga compatibility. I guess you should tell Andy to forget his AmigaOS port of Blender then.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 20, 2015, 08:36:44 PM
Quote from: itix;797692
In modern computing code density and code size have very little to do with memory requirements. PPC code requires 50% more space (versus 68k code) but we are still talking few hundred kilobytes.

It is the data that counts.

True, for instance we take 16 , 24, and 32 bit color for granted, but the amount of storage needed to support these modes is vastly larger than a 4, 16, or even 256 color mode.

As we support greater features, the size of the data needed to be handled has also grown, but in some areas its almost a geometric growth.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 20, 2015, 08:46:25 PM
Quote from: matthey;797760
I could do some constructive Amiga work but the Amiga situation takes away my motivation.


If you are not up to challenges presented by hardware or software limitations, then you probably shouldn't code at all.

There have always been difficulties to overcome in writing code.

And advocating an FPGA 68K while dismissing a PPC (in comparison to an X64 cpu) is silly.
No FPGA project available or in development comes close to a PPC's level of performance.

And at comparable clock speeds, X64 does not have that great an advantage over PPCs.

Then again, I am off enough to wish that MIPS had continued to receive as much support as the PPC (or better yet, ARM).

RISC still offers advantages over CISC, and at their core many CISC cpus use RISC architecture.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: jj on October 20, 2015, 09:00:44 PM
Pretty sure there is a morphos port of blender and has been for some time. I did I dream that
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: eliyahu on October 20, 2015, 09:02:31 PM
@JJ

nope. i've used it as well as andy's port for AOS4. :)

-- eliyahu
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 20, 2015, 09:10:25 PM
Quote from: eliyahu;797769
@JJ

nope. i've used it as well as andy's port for AOS4. :)

-- eliyahu

Wow, and I built X64 hardware just to run that.

Then again, a single core PPC system, compared to the recommended hardware specs?
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: eliyahu on October 20, 2015, 09:19:21 PM
Quote from: Iggy;797773
Wow, and I built X64 hardware just to run that.

Then again, a single core PPC system, compared to the recommended hardware specs?
i didn't say either of them were terribly fast.

:laughing:

seriously though -- the whole point of running blender for me was to do some video editing, actually. i had a bunch of clips on my peg2 and i wanted to throw something together. this way i could do it on an amiga. not the smartest way certainly, but very geeky. sort of one of those 'because i can' things. :)

-- eliyahu
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 20, 2015, 09:37:48 PM
Quote from: eliyahu;797774
...this way i could do it on an amiga. not the smartest way certainly, but very geeky. sort of one of those 'because i can' things. :)

-- eliyahu

I DO get that.
And even on an X64, Blender still has a few issues.
I wish it supported video cards that are common to CAD design.
Quadro cards, if they were fully supported, would be a nice option.

Even a low end K600 does some amazing things when its fully supported, and a K2000 is outstanding in CAD software.

BTW - Where can I find the MorphOS port of Blender?
It makes sense to install it, after all I already have it on a couple (but not all) of my X64 computers.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: eliyahu on October 20, 2015, 10:06:56 PM
Quote from: Iggy;797776
BTW - Where can I find the MorphOS port of Blender?
It makes sense to install it, after all I already have it on a couple (but not all) of my X64 computers.
you can grab it here (http://yellowblue.free.fr/yiki/doku.php/en:dev:blender:start). you'll also want to grab the latest release of python (http://yellowblue.free.fr/yiki/doku.php/en:dev:python:rel3x:start) for MOS while you're at it.

-- eliyahu
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 20, 2015, 10:20:09 PM
Quote from: eliyahu;797777
you can grab it here (http://yellowblue.free.fr/yiki/doku.php/en:dev:blender:start). you'll also want to grab the latest release of python (http://yellowblue.free.fr/yiki/doku.php/en:dev:python:rel3x:start) for MOS while you're at it.

-- eliyahu

That link appears broken as it only takes you to Yomgui's primary web page.
Any idea how to find the actual software?
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: eliyahu on October 20, 2015, 10:30:13 PM
@Iggy

whoops. try morph-files (http://www.morphos-files.net/download/Blender) instead. :o

-- eliyahu
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: broadblues on October 20, 2015, 10:44:14 PM
Quote from: nicholas;797749
Yet many masochists *do* choose to run it on AmigaONE branded hardware. ;-)


I run it on a SAM-Flex 440 733MHz, works okay. I mean it's not going to knock out the likes of Sintel or Tears of Steel, but it's okay for small projects and editing music videos.

I admit if I'm in a hurry I use my loonix laptop with a more recent version of blender, but I like using it on the SAM.  But my loonix laptop stil falls far short of those specs posted above!


It also works on the x1k but I don;t have a Warp3D capable gfx card and so WaZp3D is a bit sloe and glitchy.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 20, 2015, 10:44:28 PM
Quote from: eliyahu;797781
@Iggy

whoops. try morph-files (http://www.morphos-files.net/download/Blender) instead. :o

-- eliyahu

VERY cool!
Thanks.

BTW - I just noticed you were in the US, and on the East coast.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: nicholas on October 21, 2015, 08:47:41 AM
Quote from: broadblues;797783
I run it on a SAM-Flex 440 733MHz, works okay. I mean it's not going to knock out the likes of Sintel or Tears of Steel, but it's okay for small projects and editing music videos.

I admit if I'm in a hurry I use my loonix laptop with a more recent version of blender, but I like using it on the SAM.  But my loonix laptop stil falls far short of those specs posted above!


It also works on the x1k but I don;t have a Warp3D capable gfx card and so WaZp3D is a bit sloe and glitchy.

Doing stuff it's not ideally suited for is all part of the joy of using old and quirky hardware. :)
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Spectre660 on October 21, 2015, 03:58:29 PM
Interesting paper of floating point emulation.
http://www.ll.mit.edu/HPEC/agendas/proc08/Day1/11-Day1-PosterDemoA-Spetka-abstract.pdf
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: matthey on October 21, 2015, 05:35:14 PM
Quote from: Spectre660;797827
Interesting paper of floating point emulation.
http://www.ll.mit.edu/HPEC/agendas/proc08/Day1/11-Day1-PosterDemoA-Spetka-abstract.pdf


That is the same article I linked to in post #91 of this thread. I'm pleased that someone read it and found it "interesting". The 3D bar graph shows that the fully trapped FPU instructions (FastFPE and NWFPE) take at least twice as long to execute on average as compiling with software FP which is considered slow compared to hardware FP. It looks like there is not much difference on the bar graph for basic FP calculations but this is probably due to lack of resolution for smaller measurements. Complex FP instructions (in hardware or software emulation) usually use FP (often polynomial approximation) equations using basic FP math (FADD, FSUB, FMUL, FDIV, FABS, FSQRT, FINT, etc.) so the complex instructions are composites of many simple calculations but without using traps. Programs using heavy FP calculations would use traps more frequently so they would have more overhead than the complex FP instructions but using the complex FP instructions would reduce this additional overhead :).
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Spectre660 on October 21, 2015, 06:17:51 PM
So the end results are based on the actual method used.

Quote from: matthey;797830
That is the same article I linked to in post #91 of this thread. I'm pleased that someone read it and found it "interesting". The 3D bar graph shows that the fully trapped FPU instructions (FastFPE and NWFPE) take at least twice as long to execute on average as compiling with software FP which is considered slow compared to hardware FP. It looks like there is not much difference on the bar graph for basic FP calculations but this is probably due to lack of resolution for smaller measurements. Complex FP instructions (in hardware or software emulation) usually use FP (often polynomial approximation) equations using basic FP math (FADD, FSUB, FMUL, FDIV, FABS, FSQRT, FINT, etc.) so the complex instructions are composites of many simple calculations but without using traps. Programs using heavy FP calculations would use traps more frequently so they would have more overhead than the complex FP instructions but using the complex FP instructions would reduce this additional overhead :).
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: matthey on October 21, 2015, 07:10:58 PM
Quote from: Spectre660;797831
So the end results are based on the actual method used.


Yes, depending on restrictions and requirements of the method used. IEEE compatibility and similar accuracy and behavior as the standard PPC FPU are requirements for emulating or trapping the PPC FPU without problems. There are many ways to get floating point support with the P1022 CPU with widely varying performance.

1) Best: Recompiling software to use the P1022 GPR FPU should give good FP performance but the executable will only work on the Tabor board. This is hardware FP.
2) Good: Recompiling software to use software floating point should give fair FP performance and should work on standard PPC hardware with or without an FPU. This is software FP usually using a floating point library provided by the compiler.
3) Poor: Emulation or JIT emulation of the standard PPC FPU gives fair performance without recompiling but with much development time, overhead and resources used for the emulation and possibly bugs or problems due to the complexity. The results of this method were not shown in the article you linked.
4) Bad: Trapping all the standard PPC FPU instructions and emulation of the standard FPU has major overhead for each trapped instruction but recompiling is not needed and it is simpler than (JIT) emulation. The results of this method would be the FastFPE and NWFPE method in the article you linked.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 21, 2015, 08:30:25 PM
Quote from: matthey;797835
... Bad: Trapping all the standard PPC FPU instructions and emulation of the standard FPU has major overhead for each trapped instruction but recompiling is not needed...
-
Uh oh.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Spectre660 on October 21, 2015, 10:01:38 PM
Just tested - Its fast enough to play back an MP3 ok.
:)
Quote from: Iggy;797853
-
Uh oh.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: duga on October 21, 2015, 10:02:57 PM
Quote from: Spectre660;797857
Just tested - Its fast enough to play back an MP3 ok.
:)


And 720p@Youtube?
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Spectre660 on October 21, 2015, 10:10:25 PM
With Linux Mplayer SPE binary yes.
regular Linux Mplayer video not working with emulation under powerpc32 .

Quote from: duga;797858
And 720p@Youtube?
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 21, 2015, 10:29:39 PM
Quote from: Spectre660;797859
With Linux Mplayer SPE binary yes.
regular Linux Mplayer video not working with emulation under powerpc32 .

OK, its a start.
Maybe Hyperion needs your input as recompilation seems to be the best course with this cpu.
Recompiling what can be, and resorting to trapping/emulation as only a secondary method for execution.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: nicholas on October 21, 2015, 10:44:20 PM
Quote from: Iggy;797860
OK, its a start.
Maybe Hyperion needs your input as recompilation seems to be the best course with this cpu.
Recompiling what can be, and resorting to trapping/emulation as only a secondary method for execution.


Perhaps having the entire OS as shipped by Hyperion recompiled specifically for this CPU and then just having trapping for third party binaries that the end user installs might be a good compromise?

Plus third party devs can always ship two binaries with their future releases as was the case with 040/060 specific builds in the past.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: matthey on October 21, 2015, 11:27:57 PM
Quote from: nicholas;797861
Perhaps having the entire OS as shipped by Hyperion recompiled specifically for this CPU and then just having trapping for third party binaries that the end user installs might be a good compromise?

Most of the AmigaOS does not need floating point so only a few modules need to be recompiled. A modified version of AmigaOS is already needed for standard PPC FPU trap support and emulation. This is not a problem.

Quote from: nicholas;797861
Plus third party devs can always ship two binaries with their future releases as was the case with 040/060 specific builds in the past.

Right. It's more work and time for developers but this is the best option when there is so much difference in floating point performance between full trapping and recompiling. The partial FPU trapping of the 68040 or 68060 for 6888x instructions usually provides better performance than the 6888x and usually with less than a 20% performance loss compared to recompiling for the 68040 or 68060 FPU.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: EvilGuy on October 21, 2015, 11:54:39 PM
Quote from: Iggy;797766
If you are not up to challenges presented by hardware or software limitations, then you probably shouldn't code at all.


The challenges with developing for the Amiga aren't hardware or software related..
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: nicholas on October 22, 2015, 09:14:15 AM
Quote from: matthey;797863
Most of the AmigaOS does not need floating point so only a few modules need to be recompiled. A modified version of AmigaOS is already needed for standard PPC FPU trap support and emulation. This is not a problem.



Right. It's more work and time for developers but this is the best option when there is so much difference in floating point performance between full trapping and recompiling. The partial FPU trapping of the 68040 or 68060 for 6888x instructions usually provides better performance than the 6888x and usually with less than a 20% performance loss compared to recompiling for the 68040 or 68060 FPU.

Sounds like this would be the least worst way forward then. IIRC something similar is already in place for the X1000 boards because of missing/modified CPU instructions and the same for G5 specific builds on MorphOS. (Recompiled CPU specific builds that is, not trapping.)
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 23, 2015, 08:04:28 PM
Quote from: EvilGuy;797864
The challenges with developing for the Amiga aren't hardware or software related..

No, you are right, the primary challenge is the limited/small market.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: kolla on October 23, 2015, 11:14:55 PM
What prevents binaries from asking the OS about the abilities of the hardware, and run code accordingly? I mean, other operating systems manage to have "fat" binaries that contain entirely different architectures, but on Amiga it is not even possible to have one binary for variations within one architecture.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: QuikSanz on October 23, 2015, 11:46:07 PM
Quote from: kolla;797982
What prevents binaries from asking the OS about the abilities of the hardware, and run code accordingly? I mean, other operating systems manage to have "fat" binaries that contain entirely different architectures, but on Amiga it is not even possible to have one binary for variations within one architecture.


Question of the day! Why not query the system?

Chris
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Hans_ on October 24, 2015, 12:49:58 AM
Quote from: kolla;797982
What prevents binaries from asking the OS about the abilities of the hardware, and run code accordingly? I mean, other operating systems manage to have "fat" binaries that contain entirely different architectures, but on Amiga it is not even possible to have one binary for variations within one architecture.


This is already done in various programs for altivec/non-altivec code. The W3D_SI driver, for example, will use altivec on hardware that has it, and non-altivec code on machines that don't. The graphics library goes one step further and has copy routines that are optimized for specific processors (incl. using DMA on certain platforms). IIRC, MiniGL has a few altivec routines as well.

The examples above are a bit different from simply having a fat binary with completely different compiles sitting there side-by-side. Instead, the developer himself/herself compiles different versions of just the parts that matter. I personally prefer that approach, as the sections of a program that actually benefit from altivec/SPE/whatever is usually limited.

Hans
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: EvilGuy on October 24, 2015, 09:04:42 AM
Quote from: Iggy;797974
No, you are right, the primary challenge is the limited/small market.


Yeah, yeah, definitely that too. Small ponds, big fish and all that as well.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: kolla on October 24, 2015, 11:01:42 AM
Quote from: Hans_;797990
This is already done in various programs for altivec/non-altivec code. The W3D_SI driver, for example, will use altivec on hardware that has it, and non-altivec code on machines that don't. The graphics library goes one step further and has copy routines that are optimized for specific processors (incl. using DMA on certain platforms). IIRC, MiniGL has a few altivec routines as well.


Good, that is how it should be.

Quote
The examples above are a bit different from simply having a fat binary with completely different compiles sitting there side-by-side. Instead, the developer himself/herself compiles different versions of just the parts that matter. I personally prefer that approach, as the sections of a program that actually benefit from altivec/SPE/whatever is usually limited.


Which is really what I meant, it should not be such a big deal, not like OS4 has this vast portfolio of abandoned native software anyhow.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: LiveForIt on October 24, 2015, 12:33:29 PM
Quote from: matthey;797863
Most of the AmigaOS does not need floating point so only a few modules need to be recompiled. A modified version of AmigaOS is already needed for standard PPC FPU trap support and emulation. This is not a problem.



Right. It's more work and time for developers but this is the best option when there is so much difference in floating point performance between full trapping and recompiling. The partial FPU trapping of the 68040 or 68060 for 6888x instructions usually provides better performance than the 6888x and usually with less than a 20% performance loss compared to recompiling for the 68040 or 68060 FPU.


Most of OS does not use FLOAT, but most of the programs that run on the OS that play sound and video use float, and most of this are ported from Linux, compiled with static linking.

I tell you right now, I'm not going to waste my time down grading software to support slow CPU's without FPU. Having to jump to math library, simple fmuls and fdivs, has overhead, jumps and branches have overhead, registers has to be put in stack, and restored, and return values has be set and so on, I think the math library idea from 90's was wacky idea to begin with. And is not a good direction to be going.

It's more likely be using more double floats in my programs, because its not good idea to mix and match int with float, because of overhead; a FPU while its integrated in CPU this days. Actually works as independent processor unit, there is no way to move a value from a CPU register into a FPU register without storing it on RAM, so makes more sense to write code for the FPU or write the code for CPU instructions. Do not do casting between float and int, or at least as little as possible.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Spectre660 on October 24, 2015, 01:48:05 PM
There can be large variations of results between program versions and OS's on the same "slow" cpus.
Examples from a Sam460ex below


==================================================================================

AmigaOS 4.1FE Livefor-it-Mplayer

10.AmigaOS 4.1:> mplayer -benchmark -nosound -ao null -vo null -lavdopts skiploopfilter=none big_buck_bunny_720p_surround.avi
LiveForIt-MPlayer-6.5.7 SVN-r37230-snapshot-1.1.1 (C) 2000-2014 MPlayer Team

BENCHMARKs: VC: 804.386s VO:   0.142s A:   0.000s Sys:  19.587s =  824.115s
BENCHMARK%: VC: 97.6061% VO:  0.0172% A:  0.0000% Sys:  2.3767% = 100.0000%

Exiting... (End of file)
================================================================================

AmigaOS 4.1FE MUI-Mplayer

4.AmigaOS 4.1:> mplayer -benchmark -nosound -ao null -vo null -lavdopts skiploopfilter=none big_buck_bunny_720p_surround.avi
MPlayer UNKNOWN-4.4.3 (C) 2000-2010 MPlayer Team


BENCHMARKs: VC: 620.417s VO:   0.104s A:   0.000s Sys:  19.714s =  640.236s
BENCHMARK%: VC: 96.9045% VO:  0.0163% A:  0.0000% Sys:  3.0792% = 100.0000%

Exiting... (End of file)
==================================================================================

Morphos 3.9 Mplayer

 mplayer -benchmark -nosound -ao null -vo null -lavdopts skiploopfilter=none big_buck_bunny_720p_surround.avi
MPlayer SVN-r37401 (C) 2000-2015 MPlayer Team

BENCHMARKs: VC: 680.264s VO:   0.070s A:   0.000s Sys:  37.769s =  718.103s
BENCHMARK%: VC: 94.7307% VO:  0.0097% A:  0.0000% Sys:  5.2595% = 100.0000%
Exiting... (End of file)
==================================================================================

Linux Ubuntu 15.10 Mplayer

julian@Sam460ex:~$ mplayer -benchmark -nosound -ao null -vo null -lavdopts skiploopfilter=none
'/home/julian/Documents/big_buck_bunny_720p_surround.avi'
MPlayer2 2.0-728-g2c378c7-4build1 (C) 2000-2012 MPlayer Team

BENCHMARKs: VC: 354.405s VO:  99.944s A:   0.000s Sys:  15.271s =  469.621s
BENCHMARK%: VC: 75.4663% VO: 21.2819% A:  0.0000% Sys:  3.2519% = 100.0000%

Exiting... (End of file)
==================================================================================

 
Quote from: LiveForIt;798023
Most of OS does not use FLOAT, but most of the programs that run on the OS that play sound and video use float, and most of this are ported from Linux, compiled with static linking.

I tell you right now, I'm not going to waste my time down grading software to support slow CPU's without FPU. Having to jump to math library, simple fmuls and fdivs, has overhead, jumps and branches have overhead, registers has to be put in stack, and restored, and return values has be set and so on, I think the math library idea from 90's was wacky idea to begin with. And is not a good direction to be going.

It's more likely be using more double floats in my programs, because its not good idea to mix and match int with float, because of overhead; a FPU while its integrated in CPU this days. Actually works as independent processor unit, there is no way to move a value from a CPU register into a FPU register without storing it on RAM, so makes more sense to write code for the FPU or write the code for CPU instructions. Do not do casting between float and int, or at least as little as possible.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 24, 2015, 02:54:35 PM
@Spectre660

So we now now that Linux would outperform Amiga NG solutions (and that MorphOS would outperform OS4).
That we all would have pretty much presumed, but they figure are interesting.

I wonder how a Linux hosted version of AROS would have compared.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Spectre660 on October 24, 2015, 04:16:02 PM
Some more intersting results.
Look at the MorphosOS results.

==================================================================================
AmigaOS 4.1 FE Live-For-it-Mplayer

11.AmigaOS 4.1:> mplayer -benchmark -nosound -ao null -vo null -lavdopts skiploopfilter=none
Prometheus-Trailer.mp4
LiveForIt-MPlayer-6.5.7 SVN-r37230-snapshot-1.1.1 (C) 2000-2014 MPlayer Team

BENCHMARKs: VC: 463.903s VO:   0.029s A:   0.000s Sys:   2.854s =  466.786s
BENCHMARK%: VC: 99.3823% VO:  0.0063% A:  0.0000% Sys:  0.6115% = 100.0000%

Exiting... (End of file)
==================================================================================

AmigaOS 4.1 FE  MUI-Mplayer

4.AmigaOS 4.1:> mplayer -benchmark -nosound -ao null -vo null -lavdopts skiploopfilter=none
Prometheus-Trailer.mp4
MPlayer UNKNOWN-4.4.3 (C) 2000-2010 MPlayer Team

BENCHMARKs: VC: 409.400s VO:   0.015s A:   0.000s Sys:   2.576s =  411.991s
BENCHMARK%: VC: 99.3711% VO:  0.0036% A:  0.0000% Sys:  0.6253% = 100.0000%

Exiting... (End of file)
==================================================================================

Morphos 3.9 Mplayer

MPlayer-1.1-svn-2015.05.21/MPlayer -benchmark -nosound -ao null -vo null -lavdopts skiploopfilter=none
Prometheus-Trailer.mp4
MPlayer SVN-r37401 (C) 2000-2015 MPlayer Team

BENCHMARKs: VC: 190.363s VO:   0.009s A:   0.000s Sys:   5.132s =  195.504s
BENCHMARK%: VC: 97.3703% VO:  0.0045% A:  0.0000% Sys:  2.6252% = 100.0000%

Exiting... (End of file)
==================================================================================

Linux Ubuntu 15.10

julian@Sam460ex:~$ mplayer -benchmark -nosound -ao null -vo null -lavdopts skiploopfilter=none
'/home/julian/Documents/Prometheus-Trailer.mp4'
MPlayer2 2.0-728-g2c378c7-4build1 (C) 2000-2012 MPlayer Team

BENCHMARKs: VC: 289.712s VO:  18.294s A:   0.000s Sys:   1.753s =  309.759s
BENCHMARK%: VC: 93.5281% VO:  5.9059% A:  0.0000% Sys:  0.5660% = 100.0000%

Exiting... (End of file)
==================================================================================
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 24, 2015, 06:06:40 PM
@Spectre660

Interesting.
What causes that much variance?
Is it the differing source files or the settings?
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: matthey on October 24, 2015, 06:43:40 PM
Quote from: LiveForIt;798023
Most of OS does not use FLOAT, but most of the programs that run on the OS that play sound and video use float, and most of this are ported from Linux, compiled with static linking.


The most popular free sound and video players are based on mplayer and ffmpeg. There are all integer codecs/plugins. The 68k mpega.library, Riva and MooVid show what fast integer codecs can do. My 68060@75MHz plays MP3s and MPEG videos (up to 640x480) without problems despite lacking 32x32=64 bit integer multiply in hardware and lacking fast DSP like instructions which accelerate integer codecs. I wouldn't be surprised if the Apollo core in FPGA is able to play 720p video using an integer codec.

Quote from: LiveForIt;798023

I tell you right now, I'm not going to waste my time down grading software to support slow CPU's without FPU. Having to jump to math library, simple fmuls and fdivs, has overhead, jumps and branches have overhead, registers has to be put in stack, and restored, and return values has be set and so on, I think the math library idea from 90's was wacky idea to begin with. And is not a good direction to be going.


I agree with what you are saying here. There are developers who will not want to mess with recompiling software for a non-standard CPU. Standard hardware allows for more optimal software without the need for fat binaries, patching and creating hardware specific codecs/plugins and/or recompiling for specific hardware. The amount of developer time wasted for multiple compiles, patching and debugging on non-standard hardware is often underestimated and especially deadly to a small market with limited development resources. Standard hardware floating point support using direct floating point instructions in the code is needed for competitive modern general purpose computing. Without this, the Amiga will fall further and further behind. Embedded PPC processors are already behind the curve and the situation is likely to get worse.

Quote from: LiveForIt;798023

It's more likely be using more double floats in my programs, because its not good idea to mix and match int with float, because of overhead; a FPU while its integrated in CPU this days. Actually works as independent processor unit, there is no way to move a value from a CPU register into a FPU register without storing it on RAM, so makes more sense to write code for the FPU or write the code for CPU instructions. Do not do casting between float and int, or at least as little as possible.


A superscalar CPU has independent units which work in parallel as you say. This makes it advantageous to work on mixed (integer, FPU, SIMD) instructions in the code as otherwise the unused units are idle. The compiler instruction scheduler will schedule these instructions to keep as many CPU units busy as possible even if integer and floating point parts of the source are separated. You are also correct that transferring data between CPU units can have significant overhead. Pipeline bubbles can be generated when transferring data between units using instructions or the DCache with longer pipelines giving longer stalls. Depending on the CPU design, these stalls may be avoided by not touching the transferred data for several cycles. The instruction scheduler may improve these situations also although the results can vary. In general, mixing float and integer is good but the programmer should try to reduce the number of float<->int conversions.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: dooz on October 25, 2015, 08:04:59 AM
I done some quick browsing and found this news on:

http://www.software4embedded.de/node/9844

Quote:
15.10.2012 | 14:27 Uhr
Freescale Semiconductor introduced  four new devices for their QorIQ T1 and T2 families of 64-bit processor  families. The new processors are the T1040, T1020, T1022, and T2081. The  new Freescale devices are built on Power Architecture technology. All  of the parts are pin-compatible. They are ideal for entry-level to  mid-range networking, printing and security device applications. Samples  of the T1040 device will be available in the third quarter of 2013. The  other T1 and T2 devices will follow soon after.

That  statement was really only annoucement. What really happened is that T  series, T1022 samples were probably available more close to the end of  2013. So far we learned that it takes minimum about 2.5 years to develop  hardware like Tabor, so Tabor was probably one years already in  development when T series could be "considered" for a product.

If  we look what was Freescale CPUs were available as a option 2.5 years  ago, the logical choice is.... suprise.... P1022 ;-) All other P10xx CPU  options doesnt offer anything new. So the first next option would be to  use P2041 which is based on e500mc core with normal FPU (P2040 doesnt  have gigabit ethernet). But.... those are quad core CPUs... not really  low end suitable solution for low-end Tabor. The same story is valid  also for P3041.

These are the prices for P and T processor from the Freescale web page (for 1000 units):

P1022: US$30.13
P2041: US$129.06 (1.2 GHz)
P2041: US$161.89 (1.5 GHz)
P3041: US$137.66 (1.2 GHz)
P3041: US$181.70 (1.5 GHz)
T1022: US$43.07 (1.2 GHz)
T1022: US$51.68 (1.4 GHz)

So  P20xx is too expensive for low-end, T10xx was not available. Who would  really stop one year development because new CPU is around the corner!?  And when you do that, maybe new thing will arrive so you really never  release the product.

Also why integrate 64-bit processor when  there is no 64-bit support in OS, also why integrate quad core processor  when there is no multicore support in OS. There is no space for unsued  things in low-end product.

P1022 is a snapshot of present moment  when we can have Tabor as it is right now. Otherwise we wouldn not have  this board at all. All other options are in future development.

Tabor  is a very-low-end and low-cost AmigaOS4 (I hope also MorphOS) PPC  configuration which is affordable for every Amigan to buy. It is also  very powerfull because its faster that SAM460, dramatically faster if  second core will be soon in use. This very-low-end is recognizable if  you study the board further (only one PCIe slot, mini-ITX format, P1022,  everything else i integrated). So if CPU is different then we would  probably start asking about many other aspects of the board (for  example...why only one PCIe slot...etc.)

At the end this board is low-end with I hope very acceptable price. Its not something in the middle way to X5000 range.

Well all that is only my opinion.....feel free to correct...

------
Domagoj Ozanic (domagoj.ozanic@zg.t-com.hr)
Amiga WARP Organization http://www.amigawarp.org
A1200T Blue Thunder Tower (BTT) - AmigaOS 4.1 FE
BlizzardPPC 200 MHz / BVisionPPC / 256 MB RAM
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: OlafS3 on October 25, 2015, 09:40:06 AM
Quote from: dooz;798079
I done some quick browsing and found this news on:

http://www.software4embedded.de/node/9844

Quote:
15.10.2012 | 14:27 Uhr
Freescale Semiconductor introduced  four new devices for their QorIQ T1 and T2 families of 64-bit processor  families. The new processors are the T1040, T1020, T1022, and T2081. The  new Freescale devices are built on Power Architecture technology. All  of the parts are pin-compatible. They are ideal for entry-level to  mid-range networking, printing and security device applications. Samples  of the T1040 device will be available in the third quarter of 2013. The  other T1 and T2 devices will follow soon after.

That  statement was really only annoucement. What really happened is that T  series, T1022 samples were probably available more close to the end of  2013. So far we learned that it takes minimum about 2.5 years to develop  hardware like Tabor, so Tabor was probably one years already in  development when T series could be "considered" for a product.

If  we look what was Freescale CPUs were available as a option 2.5 years  ago, the logical choice is.... suprise.... P1022 ;-) All other P10xx CPU  options doesnt offer anything new. So the first next option would be to  use P2041 which is based on e500mc core with normal FPU (P2040 doesnt  have gigabit ethernet). But.... those are quad core CPUs... not really  low end suitable solution for low-end Tabor. The same story is valid  also for P3041.

These are the prices for P and T processor from the Freescale web page (for 1000 units):

P1022: US$30.13
P2041: US$129.06 (1.2 GHz)
P2041: US$161.89 (1.5 GHz)
P3041: US$137.66 (1.2 GHz)
P3041: US$181.70 (1.5 GHz)
T1022: US$43.07 (1.2 GHz)
T1022: US$51.68 (1.4 GHz)

So  P20xx is too expensive for low-end, T10xx was not available. Who would  really stop one year development because new CPU is around the corner!?  And when you do that, maybe new thing will arrive so you really never  release the product.

Also why integrate 64-bit processor when  there is no 64-bit support in OS, also why integrate quad core processor  when there is no multicore support in OS. There is no space for unsued  things in low-end product.

P1022 is a snapshot of present moment  when we can have Tabor as it is right now. Otherwise we wouldn not have  this board at all. All other options are in future development.

Tabor  is a very-low-end and low-cost AmigaOS4 (I hope also MorphOS) PPC  configuration which is affordable for every Amigan to buy. It is also  very powerfull because its faster that SAM460, dramatically faster if  second core will be soon in use. This very-low-end is recognizable if  you study the board further (only one PCIe slot, mini-ITX format, P1022,  everything else i integrated). So if CPU is different then we would  probably start asking about many other aspects of the board (for  example...why only one PCIe slot...etc.)

At the end this board is low-end with I hope very acceptable price. Its not something in the middle way to X5000 range.

Well all that is only my opinion.....feel free to correct...

------
Domagoj Ozanic (domagoj.ozanic@zg.t-com.hr)
Amiga WARP Organization http://www.amigawarp.org
A1200T Blue Thunder Tower (BTT) - AmigaOS 4.1 FE
BlizzardPPC 200 MHz / BVisionPPC / 256 MB RAM

Dramatically faster SOON with second core in use? :angry:

you have looked in your glass ball or wishful thinking?
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: LiveForIt on October 25, 2015, 09:57:58 AM
@Spectre660

The version of avcodec library that is in LiveForIt-Mplayer was picked to support newer video codecs. Older avcodec library's are faster, but do not play newer video formats. I can go back to older avcodec library, but then complain about new video formats not working, there for I see no point in doing anything about.

We need hardware accelerated video decoding, this is the direction avcodec is going, it get harder and harder to compile stuff, if you do not have hardware acceleration decoding.

As I learned, MorphOS version was compiled without pthreads support, and it also has slightly different avcodec library.

The Linux version can gains speed by using UVD & VDPAU, you are not using it clearly.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: LiveForIt on October 25, 2015, 10:07:16 AM
@matthey

Sure you can reserve a few gate array's for DCT, Deblocking and color space conversion, accelerate speed on FPGA. However I do not think you, be able to play H264 video buy just simulating normal CPU instructions. But FPGA's are pretty expensive, how many gate will you need to do that on FPGA, and will it cost you more than buying a ASIC from Broadcom, VIA or Intel.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: dooz on October 25, 2015, 10:11:58 AM
Quote from: OlafS3;798082
Dramatically faster SOON with second core in use? :angry:

you have looked in your glass ball or wishful thinking?

.....dramatically faster if second core will be soon in use.....

I wrote *IF* as a keyword here, and that is completely different meaning.

But anyway, without multicore support all this hardware is not used 100% and that is the main disadvantage of every new product.

SPE and non-standard FPU in P1022 is not that important IMHO. At least there is some kind of FPU that we can use somehow.

No multicore support should be our primary concern both with A1222 and X5000.

------
Domagoj Ozanic (domagoj.ozanic@zg.t-com.hr)
Amiga WARP Organization http://www.amigawarp.org
A1200T Blue Thunder Tower (BTT) - AmigaOS 4.1 FE
BlizzardPPC 200 MHz / BVisionPPC / 256 MB RAM
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Spectre660 on October 25, 2015, 10:43:58 AM
The bechmark is just supposed to test CPU and bus speed.
Of the 3 OS's OS 4.1 currently is the only one that works with any GPU acceleration. GPU Acceleration dos not work in Linux on the Sam.
But the actual playback under OS 4.1 is degraded because of the slower decoding.
UVD & VDPAU do work well on the Tabor.

Quote from: LiveForIt;798085
@Spectre660

The version of avcodec library that is in LiveForIt-Mplayer was picked to support newer video codecs. Older avcodec library's are faster, but do not play newer video formats. I can go back to older avcodec library, but then complain about new video formats not working, there for I see no point in doing anything about.

We need hardware accelerated video decoding, this is the direction avcodec is going, it get harder and harder to compile stuff, if you do not have hardware acceleration decoding.

As I learned, MorphOS version was compiled without pthreads support, and it also has slightly different avcodec library.

The Linux version can gains speed by using UVD & VDPAU, you are not using it clearly.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: LiveForIt on October 25, 2015, 11:02:30 AM
Quote
The benchmark is just supposed to test CPU and bus speed.

This is what your testing really testing.
Avcodec the version mplayer was compiled with there is big difference between etch version.
newlib or clib depending on how mplayer was compiled.
OS API that newlib or clib depends on.
OS API that mplayer depends on.
The hardware you're running on.
The other programs that runs in background and stealing CPU cycles.

While you have the same code, you compile it; it can end up doing something completely different on different OS.

To make any sense, of anything need to unit test the smallest of things, to find the bottlenecks.

If you have the same code running on two different OS's, and one case the code is slower, and the other is faster, then it's not the CPU or bus speed that is course of it, how the OS and library's was compiled and what has been optimized and what has not.

If what you're testing is not 100% the same you never know way it is slower or faster.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: wawrzon on October 25, 2015, 11:03:11 AM
Quote from: dooz;798087
.....dramatically faster if second core will be soon in use.....

I wrote *IF* as a keyword here, and that is completely different meaning.



in other words usual case of someone entering discussion to post his dreams and visions.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Spectre660 on October 25, 2015, 11:25:27 AM
Anyway we now know that this bechmark as used to compare the
X1000 runing AmigaOS 4.1 to G4 Mac's runing MorphOS is not giving a balanced comparison. :)

http://www.amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2012-02-00011-EN.html
http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=37054&forum=45&88

Quote from: LiveForIt;798092
This is what your testing really testing.
Avcodec the version mplayer was compiled with there is big difference between etch version.
newlib or clib depending on how mplayer was compiled.
OS API that newlib or clib depends on.
OS API that mplayer depends on.
The hardware you're running on.
The other programs that runs in background and stealing CPU cycles.

While you have the same code, you compile it; it can end up doing something completely different on different OS.

To make any sense, of anything need to unit test the smallest of things, to find the bottlenecks.

If you have the same code running on two different OS's, and one case the code is slower, and the other is faster, then it's not the CPU or bus speed that is course of it, how the OS and library's was compiled and what has been optimized and what has not.

If what you're testing is not 100% the same you never know way it is slower or faster.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: LiveForIt on October 25, 2015, 11:40:10 AM
Quote
Anyway we now know that this bechmark as used to compare the
X1000 runing AmigaOS 4.1 to G4 Mac's runing MorphOS is not giving a balanced comparison.


That's not what I'm saying, your complain to me about speed, I just gave you the answer to way it might be the case.

MorphOS Mplayer uses a older avcodec lib, its compiled without pthreads.
MUI Mplayer OS4 is also using a older version of avcodec, (don't know they are the same, should be).

The difference between MPlayer on MorphOS and MUI MPlayer on OS4, if using the same avcodec lib, depends on OS and newlib / clib stuff, that it runs on. And the fact that Mplayer on MorphsOS was its compiled without pthreads.

And you running that candy thing in the background while benchmarking you're going to screw up all tests.

I repeat again, if you won't to find bottlenecks to help out developers improve anything, the only thing that going to help is benchmark every tiny thing, individually. As isolated cases.

If you change too many factors, you cannot make sense of the results.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Spectre660 on October 25, 2015, 11:43:57 AM
What candy thing am I running ?

Quote from: LiveForIt;798097
That's not what I'm saying, your complain to me about speed, I just gave you the answer to way it might be the case.

MorphOS Mplayer uses a older avcodec lib, its compiled without pthreads.
MUI Mplayer OS4 is also using a older version with avcodec I think.

The difference between MPlayer on MorphOS and MUI MPlayer on OS4, if using the same avcodec lib, depends on OS and newlib / clib stuff, that it runs on. And the fact that Mplayer on MorphsOS was its compiled without pthreads.

And you running that candy thing in the background while benchmarking you're going to screw up all tests.

I repeat again, if you won't to find bottlenecks to help out developers improve anything, the only thing that going to help is benchmark every tiny thing, individually. As isolated cased.

If you change too many factors, you cannot make sense of the results.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 25, 2015, 02:29:12 PM
Quote from: dooz;798079
...why integrate 64-bit processor when  there is no 64-bit support in OS, also why integrate quad core processor  when there is no multicore support in OS. There is no space for unsued  things in low-end product.

...Tabor  is a very-low-end and low-cost AmigaOS4 (I hope also MorphOS) PPC  configuration which is affordable for every Amigan to buy. It is also  very powerfull because its faster that SAM460, dramatically faster if  second core will be soon in use.

Why? Because I want it, and it adds minimal cost.
And there will be uses for these in the future (hey, I'm optimistic).

Faster? Slightly until the fpu issues are factored in.

And while it is dual core..."why integrate quad core processor  when there is no multicore support in OS", so why integrate a dual core.
You do know there are single core T10XX cpus, don't you?

Quote from: Spectre660;798089
...Of the 3 OS's OS 4.1 currently is the only one that works with any GPU acceleration. ..
But the actual playback under OS 4.1 is degraded because of the slower decoding...

Odd, degraded "because of the slower decoding...", why?
And you make it sound like AROS and MorphOS don't use GPU acceleration at all.
For decoding, true.
But for 2D and 3D graphics acceleration, untrue (although, MorphOS does not to implement that for the Radeon HD cards).

Quote from: Spectre660;798095
Anyway we now know that this bechmark as used to compare the
X1000 runing AmigaOS 4.1 to G4 Mac's runing MorphOS is not giving a balanced comparison.

Yes, comparing processors with significant differences is tricky.
Also, as MorphOS usual has a slight performance advantage on similar platforms, again, not a fair comparison.

Quote from: Spectre660;798098
What candy thing am I running ?

I thought everyone was clear that you are working with Linux, not OS4 (where you would find Candi).
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Spectre660 on October 25, 2015, 03:20:05 PM
The more time taken by the CPU to decode the video means that it has the remaining time to  do  the display and audio. So if a 60 second clip takes 54 second to just decode you only have 6 seconds to display 60 seconds of video and audio which means that it cant be done in real time.
Thus the reason for this benchmark which does not involve any GPU acceleration .When you actually try to play a 480p MP4 video under OS 4.1 on the Sam460ex it cannot sync the audio and video even in windowed mode with the AmigaOS 4.1FE version of video acceleration with the Radeon HD driver. In Linux it is sync in windowed mode even with no GPU acceleration. On the other hand the same video converted to an xvid avi plays back in full screen mode in perfect sync on the Sam460ex under AmigaOS 4.1FE.Linux cannot do it in fully screen in sync .


Quote
Odd, degraded "because of the slower decoding...", why?  
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 25, 2015, 03:30:45 PM
Quote from: Spectre660;798104
The more time taken by the CPU to decode the video means that it has the remaining time to  do  the display and audio. So if a 60 second clip takes 54 second to just decode you only have 6 seconds to display 60 seconds of video and audio which means that it cant be done in real time.
Thus the reason for this benchmark which does not involve any GPU acceleration .When you actually try to play a 480p MP4 video under OS 4.1 on the Sam460ex it cannot sync the audio and video even in windowed mode with the AmigaOS 4.1FE version of video acceleration with the Radeon HD driver. In Linux it is sync in windowed mode even with no GPU acceleration. On the other hand the same video converted to an xvid avi plays back in full screen mode in perfect sync on the Sam460ex under AmigaOS 4.1FE.Linux cannot do it in fully screen in sync .

Ah, I did not examine those closely enough.
So gPU acceleration is a good thing.
I'm curious as to how Hyperion implemented it.
I thought the primary reason that Linux and MorphOS didn't use it was the difficulty in getting really complete documentation for GPUs themselves.

I mean, when you compare Linux systems that have proprietary drivers supplied by the gpu manufacturers to systems with open drivers you see a big performance hit in the latter.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: LiveForIt on October 25, 2015, 03:30:46 PM
I that version you using I experimented with AHI, that's way audio is out of sync with video, use SDL audio, and you should have no problem.

I did not won't that version to be uploaded to OS4Depot.net, but it was done anyway.

My best version is 6.5.8 not 6.5.7.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Spectre660 on October 25, 2015, 04:03:01 PM
Using the SDL audio make no difference. Still out of sync .

Is it possible that there is an issue with the compiler and the amcc 440 core ?

https://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-users/2007-February/065692.html


Quote from: LiveForIt;798106
I that version you using I experimented with AHI, that's way audio is out of sync with video, use SDL audio, and you should have no problem.

I did not won't that version to be uploaded to OS4Depot.net, but it was done anyway.

My best version is 6.5.8 not 6.5.7.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: mongo on October 25, 2015, 05:05:11 PM
Quote from: Spectre660;798104
The more time taken by the CPU to decode the video means that it has the remaining time to  do  the display and audio. So if a 60 second clip takes 54 second to just decode you only have 6 seconds to display 60 seconds of video and audio which means that it cant be done in real time.


You don't have to decode the whole video before you can start playing it. As long as you're not using more than 6 seconds of CPU time to display the video frames and play the audio you can play the video in real time no problem. The only problem is if you use more than 60 seconds to decode a 60 second video.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: matthey on October 25, 2015, 06:29:27 PM
Quote from: LiveForIt;798086
Sure you can reserve a few gate array's for DCT, Deblocking and color space conversion, accelerate speed on FPGA. However I do not think you, be able to play H264 video buy just simulating normal CPU instructions. But FPGA's are pretty expensive, how many gate will you need to do that on FPGA, and will it cost you more than buying a ASIC from Broadcom, VIA or Intel.

Accelerating video processing by SIMD and DSP like instructions in the CPU has advantages for many types of of programs. CPU non-general purpose video support like Intel's Quick Sync probably gives the most acceleration but I don't know if it necessary. The following is a benchmark of encoding a 449 MB, four-minute 1080p file to 1024×768 (CPU is a Core i7 3770).

Software encoding = 172 seconds
AMD Radeon HD 6870 = 86 seconds
Nvidia GeForce GTX 570 = 83 seconds
Quick Sync Video in i7 = 22 seconds

This shows how effective CPU specific acceleration can be but it also may benefit from being a popular hardware standard. Video acceleration on these gfx boards goes across the gfx bus which adds latency and the support is less standard. Integrating standard gfx on the motherboard could potentially reduce this overhead. I would like to see the Amiga go back to custom standardized hardware including the CPU and integrated graphics.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: kolla on October 25, 2015, 07:26:25 PM
Can I haz netflix? Who in their right mind wants to watch video on Amiga systems?
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: LiveForIt on October 25, 2015, 07:30:26 PM
@matthey

Quote
Accelerating video processing by SIMD and DSP like instructions in the CPU has advantages for many types of of programs.

Sure it can, but it's like learning a new language in the case of SIMD (AltiVec), I also find hard to find good documentation on how to use it. the basic idea is that you can multiplay 4 values at the same time, or divide 4 values at the same time, so if you are working normal code, find places where you can do tings in steps of 4. So you can optimize a lot but not everything.

As for DSP is normally referees to some coprocessor, many codecs in avcodec requires a DSP.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: LiveForIt on October 25, 2015, 07:31:12 PM
@kolla

Youtube
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: dooz on October 25, 2015, 08:03:27 PM
Quote from: Iggy;798103
Why? Because I want it, and it adds minimal cost.
And there will be uses for these in the future (hey, I'm optimistic).

Faster? Slightly until the fpu issues are factored in.

And while it is dual core..."why integrate quad core processor  when there is no multicore support in OS", so why integrate a dual core.
You do know there are single core T10XX cpus, don't you?

You are right here - I did not even consider single core CPU!

Well I guess I am also optimistic :laugh1:

It is somehow acceptable from my POV to have only one unused core with the "future in mind". Three cores is simply too much for me to invest when there is no multicore support right now.

There are people in all kind of different situations considering what Amiga hardware they own. If you look at my signature - that is my current hardware situation. For most of the time this configuration is too weak for anything considering NG and AOS4 and on the other side it is not exactly pure classic either. I done what I can with it.

So A1222 is a "huge leap forward" to me. I can have it for several years. After that maybe I can buy next machine that will have T10xx or whatever it is actual then. This is possible because those machines are supposed to be low - priced. At first I though I would buy X5000, but I think I would give up that because of the price, and get Tabor instead.

These new AmigaOne products do not have "CPU slot" like Commodore Amigas from the past. Also CPU cannot be changed easily. So very long term period for a motherboard is not possible....just change the whole motherboard.

For someone else my situation does not apply. This is just example where current Tabor might be OK in my case.


-----
Domagoj Ozanic (domagoj.ozanic@zg.t-com.hr)
Amiga WARP Organization http://www.amigawarp.org
A1200T Blue Thunder Tower (BTT) - AmigaOS 4.1 FE
BlizzardPPC 200 MHz / BVisionPPC / 256 MB RAM
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Hans_ on October 25, 2015, 08:14:25 PM
Quote from: Iggy;798105
Ah, I did not examine those closely enough.
So gPU acceleration is a good thing.
I'm curious as to how Hyperion implemented it.
I thought the primary reason that Linux and MorphOS didn't use it was the difficulty in getting really complete documentation for GPUs themselves.
The GPU acceleration that he's talking about is the composited video (http://hdrlab.org.nz/projects/amiga-os-4-projects/radeonhd-driver/radeonhd-development-log/composited-video-radeon-hd-driver-version-2-x/) feature of the latest Radeon HD driver.

Quote from: Iggy;798105
I mean, when you compare Linux systems that have proprietary drivers supplied by the gpu manufacturers to systems with open drivers you see a big performance hit in the latter.
AFAIK, AMD's proprietary drivers work only on x86/x64 systems. Linux on the Sam460ex uses the open-source drivers, and they are definitely lagging behind AMD's proprietary drivers. I think that I managed to get Radeon HD 7xxx series (Southen Islands GPUs) working on AmigaOS before the open-source Linux driver did, and that was also before AMD released the docs for the new series. Ironically, I deciphered the new GPU instruction set from the LLVM code in their Work-In-Progress (WIP) Gallium3D driver.

Hans
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 25, 2015, 09:18:33 PM
Quote from: Hans_;798123
The GPU acceleration that he's talking about is the composited video (http://hdrlab.org.nz/projects/amiga-os-4-projects/radeonhd-driver/radeonhd-development-log/composited-video-radeon-hd-driver-version-2-x/) feature of the latest Radeon HD driver.

Yes I know that, it should probably be referred to as something more specific, it kind of blurs that definition too much.

Quote from: Hans_;798123
AFAIK, AMD's proprietary drivers work only on x86/x64 systems. Linux on the Sam460ex uses the open-source drivers, and they are definitely lagging behind AMD's proprietary drivers. I think that I managed to get Radeon HD 7xxx series (Southen Islands GPUs) working on AmigaOS before the open-source Linux driver did, and that was also AMD released the docs for the new series. Ironically, I deciphered the new GPU instruction set from the LLVM code in their Work-In-Progress (WIP) Gallium3D driver.
Hans

Damned clever.
Yes, AMD likes to reserve some information for itself.
I think the very idea of open drivers freaks them out a little.

BTW - I am quite impressed with the Radeon HD work.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Yasu on October 26, 2015, 09:46:19 AM
Stupid question: is it possible to let the second core stand in as an FPU?
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: itix on October 26, 2015, 09:49:53 AM
Quote from: Yasu;798144
Stupid question: is it possible to let the second core stand in as an FPU?


No. It would be very very slow.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Yasu on October 26, 2015, 10:27:56 AM
@itix

Even as a dedicated software emulation core?
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: mbrantley on October 26, 2015, 11:37:36 AM
Quote from: kolla;798119
Can I haz netflix? Who in their right mind wants to watch video on Amiga systems?


Uh oh, I might be identifying myself as not being in my right mind. But I watch video (and even produce video on occasion) on my AmigaOS systems all the time. So keenly interested in exploring the capabilities and limitations of this activity on these machines.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: nicholas on October 26, 2015, 11:51:35 AM
Quote from: kolla;798119
Can I haz netflix? Who in their right mind wants to watch video on Amiga systems?

Who in their right mind does anything on an Amiga system in this day and age?

Because we can, no other reason is necessary ;-)
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: bison on October 26, 2015, 02:55:16 PM
Quote from: Yasu;798144
Stupid question: is it possible to let the second core stand in as an FPU?


There was a discussion on EAB about that.  Can't find it right now...
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: matthey on October 26, 2015, 03:56:45 PM
Quote from: nicholas;798148
Who in their right mind does anything on an Amiga system in this day and age?

Because we can, no other reason is necessary ;-)


We should be able to do general purpose computing on the Amiga even if it slower than the competition. The challenge of a small market like the Amiga is how to make it easier, cheaper and faster so it can be used more.

Quote from: bison;798154
There was a discussion on EAB about that.  Can't find it right now...


This thread?

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=79940
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: bison on October 26, 2015, 07:23:45 PM
Quote from: matthey;798155

This thread?

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=79940


Yes, that's it.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 26, 2015, 09:17:23 PM
Quote from: bison;798170
Yes, that's it.

No matter what forum its is discussed on this will distill (eventually) to two opinions.
One, "not good, we may be shooting ourselves in the foot here", and...
Two, "we need to wait and see"..
If your in the second camp, good for you!
You are more of an optimist than I am.

But since I have the option of running my OS of choice on a larger array of  hardware than OS4 users, I think I can be more discerning.

One, I can pay for an X5000, and spend more, but get decent hardware, or...
Two, I can wait for PCI-e G5 support when I will have have good hardware at a better price.

Thanks to my friends, I have this choice.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: itix on October 27, 2015, 10:28:11 AM
Quote from: Yasu;798146
Even as a dedicated software emulation core?


The first core can't proceed until FPU instruction emulation is completed. Thus emulating FPU on 2nd core would halt the first core.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Spectre660 on November 28, 2015, 03:48:57 PM
Great endorsement .

Quote from: Iggy;797215
Been expecting this one.
As for being "crippled", its got better specs than a SAM460.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: blakespot on January 06, 2016, 03:18:54 PM
What's the latest on this situation? Is AmigaOS 4.1 running on this board right now? When will it be avail?


bp
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: blakespot on February 24, 2016, 02:37:03 AM
What is the estimated cost of the A1222. Is it cheaper than the SMA460? Prob not. Is the 460 ITX?
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Hammer on May 06, 2016, 03:58:00 AM
Quote from: LiveForIt;798023
Most of OS does not use FLOAT, but most of the programs that run on the OS that play sound and video use float, and most of this are ported from Linux, compiled with static linking.

I tell you right now, I'm not going to waste my time down grading software to support slow CPU's without FPU. Having to jump to math library, simple fmuls and fdivs, has overhead, jumps and branches have overhead, registers has to be put in stack, and restored, and return values has be set and so on, I think the math library idea from 90's was wacky idea to begin with. And is not a good direction to be going.

It's more likely be using more double floats in my programs, because its not good idea to mix and match int with float, because of overhead; a FPU while its integrated in CPU this days. Actually works as independent processor unit, there is no way to move a value from a CPU register into a FPU register without storing it on RAM, so makes more sense to write code for the FPU or write the code for CPU instructions. Do not do casting between float and int, or at least as little as possible.

With Doom3 PC vs MacPPC, I recall PowerPC has issues with register data movements between FPU and GPRs. PPC has to copy it back to main memory (cache). X86 CPUs can move register data between FPU, SSE and GPRs without hitting main memory.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Everblue on September 05, 2016, 09:37:09 AM
Any updates when the Tabor will be available yet? Seems it has gone off the radar.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on September 05, 2016, 01:59:59 PM
Quote from: Everblue;813512
Any updates when the Tabor will be available yet? Seems it has gone off the radar.

I think they are focused on getting the dual core P5020 based version of the X5000 out the door right now.

If Tabor boards already exist, maybe Aeon ought to consider releasing it to the Linux market.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: yssing on September 05, 2016, 02:54:49 PM
Yes some news about the current state would be great.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: F0LLETT on September 06, 2016, 09:37:12 AM
Its being worked on. Thats all I can say at the moment.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: JimmiG on September 09, 2016, 11:59:18 AM
From what I understand the board itself has been available to beta testers for at least 9 months. It's the AmigaOS port that's taking so long.

The slow pace of development really gives you second thoughts about investing into something like this. What about new drivers and updates down the road?

Still, if it ends up priced less than the Sam460CR and availability is good enough that you can actually buy one, then it might attract a few users. As a secondary system and a "gateway" to AmigaOS, absolute performance isn't critical. Price and availability will be more important.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: kamelito on September 09, 2016, 01:38:48 PM
Quote from: JimmiG;813672
From what I understand the board itself has been available to beta testers for at least 9 months. It's the AmigaOS port that's taking so long.

The slow pace of development really gives you second thoughts about investing into something like this. What about new drivers and updates down the road?

Still, if it ends up priced less than the Sam460CR and availability is good enough that you can actually buy one, then it might attract a few users. As a secondary system and a "gateway" to AmigaOS, absolute performance isn't critical. Price and availability will be more important.


I would buy one if it's around the 500€ or less of course :hammer:
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on September 09, 2016, 01:51:02 PM
Quote from: kamelito;813675
I would buy one if it's around the 500€ or less of course :hammer:

 Sure, above that you might experience some buyer's remorse for not buying the more powerful X5000.
 
 And I wouldn't abuse AmigaKit over availability.
 They don't set the release date, and obviously Aeon doesn't want this released without OS4 support.
 
 So it all comes down to waiting for Hyperion.
 And the community ought to be accustomed to waiting on Hyperion by now.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: JimmiG on September 16, 2016, 10:10:59 AM
Quote from: kamelito;813675
I would buy one if it's around the 500€ or less of course :hammer:


That's the sweet spot I think for the board+CPU. I mean that's still expensive for something that is about as powerful as the €30 Raspberry Pi 3, but understandable given the small scale production and specialized hardware. €300 would be better, but that's probably unreasonable to expect.

Not really slamming anyone in particular over the lack of availability, just somewhat frustrated. I got interested in buying an AmigaOne maybe 2 years ago, and since then I havne't seen one available for purchase anywhere. They're always listed as Unavailable or Out of Stock.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: utri007 on September 16, 2016, 11:23:28 AM
Hve you seen this :

https://www.facebook.com/domagoj.ozanic.7/videos/490409714498579/

Guy with Tabor running Quake Dark Places 4x same time
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: OlafS3 on September 16, 2016, 12:29:42 PM
Quote from: utri007;814012
Hve you seen this :

https://www.facebook.com/domagoj.ozanic.7/videos/490409714498579/

Guy with Tabor running Quake Dark Places 4x same time

Linux...

it does not prove how useable it is when installing AmigaOS
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: AmigaOldskooler on September 16, 2016, 12:55:48 PM
Quote from: JimmiG;813672
Still, if it ends up priced less than the Sam460CR and availability is good enough that you can actually buy one, then it might attract a few users. As a secondary system and a "gateway" to AmigaOS, absolute performance isn't critical. Price and availability will be more important.


I have a feeling the Tabor will be cheap and affordable, especially after I re-listened to Trevor's speech at Amiwest last year. In that speech he said that they've made a big number of boards and that they would be low in price. Trevor then said that with an increase of new users, they would see more software sales. These sales would cover the losses on the boards. So my guess is £299 for the motherboard and £399 for a setup with RAM and GFX-card. Hope I'm right. :cool:
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: OlafS3 on September 16, 2016, 01:07:17 PM
Quote from: AmigaOldskooler;814015
I have a feeling the Tabor will be cheap and affordable, especially after I re-listened to Trevor's speech at Amiwest last year. In that speech he said that they've made a big number of boards and that they would be low in price. Trevor then said that with an increase of new users, they would see more software sales. These sales would cover the losses on the boards. So my guess is £299 for the motherboard and £399 for a setup with RAM and GFX-card. Hope I'm right. :cool:

700 Pound are 821 EUR, then add tax and transport costs then price is more than 1000 EUR... cheap is relative
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: AmigaOldskooler on September 16, 2016, 01:49:17 PM
Quote from: OlafS3;814016
700 Pound are 821 EUR, then add tax and transport costs then price is more than 1000 EUR... cheap is relative


You got me totally wrong. I said:

- 1 x motherboard: £299
- Bundle: 1 x motherboard with RAM and gfxboard: £399
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: OlafS3 on September 16, 2016, 02:10:24 PM
Quote from: AmigaOldskooler;814020
You got me totally wrong. I said:

- 1 x motherboard: £299
- Bundle: 1 x motherboard with RAM and gfxboard: £399

ok...

we will see
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Oldsmobile_Mike on September 16, 2016, 04:15:11 PM
Quote from: AmigaOldskooler;814020
You got me totally wrong. I said:

- 1 x motherboard: £299
- Bundle: 1 x motherboard with RAM and gfxboard: £399

:laughing:  :laughing:  :laughing:
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: duga on September 16, 2016, 04:56:37 PM
Quote from: Oldsmobile_Mike;814025
:laughing:  :laughing:  :laughing:
£300 + 20% UK VAT = £360. 430 Euro without memory/gfx.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Oldsmobile_Mike on September 16, 2016, 07:09:38 PM
Quote from: duga;814027
£300 + 20% UK VAT = £360. 430 Euro without memory/gfx.


I hope nobody accidentally sees these posts and thinks these are in any way realistic or actual costs for this hardware. :(
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on September 16, 2016, 09:20:41 PM
Quote from: Oldsmobile_Mike;814033
I hope nobody accidentally sees these posts and thinks these are in any way realistic or actual costs for this hardware. :(


Seems unlikely to me too.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: duga on September 17, 2016, 06:46:03 AM
Can't find the original quote, but "700 seems too high" and "will be sold at loss to gain new customers with a cheap board" has been mentioned. That could of course still mean 699 + VAT which would be way too high if you want to sell those thousand made boards.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: tribz on September 17, 2016, 08:28:33 AM
This reminds me of chinese whispers. It will be over a thousand euros by the next page.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: F0LLETT on September 17, 2016, 09:05:26 AM
Quote from: tribz;814057
This reminds me of chinese whispers. It will be over a thousand euros by the next page.


lol, Im sure you ment 2000 euros, :).
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: psxphill on September 17, 2016, 09:11:26 AM
Quote from: AmigaOldskooler;814015
In that speech he said that they've made a big number of boards and that they would be low in price. Trevor then said that with an increase of new users, they would see more software sales. These sales would cover the losses on the boards.


I wonder how much software they need people to buy before they don't lose money. I admire him for taking the risk, but I'm glad it's not my money.

"Last year we sold 1000 boards and made a 5000€ loss. This year we've exceeded expectations and sold 10000 boards which has pushed our losses to 50000€ euros. Next year we hope to sell 100000 boards".
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Jezry on September 17, 2016, 04:38:04 PM
I would love a set top box thingy with amiga os on and games just autostart when you put them in.
Most people remembers amiga for games and they dont care if its wrong fpu. As long as it works.
I want a tabor if its in my pricerange.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: JimmiG on September 22, 2016, 10:37:07 AM
Quote from: Jezry;814072
I would love a set top box thingy with amiga os on and games just autostart when you put them in.
Most people remembers amiga for games and they dont care if its wrong fpu. As long as it works.
I want a tabor if its in my pricerange.


Well if you just want to run old games, there are options like RetroPie and MIST.

The Tabor and X5000 are more for people who want to pretend they live in an alternative timeline where everyone uses NG Amigas :)
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Jezry on September 22, 2016, 11:36:26 AM
Haha.
I did not just mean old games new ones as well.
And ofcourse browsing. Just saying there are alot of companys making boxes that could do that.
Maybe not with super 3d graphics and all the bells and whistles but still. Hell today almost everything can and  wants to be connected to the internet.
A small console like amiga under my tv is what i would want:laughing:
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: duga on September 22, 2016, 05:26:01 PM
Quote from: Jezry;814260
Haha.

A small console like amiga under my tv is what i would want


It's called CD32.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: wawrzon on September 22, 2016, 05:35:39 PM
Quote from: F0LLETT;814058
lol, Im sure you ment 2000 euros, :).


.. in which case if the final price arrives after all the rumours under eur 1k,-- itll be considered cheap. ;) relax!°!
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Jezry on September 22, 2016, 06:32:48 PM
Quote from: duga;814283
It's called CD32.
Yup it could be on my wishlist but its getting more and more expensive that also. And the controllers go for ridiculus money to.
So for now il stick with my old Amigas and my Aros pc.
Maybe in the future :-)
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: adonay on September 22, 2016, 11:29:30 PM
Quote from: Jezry;814072
I would love a set top box thingy with amiga os on and games just autostart when you put them in.
Most people remembers amiga for games and they dont care if its wrong fpu. As long as it works.
I want a tabor if its in my pricerange.


Raspberry Pi with Amibian will boot directly into uae . I boot right into workbench with mine and choose games from a nice high resolution wb with Whdload hd installed games . Or do other WB tasks
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: psxphill on September 23, 2016, 12:15:29 AM
Quote from: Jezry;814260
Haha.
I did not just mean old games new ones as well.
And ofcourse browsing.


It sounds like you want AROS running on a ps3.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Jezry on September 23, 2016, 12:45:19 AM
That would have been something :) but on xbox 360 :roflmao:
No  i meant a nice small custom case for something like tabor that would look great in the livingroom. I have Aros on a matx board in a nice case already..
The Console thingy or set top box was in the alternate timeline!
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on September 23, 2016, 11:03:50 PM
Quote from: JimmiG;814258
Well if you just want to run old games, there are options like RetroPie and MIST.

The Tabor and X5000 are more for people who want to pretend they live in an alternative timeline where everyone uses NG Amigas :)

Nope, I just want a vacation from my PC hardware occasionally.
And I have legacy hardware if I want to run old games (although I do that primarily with a CD32).
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: SACC-guy on September 23, 2016, 11:16:23 PM
@iggy/Bean/Jim (why so many names?)(hiding from the fires?)

I myself want a x5000 (see my other thread)
Really want a 5040 (grin)

But would buy a ALICE!
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: amoskodare on September 23, 2016, 11:42:15 PM
@thread

(http://i2.wp.com/bitcast-a-sm.bitgravity.com/slashfilm/wp/wp-content/images/cliffhanger.jpg)

;)
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on September 24, 2016, 12:33:28 AM
Quote from: SACC-guy;814344
@iggy/Bean/Jim (why so many names?)(hiding from the fires?)

I myself want a x5000 (see my other thread)
Really want a 5040 (grin)

But would buy a ALICE!

I asked Matt for a password reset on the first account last week, but I guess he forgot.

And you guys ought to know by now that I like controversies.

I don't know about Alice though, I already have laptops.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: psxphill on September 25, 2016, 12:48:39 AM
Quote from: Jezry;814309
That would have been something :) but on xbox 360 :roflmao:


PS3 is the Amiga to the Xbox 360's ST.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on September 25, 2016, 01:47:01 AM
Quote from: psxphill;814373
PS3 is the Amiga to the Xbox 360's ST.


?!
The processor in the XBOX360 was definitely easier to program for than the PS3's weird Cell BE layout with it satellite spes.
I really don't see your comparison, and besides the PS3 really needed more memory.

Both have in order execution which is kind of lame for a PPC. A 970MP from a PowerMac G5 will eat either of those alive.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: SACC-guy on September 26, 2016, 02:59:27 AM
Maybe we'll see the "1222" at AmiWest2016?
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: AmigaOldskooler on September 26, 2016, 08:41:22 AM
Quote from: SACC-guy;814422
Maybe we'll see the "1222" at AmiWest2016?


That would be cool. :) I'm really hoping for some news on AmiWest concerning this computer.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Everblue on September 26, 2016, 06:12:42 PM
Let's hope for some interesting news :)
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: SACC-guy on September 26, 2016, 07:17:17 PM
Quote from: AmigaOldskooler;814430
That would be cool. :) I'm really hoping for some news on AmiWest concerning this computer.
We saw this "1222" at AmiWest2015 running linux.
Alex made a very nice presentation.
I hope to see and learn more this year!
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: duga on October 09, 2016, 09:00:22 PM
Quote from: duga;814027
£300 + 20% UK VAT = £360. 430 Euro without memory/gfx.


Quote from: Oldsmobile_Mike;814033
I hope nobody accidentally sees these posts and thinks these are in any way realistic or actual costs for this hardware. :(


Ahem. :rtfm:
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: psxphill on October 09, 2016, 09:42:32 PM
Quote from: Iggy;814374
?!
The processor in the XBOX360 was definitely easier to program for than the PS3's weird Cell BE layout with it satellite spes.


Yeah, xbox 360 was just bog standard like the ST. While Amiga had copper and blitter that needed special coding skills

Quote from: Iggy;814374
I really don't see your comparison, and besides the PS3 really needed more memory.


Amiga needed more memory too, although you could upgrade the ram a lot easier than a PS3.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 09, 2016, 10:10:27 PM
Quote from: psxphill;815042
Yeah, xbox 360 was just bog standard like the ST. While Amiga had copper and blitter that needed special coding skills

Amiga needed more memory too, although you could upgrade the ram a lot easier than a PS3.

You can't add memory to the Cell BE, and it uses a very unusual type of memory.
 
 Further, later STs had blitters, and the ST cost a lot less than an Amiga.
 As far as coding skills, using hardware features is hardly a special skill.
 
 As far as the Xbox360 vs the PS3, both are 'bog standard' AND derived from related technology (which come to think of it, makes your ST vs Amiga comparison somewhat relevant).
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: psxphill on October 10, 2016, 09:30:35 AM
Quote from: Iggy;815043
As far as coding skills, using hardware features is hardly a special skill.

I think there is plenty of evidence that disproves that.

Getting the most out of the Amiga and the PS3 is much harder than getting the most out of the ST and the 360.

Going back further to the c64 and spectrum, you saw the best spectrum games quite early on in the life of the computer and then it reached a peak. The benefit of time and sharing of knowledge has allowed people to create software that would have blown away c64 users in 1983.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 10, 2016, 12:58:56 PM
Quote from: psxphill;815071
I think there is plenty of evidence that disproves that.

Getting the most out of the Amiga and the PS3 is much harder than getting the most out of the ST and the 360.

Going back further to the c64 and spectrum, you saw the best spectrum games quite early on in the life of the computer and then it reached a peak. The benefit of time and sharing of knowledge has allowed people to create software that would have blown away c64 users in 1983.

With time, people always figure out new tricks to use hardware that produce innovative results.
 The fact is that the PS3 is just a pain in the ass to program, has limited memory, and in time it really hasn't produced that many creative uses of its weird hardware configuration.
 
 And the Amiga and C64 aren't that hard to code for by the standards of their day. In some ways their more advanced hardware makes some functions easier.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: psxphill on October 10, 2016, 04:51:46 PM
Quote from: Iggy;815043
You can't add memory to the Cell BE, and it uses a very unusual type of memory.


Sounds a bit like chip memory then, which is also impossible to increase on the Amiga (unless you cheat and re-implement the chipset, which maybe someone will do for the ps3 in 20 years time).

Quote from: Iggy;815074
With time, people always figure out new tricks to use hardware that produce innovative results.


I don't see that happening on the Atari-ST or Spectrum as much as the C64 and to a less extent the Amiga though.

Quote from: Iggy;815074
The fact is that the PS3 is just a pain in the ass to program,


It's easy to program the PS3, it's hard to program it well. Which proves my point about specialist hardware being difficult to code for.

Quote from: Iggy;815074
has limited memory


All console hardware has limited memory. Fixed configuration systems has good and bad points.

Quote from: Iggy;815074
, and in time it really hasn't produced that many creative uses of its weird hardware configuration.


Games made better use of the SPE's over time, which I would class as creative.

Quote from: Iggy;815074
And the Amiga and C64 aren't that hard to code for by the standards of their day. In some ways their more advanced hardware makes some functions easier.


Getting up to 8 sprites on the screen is easier on the c64 than on the spectrum. But when you've learned how to do that on the spectrum, then ramping up to more than 8 sprites is a lot easier than on the c64.

Similar to how you can dump something on an SPE quite easily, but doing it well is hard.

Anyway, I think this is OT enough now.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 10, 2016, 06:29:24 PM
Quote from: psxphill;815081
Anyway, I think this is OT enough now.

Agreed. We've spent too much time on something that our opinions aren't that far apart on.
And besides, the thread topic is the A1222.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: magnetic on October 11, 2016, 11:30:42 PM
I got to see the tabor board in person at amiwest and have to say its a really cool board. Mini its form factor is awesome and the price is going to be VERY good news for the community!
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: psxphill on October 11, 2016, 11:36:04 PM
Quote from: magnetic;815134
Mini its form factor is awesome and the price is going to be VERY good news for the community!


I wonder what would happen if people started cloning the boards. They are selling them at cost, so they shouldn't be upset. As long as users can buy a separate license for amigaos 4 of course.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: magnetic on October 11, 2016, 11:39:04 PM
psxphil
thats not correct logic really. They have a sizable investment and we need to buy the boards from them not another provider.  we should reward them for putting a lot of money into this project with no expectation for profitability
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: psxphill on October 12, 2016, 12:01:16 AM
Quote from: magnetic;815138
psxphil
thats not correct logic really. They have a sizable investment and we need to buy the boards from them not another provider.  we should reward them for putting a lot of money into this project with no expectation for profitability


I was assuming a clone wouldn't be available immediately and they wouldn't have ordered more board than they could easily sell in six months.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 12, 2016, 12:10:26 AM
Quote from: psxphill;815140
I was assuming a clone wouldn't be available immediately and they wouldn't have ordered more board than they could easily sell in six months.

 Not nearly as easy a task as you make it sound.
 Those boards have several layers, and those layers/layouts are not known.
 You aren't going to be able to just 'clone' them.
 Its not like a plant where you can take cuttings. ;)
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: psxphill on October 12, 2016, 12:20:57 AM
Quote from: Iggy;815142
Not nearly as easy a task as you make it sound.
 Those boards have several layers, and those layers/layouts are not known.
 You aren't going to be able to just 'clone' them.
 Its not like a plant where you can take cuttings. ;)


If you know the right people then multiple layers is not an issue. Or you can just find someone to bribe at the manufacturers.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: magnetic on October 12, 2016, 12:22:08 AM
I have to say this is rather absurd lol. cloning a board that just came out. do you realize how much money it would take for you just to do one prototype?
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: psxphill on October 12, 2016, 12:55:10 AM
Quote from: magnetic;815146
I have to say this is rather absurd lol. cloning a board that just came out. do you realize how much money it would take for you just to do one prototype?

You know there are companies in the far east that specialise in board cloning? It's not that expensive to get a board made if you have access to the equipment (like CSG/MOS were able to turn round prototype chip in a couple of weeks. There is likely a reference design that could be tweaked anyway.

Why is it absurd doing it when it comes out? The only reason it would be absurd is if someone doesn't think it's worth the effort, because they couldn't do it cheap enough or there aren't enough people to buy them. Then they'll go on and clone something else.

3com networking products were big a few years ago, although they tried to keep it quiet for some reason.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: magnetic on October 12, 2016, 01:05:08 AM
my point is the board will be made by a reliable company for a fair price why in the world are we talking about chinese clones? lol
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: blakespot on October 17, 2016, 05:07:13 PM
I saw mention that in a AmiWest video Trevor indicated Tabor would sell for 400 Euro.

Was there any indication of a timeframe for availability?
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: psxphill on October 17, 2016, 07:59:00 PM
Quote from: magnetic;815149
my point is the board will be made by a reliable company for a fair price why in the world are we talking about chinese clones? lol


Because they say they are selling it at cost, so they aren't making money on it. This means there isn't going to be money available to invest in pushing down the cost. To me it would seem more logical to let the market compete for the business.

Of course if nobody is interested in competing then it's a moot point. But as it runs Linux then there is a market outside of AmigaOS, if it can be made cheap enough. Which at the current price it isn't cheap enough.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: kamelito on October 17, 2016, 08:42:36 PM
Quote from: psxphill;815435
Because they say they are selling it at cost, so they aren't making money on it. This means there isn't going to be money available to invest in pushing down the cost. To me it would seem more logical to let the market compete for the business.

Of course if nobody is interested in competing then it's a moot point. But as it runs Linux then there is a market outside of AmigaOS, if it can be made cheap enough. Which at the current price it isn't cheap enough.

This is the only choice left, try to sell an AmigaOne as cheap as possible in the hope that Amigans will buy software. I suppose that their Store is working well, so the more AmigaOne users the more they expect to sell software.
Software will be the driving force here not HW. They could also sell to 68k users being under emulation, Amiga or FPGA.
It is the best thing they can do IMO.
Kamelito
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 17, 2016, 10:50:00 PM
Quote from: kamelito;815437
This is the only choice left, try to sell an AmigaOne as cheap as possible in the hope that Amigans will buy software. I suppose that their Store is working well, so the more AmigaOne users the more they expect to sell software.
Software will be the driving force here not HW. They could also sell to 68k users being under emulation, Amiga or FPGA.
It is the best thing they can do IMO.
Kamelito
 
 Uh yeah...that is the purpose of having a computer system in the first place, to run software.
 So, not to keep beating that drum, but that is our weak area, availability of software.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: magnetic on October 18, 2016, 03:12:43 AM
Quote from: Iggy;815444
Uh yeah...that is the purpose of having a computer system in the first place, to run software.
 So, not to keep beating that drum, but that is our weak area, availability of software.


This has been a problem since the eyetech amiga one xe days. They just keep doing it. Project moana should have been the road for os4. Good news is now thanks to Trevor and Aeon there is an affordable NG board in a cool form factor.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 18, 2016, 05:11:49 AM
Quote from: magnetic;815458
This has been a problem since the eyetech amiga one xe days. They just keep doing it. Project moana should have been the road for os4. Good news is now thanks to Trevor and Aeon there is an affordable NG board in a cool form factor.


Yeah, it just bugs me that its not the best choice of cpus.
Then again, someone else will start chiming in that its not an ARM, or an X86, or yadda yadda yadda.

A micro itx board should be kind of neat.
And $400< - that's a better pricing model.

Of course, being as much of a fanatic as any of the rest of you, you all know what I want to buy.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: magnetic on October 18, 2016, 07:00:57 AM
What do you want to buy? the x5000? If i didn't have a peg2 id consider it. I have to say again though i love the small form factor of tabor.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: psxphill on October 18, 2016, 08:16:44 AM
Quote from: kamelito;815437
Software will be the driving force here not HW.

That is how they hope to make money, but aiming your market at people with a passion for a retro computer means that is an uphill struggle.

I accept that it's cheaper than previous ng amiga boards. When you compare it to the rest of the market, it has a weak price to performance ratio.

The IBM PC only became the defacto standard because of clones.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: OlafS3 on October 18, 2016, 10:25:15 AM
Quote from: psxphill;815136
I wonder what would happen if people started cloning the boards. They are selling them at cost, so they shouldn't be upset. As long as users can buy a separate license for amigaos 4 of course.

 Why should anyone clone this board?
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 18, 2016, 02:21:14 PM
Quote from: magnetic;815460
What do you want to buy? the x5000? If i didn't have a peg2 id consider it. I have to say again though i love the small form factor of tabor.


Yeah Mag, I want the best, and I don't anticipate buying another PC system after that.
And the only itx case I have sitting around is an aluminum cube that's surprisingly large (its got room for a CD/DVD and at least 2 3.5" hard drives).
It would be overkill for Tabor.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: Iggy on October 18, 2016, 02:30:23 PM
Quote from: psxphill;815462
That is how they hope to make money, but aiming your market at people with a passion for a retro computer means that is an uphill struggle.

I accept that it's cheaper than previous ng amiga boards. When you compare it to the rest of the market, it has a weak price to performance ratio.

The IBM PC only became the defacto standard because of clones.


Pity that too, as it was a pretty lousy standard.
And actually, there were a lot of market factors at play.
For one, the buyers impressions that somehow that platform had some kind of magic (possibly imbued by those three letters I-B-M).

Apple succeeded without clones, then again, in a weird way its become a clone.

And that is the real choice we face, do we accept the defacto standard, or like other alternatives (ie ARM) do we continue to do our own thing.

As we stand no real chance of challenging the current market domination, I'd rather do the latter, as the former would simply be based on boring commodity goods.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: JimmiG on October 18, 2016, 07:09:57 PM
Well the "IBM PC standard" of the 80's/90's is so detached from the current standards of modern PC's that they really don't have anything in common.

ISA, VESA, even PCI were slow, inefficient, error prone and difficult to deal with (IRQ conflicts etc. I remember spending weeks trying to get a UART ISA card to work in my mom's 386). However these days we use PCI-Express, USB 3, SATA, UEFI, HDMI, NVMe etc. which are essentially legacy-free. Those standards weren't even conceptualized back then, and IBM has very little, if anything, to do with them. It's really not the "IBM PC" standard, it's just "the standard" these days.

Ironically, the same standards are used by Apple Macs (you can build a "Hackintosh" out of off the shelves PC parts) and of course even by AmigaOne systems - we plug in SATA drives, PCI-Express sound cards and Radeon video cards, DDR3 DIMMs or SO-DIMMs etc. The only differentiating factor is really the instruction set of the CPU, which only really matters if you're writing compiles or programming in Assembler.
Title: Re: New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"
Post by: psxphill on October 18, 2016, 08:04:01 PM
Quote from: OlafS3;815467
Why should anyone clone this board?


To make money?
Title: USB 3
Post by: kamelito on March 14, 2019, 12:34:31 PM
I guess Haiku USB 3 could be useful for AmigaOS :
https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/waddlesplash/2019-03-08_most_long-standing_xhci_usb3_issues_resolved/