Zorro 3 Bus Speed

[trekiej]

I was wandering if I should answer the above post.
Here goes, I do not buy PC hardware except for those rare times I buy PC hardware.
That is how it sounds.

[Akiko]

Just imagining a 10x potential speed increase across the Zorro bus  

It took 457 of us to raise $29,656 for some documentary, if someone talented like Michael Böhmer could be convinced to make
a fully working Buster in FPGA, surely we could raise an equal amount to make the Holy Grail of A3000/A4000 upgrades a reality.

[billt]

No-one is going to make one. It is not economically viable.

Then find someone to do it for reasons other than making lots of money.

http://opencores.org/project,zorro_to_wishbone_bridge

[Zac67]

Before actually re-inventing Super Buster it's probably a more promising approach to leave out Zorro III altogether (sorry Dave) and directly interface to PCI/PCIe with an appropriate new daughterboard, ideally 1x video, 2x Z3/PCIe shared, 1x Z3/PCI shared.

If you also include a faster-than-motherboard (which is an '030 bus), direct PCI(e) interface for future accelerator cards, you've completely circumvented the ancient bottlenecks. Just add a somewhat modern 1 Gig graphics card for RAM and you're set. Anyone?

[danbeaver]

Are you sure you need to "re-invent" a bus when the CSPPC and BZPPC have a "on accelerator" PCI bus used for a video card?

[Zac67]

Exactly - but that's limited to that single video card. Adding a modern gfx card plus maybe a fast SCSI or SATA adapter and a GE NIC would be so much nicer, wouldn't it? Btw, I'd include USB, SATA, and Ethernet right on the daughterboard - while we're at it...

[danbeaver]

Isn't that a firmware issue and not a hardware limitation?

[freqmax]

Maybe the question to ask is, what to keep from the old architecture and why?

[danbeaver]

?

[Matt_H]

I think the logic of producing an updated Buster is that all our existing cards would benefit from a speed increase, as would 3000Ts and 4000Ts where there is no replaceable daughterboard.

Of course producing a completely new PCIe bus would provide better performance, but we're probably looking at a whole new machine at that point - and several efforts (NatAmi, other FPGA Amigas, etc.) on that front are already underway.

[wawrzon]

im not sure if the cards would be able to take advantage of updated speed.

[Akiko]

im not sure if the cards would be able to take advantage of updated speed.

The biggest beneficiary is probably the Mediator busboard,  all cards using it at the moment are crippled by Buster limitations from a achieving anywhere near their full potential.
Also ZorroIII based cards like ZorRAM, and any future cards like the upcoming BigRamPlus from Individual computers would also see a significant speed increase.

[Zac67]

im not sure if the cards would be able to take advantage of updated speed.

No, not at all. Probably it'd be wise to stick at the current speed for compatibility reasons.

My intention in talking about PCI/e was that once you pick up this task you should do the job thoroughly - without adding too much complexity, PCI soft cores are around.

Step 1: You could redo the Buster, maybe speeding it up a bit, but most of all removing the bugs.

Step 2: Integrating a PCI port opens the door for replacing the daughterboard with one carrying any mix of Z3, PCI or PCIe slots, connected to the Buster PCB by a ribbon cable. Better PCI performance without messing with Z3.

Step 3: The daughterboard has yet another connector for hooking up an accelerator board directly to the PCI world. Except for the Bvision port danbeaver mentioned all other solutions require the - fast - accelerator to go over the - slow - motherboard bus to reach a - fast - PCI busboard. Obvious where the bottleneck sits.
At the same time the '030-to-PCI bridge we built into Buster starts to work the other way around, interfacing the accelerator to the motherboard, removing some complexity from accelerator design.

Step 4: Why use an expensive and hard-to-get 68060 CPU? Better take a cheap, fast and cool(!) ARM CPU with integrated PCIe and 68k emulation in firmware. You won't see a difference except that it's faster. The 5V adaption problem has already been solved with the Buster replacement.

[freqmax]

If using an ARM with 68k software emulation and make use of it's PCI bus. What's left?

Regarding "Buster" how any transistors (gates) does it use?

In what ways can Buster explicitly be improved to boost Z3 speed without casuing incompatibilities?

[SpeedGeek]

WTF? 150 MB/sec Zorro3! Wiki is full of BS! :lol:

Super Buster doesn't run from a 37.5 MHz clock. It runs from CPUCLK and CLK90. These are normally 25 MHz clocks. You can overclock it but you will only get a small performance boost because Zorro3 cards are asynchronous and run from their own clock.

Dave Haynie posted on comp.sys.amiga (a long time ago) that Zorro3 had a theoretical transfer rate of 20 MB/sec but C= never made a Super Buster or a Zorro3 card which could operate at this speed.

[zipper]

I think it was theoretically max 133 MB/s burst speed.