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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: Oldsmobile_Mike on August 09, 2016, 04:22:50 AM

Title: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: Oldsmobile_Mike on August 09, 2016, 04:22:50 AM
I saw these pictures over on one of the Amiga Google+ forums.  I take no credit, just wanted to share them since I haven't seen any pics of this particular piece of hardware on this site, yet:
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: Methanoid on August 09, 2016, 08:49:36 AM
https://plus.google.com/communities/103199122169081959411 for those who didnt know what address to look for....

Looks very nice.. Vampire is bringing Amiga back to life :)
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: psxphill on August 09, 2016, 08:51:56 AM
Quote from: Methanoid;812309
https://plus.google.com/communities/103199122169081959411 for those who didnt know what address to look for....

Looks very nice.. Vampire is bringing Amiga back to life :)


Almost makes me wish I'd kept the Amiga 1500 that I sold a few years ago. A silent power supply would definitely do it.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: polyp2000 on August 09, 2016, 11:39:56 AM
Quote from: psxphill;812310
Almost makes me wish I'd kept the Amiga 1500 that I sold a few years ago. A silent power supply would definitely do it.


Dont get me started on the a2000 i took to the tip , along with the 1084 and god knows what cards inside :(
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: Robbie on August 09, 2016, 12:26:28 PM
Really glad to see this!  Can't wait to have one...Hopefully
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: paul1981 on August 09, 2016, 05:47:39 PM
Quote from: polyp2000;812314
Dont get me started on the a2000 i took to the tip , along with the 1084 and god knows what cards inside :(


I was annoyed with myself after I'd took my pile of Amiga mags to the skip...
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: punkyclown on August 09, 2016, 06:42:59 PM
Hi All, two Saturdays ago I was in Las Vegas at the CommVEX 2016 show and spoke with Jim Drew, he of Fusion Mac and SuperCopy software.  He showed off an A2000 running a Vampire board at 234 mhz.  He is the North American Rep for Apollo and said the Vampire A1200 would be released around Christmas time.
Brad Hansen
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: Bodie on August 10, 2016, 02:09:16 AM
Is this version available for pre-order yet?

Also...hmmm I have a spare A2000 with one of the dreaded German motherboards - might get used again if I order two if it works with these as well!
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: klx300r on August 10, 2016, 02:19:30 AM
Quote from: punkyclown;812327
Hi All, two Saturdays ago I was in Las Vegas at the CommVEX 2016 show and spoke with Jim Drew, he of Fusion Mac and SuperCopy software.  He showed off an A2000 running a Vampire board at 234 mhz.  He is the North American Rep for Apollo and said the Vampire A1200 would be released around Christmas time.
Brad Hansen

:hammer: woah great news so looks like Kipper finally has some help over the border eh:D
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: QuikSanz on August 10, 2016, 02:43:25 AM
Quote from: klx300r;812337
:hammer: woah great news so looks like Kipper finally has some help over the border eh:D


234Mhz? That will be a monster with everything enabled!
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: klx300r on August 10, 2016, 04:50:27 AM
Quote from: QuikSanz;812338
234Mhz? That will be a monster with everything enabled!

yes but hopefully this includes full functioning FPU :confused:
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: QuikSanz on August 10, 2016, 05:07:27 AM
Quote from: klx300r;812340
yes but hopefully this includes full functioning FPU :confused:


When I say everything I mean the kitchen sink, MMU. FPU, Branch, caches and DMA at least.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: klx300r on August 10, 2016, 05:35:40 AM
Quote from: QuikSanz;812341
When I say everything I mean the kitchen sink, MMU. FPU, Branch, caches and DMA at least.


:shocked::eek: where can I order NOW:knuddel::pint:
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: PPC on August 10, 2016, 05:50:54 AM
Quote from: QuikSanz;812341
When I say everything I mean the kitchen sink, MMU. FPU, Branch, caches and DMA at least.


Vampire v2 has all of the above already, except for the FPU.
FPU will come with an update, it's ready but integration hasn't begun yet.
From silvercore 9 it also has AMMX (MMX for 68K)
Gunnar is looking for coders to showcase this.

Core updates are very frequently btw.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: polyp2000 on August 10, 2016, 07:38:25 AM
Quote from: paul1981;812326
I was annoyed with myself after I'd took my pile of Amiga mags to the skip...


Oh yep - i forgot about those (which accompanied the a2000)
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: polyp2000 on August 10, 2016, 07:39:54 AM
Quote from: PPC;812344
Gunnar is looking for coders to showcase this.


Anyone thought about porting this ? :
https://opentomb.github.io/

N
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: PPC on August 10, 2016, 10:20:32 AM
Quote from: polyp2000;812346
Anyone thought about porting this ? :
https://opentomb.github.io/

N


That might be a nice to do later on, when the FPU is implemented.
Gunnar is looking for coders who can make Apollo-core optimized datatypes using AMMX like jpeg,png, video codecs etc.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: Srdjan on August 10, 2016, 01:41:09 PM
Hi, does anybody knows do we need extra hardware for A2000, i have "plain one" Ecs , 1Mb chip ram and Kickstart 37.299, ...
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: Oldsmobile_Mike on August 10, 2016, 04:27:43 PM
Quote from: Srdjan;812354
Hi, does anybody knows do we need extra hardware for A2000, i have "plain one" Ecs , 1Mb chip ram and Kickstart 37.299, ...


Extra hardware to do what? Run this Vampire board?
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: OlafS3 on August 10, 2016, 04:33:03 PM
Quote from: quiksanz;812341
when i say everything i mean the kitchen sink, mmu. Fpu, branch, caches and dma at least.

mmu?
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: OlafS3 on August 10, 2016, 04:35:05 PM
Quote from: Srdjan;812354
Hi, does anybody knows do we need extra hardware for A2000, i have "plain one" Ecs , 1Mb chip ram and Kickstart 37.299, ...

if you mean for Vampire I think nothing
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: mindprober on August 10, 2016, 04:43:46 PM
It occurred to me that if you can provide 68k and "AGA" in an FPGA, wouldn't PowerPC also be possible?
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: OlafS3 on August 10, 2016, 04:50:50 PM
Quote from: jdryyz;812363
It occurred to me that if you can provide 68k and "AGA" in an FPGA, wouldn't PowerPC also be possible?

IBM even owns a FPGA implementation of PPC (of course asking for money). Gunnar says it makes no sense because it is too slow.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: mindprober on August 10, 2016, 04:55:08 PM
I figured if a 100MHz 68k was possible, PowerPC wouldn't be too far-fetched.  :D

Quote from: OlafS3;812364
IBM even owns a FPGA implementation of PPC (of course asking for money). Gunnar says it makes no sense because it is too slow.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: Oldsmobile_Mike on August 10, 2016, 05:37:05 PM
Just remembered. I recall hearing a while back that the Vampires weren't compatible with Zorro slot expansions. Installing one would render all your other cards inoperable. I wonder if this has been addressed yet?
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: Heiroglyph on August 10, 2016, 05:51:14 PM
I've heard of the v500 being used with network cards.

The way the v600 was designed, the bus master signals were used to shut down the old CPU it was clipped onto, so even if you could add Zorro slots to the 600, it couldn't allow them on the bus.

Maybe some early v500 boards had this limitation as well.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: guest11527 on August 10, 2016, 09:13:48 PM
Quote from: jdryyz;812366
I figured if a 100MHz 68k was possible, PowerPC wouldn't be too far-fetched.

Not really. You should keep in mind that the PPC has longer opcodes, and performs less operations per opcode as it is a risk processor. Thus, you first need twice the bandwidth of the 68K to get the same number of instructions into the processor, then you also need *more* instructions to get the same operation(s) done.  Thus, even if you get a FPGA implmentation of a PPC running at 250Mhz, you still don't have quite the power of a 250Mhz equivalent of a 68K. It's more like a 100Mhz 68K, if not even less.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: kolla on August 10, 2016, 09:27:06 PM
Quote from: oldsmobile_mike;812371
just remembered. I recall hearing a while back that the vampires weren't compatible with zorro slot expansions. Installing one would render all your other cards inoperable. I wonder if this has been addressed yet?

mmu, and zorro3.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: mindprober on August 10, 2016, 09:58:58 PM
Oh well. Maybe this might be made some day:

http://ultimateppc.nl/specifications.php

It's for big box Amigas, though. I think Gideon is way too busy with the 1541 Ultimate right now though.  :D

Quote from: Thomas Richter;812378
Not really. You should keep in mind that the PPC has longer opcodes, and performs less operations per opcode as it is a risk processor. Thus, you first need twice the bandwidth of the 68K to get the same number of instructions into the processor, then you also need *more* instructions to get the same operation(s) done.  Thus, even if you get a FPGA implmentation of a PPC running at 250Mhz, you still don't have quite the power of a 250Mhz equivalent of a 68K. It's more like a 100Mhz 68K, if not even less.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: Oldsmobile_Mike on August 10, 2016, 10:45:34 PM
Quote from: jdryyz;812380
Oh well. Maybe this might be made some day:

http://ultimateppc.nl/specifications.php:D


This has been mentioned before as well. I think it was something along the lines of "the PPC chip they chose was incompatible with any of the other Amiga PPC hardware or software". Useless. :(  I could be wrong, though! ;)
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: Rob on August 10, 2016, 11:34:02 PM
Quote from: Oldsmobile_Mike;812383
This has been mentioned before as well. I think it was something along the lines of "the PPC chip they chose was incompatible with any of the other Amiga PPC hardware or software". Useless. :(  I could be wrong, though! ;)


It uses the same core as Tabor so we'll wait and see how that performs although they did say they were considered using a different processor after receiving feedback from the community.  There are much better choices available now too.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: QuikSanz on August 11, 2016, 01:29:41 AM
Quote from: Oldsmobile_Mike;812371
Just remembered. I recall hearing a while back that the Vampires weren't compatible with Zorro slot expansions. Installing one would render all your other cards inoperable. I wonder if this has been addressed yet?


If you loose the use of Zorro slots this does not sound very desirable. I need to use some of those for other things.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: Sparky on August 11, 2016, 03:29:29 AM
Quote from: jdryyz;812363
It occurred to me that if you can provide 68k and "AGA" in an FPGA, wouldn't PowerPC also be possible?


I think I read a post in the apollo forums nixing the PowerPC idea, they want to keep it classic and make the fastest 68k systems .. or something along those lines.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: Steady on August 11, 2016, 03:52:47 AM
@Srdjan

That's a weird kickstart number for an A2000. I would've thought it would be 37.175.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: Heiroglyph on August 11, 2016, 03:53:54 AM
Quote from: QuikSanz;812389
If you loose the use of Zorro slots this does not sound very desirable. I need to use some of those for other things.


That's not correct. People are using them with A500's with attachments on the side and with A2000's with zorro network cards.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: QuikSanz on August 11, 2016, 04:59:25 AM
Quote from: Heiroglyph;812393
That's not correct. People are using them with A500's with attachments on the side and with A2000's with zorro network cards.


Well, it looks to have a USB port. If a hub can be used I won't need Algor. However I need network and high speed Ser/Par card for printing and other stuff.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: Heiroglyph on August 11, 2016, 07:19:33 AM
That's not USB, you're probably seeing the JTAG port.

This isn't the hardware that will be for sale, only for development until the hardware is final.

This one has HDMI, IDE and an SD card but it will probably change before they go out for sale to the public. I've heard of onboard ethernet for example, but not with this early development board.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: psxphill on August 11, 2016, 09:35:30 AM
Quote from: Thomas Richter;812378
Not really. You should keep in mind that the PPC has longer opcodes, and performs less operations per opcode as it is a risk processor.


PPC & 68060 appear to have quite similar instruction rates. RISC processors were designed for the type of operations that C compilers needed. So there may be times you can code something more efficiently on a 68060, if you're writing in a compiled language then the difference won't be anyway near as pronounced as you say.

The problem is that getting an FPGA to run at a speed equivalent to a 100mhz 68060 has taken a long time and is likely the top end of performance for that FPGA no matter what CPU you are simulating. It doesn't make sense to him because you would have to dedicate the same amount of time to create a PPC and it would only have the performance of a 100mhz 68060. You can beat that with ancient PPC that nobody wants to buy anymore because they are too slow.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: wawrzon on August 11, 2016, 11:46:30 AM
wasting time with ppc whatsoever is not what apollo team is going to do. they told it over and over. and they are right to do so. ppc was an attempted (and failed) solution for lack of further development on 68k front. exactly the gap apollo core is about to fill in. what sense would that make to give up on that (apparently successful approach) and try to repeat some old failed hackery attempt? especially software titles that could take advantage of it is too few even to mention..
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: wawrzon on August 11, 2016, 12:05:53 PM
Quote from: jdryyz;812380
Oh well. Maybe this might be made some day:

http://ultimateppc.nl/specifications.php

It's for big box Amigas, though. I think Gideon is way too busy with the 1541 Ultimate right now though.  :D


if you want ppc, this is your choice:
https://github.com/Sakura-IT/SonnetAmiga/
its better and more compatible with warpup ultimateppc would likely ever be. and its real, working and being worked on.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: guest11527 on August 11, 2016, 12:10:54 PM
Quote from: psxphill;812399
PPC & 68060 appear to have quite similar instruction rates. RISC processors were designed for the type of operations that C compilers needed.
I would rather say, Coldfire was as it only allowed 32-bit operands (mostly), which corresponds to the implicit conversion to "int" the C language performs. PPC was Motorola's attempt to jump on the bandwagon of the latest fashion at that time, which was "risk".   Clearly, "risk" makes a lot of things simpler for the CPU designer because none of the instructions that affect memory have any other secondary side effect - unlike the CISC cores. But it also means that everything needs to go through registers in some way. Thus, a C code such as  
Code: [Select]
rect.y += delta_y  would translate, in 68K, to something  
Code: [Select]
add.l d2,4(a0) which is something your average C compiler can do, whereas in PPC, it would be something approximately like
Code: [Select]
lwz r1,4(r2) add r1,r3,r1 st r1,4(r2) which are three instructions of 32 bit instead of one instruction of 16 bit. Clearly, if you then later on use r1 or the result of the addition for any other computation, one of the instruction "amortizes", but on average, the PPC requires more instructions, and longer instructions, and more registers.  It's a horse of a different color. The hope was that PPC - due to a simpler execution unit - would allow an easier upscaling of the CPU to higher frequencies. Unfortunately, the memory bandwidth bottleneck was probably not yet relevant enough at that time.    
Quote from: psxphill;812399
So there may be times you can code something more efficiently on a 68060, if you're writing in a compiled language then the difference won't be anyway near as pronounced as you say.
Wasn't that Apple back then when porting MacOs to PPC that they came up with about a code expansion of this factor of two? I seem to remember some statement like this. Given the instruction sizes and the instruction performance, it seems about to fit.  
Quote from: psxphill;812399
The problem is that getting an FPGA to run at a speed equivalent to a 100mhz 68060 has taken a long time and is likely the top end of performance for that FPGA no matter what CPU you are simulating. It doesn't make sense to him because you would have to dedicate the same amount of time to create a PPC and it would only have the performance of a 100mhz 68060. You can beat that with ancient PPC that nobody wants to buy anymore because they are too slow.

That's a different story, of course. If you ask me whether it would make sense to emulate a PPC on an FPGA for amiga applications then my answer would also be "clearly no", basically because the amount of applications for which this would be an advantage is too small, and you could buy a somewhat "modern" (ehem) PPC system anyhow if you would want to. But that's a different market.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: psxphill on August 11, 2016, 12:52:59 PM
Quote from: Thomas Richter;812404
PPC was Motorola's attempt to jump on the bandwagon of the latest fashion at that time, which was "risk".

I'm struggling to take you seriously as you keep calling it "risk" when it is RISC.

Motorola got into the PowerPC project because IBM had persuaded Apple to switch from 680x0 to a new chip based on their POWER architecture. Apple invited Motorola to join. Apple knew that Motorola had more experience in making single chip microprocessors, but also having two sources gave them more bargaining power.

I'm sure there are examples of 1 68060 instruction needing to be expanded to 3 PPC instructions. But the question I would ask is how often those types of expansions occur & whether it's mitigated by any situations where the opposite occurs and whether the PPC can run multiple instructions more often than the 68060.

I'm reasonably confident that if someone put the same effort in then they could create a PPC that has a similar real world performance to a 100mhz 68060. Finding that person is the hard part. Especially as it's far slower than the original PowerUP boards, let alone the SAM/X1000 etc.

What would make sense is for there to be a board that allows you to fit an FPGA and an off the shelf PowerPC, so that people don't have to choose between vampire or a phase 5 PPC.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: Dandy on August 11, 2016, 01:11:15 PM
Quote from: Bodie;812335
Is this version available for pre-order yet?

Also...hmmm I have a spare A2000 with one of the dreaded German Motherboards...



Why "dreaded"?
:confused:
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: guest11527 on August 11, 2016, 01:22:07 PM
Quote from: psxphill;812406
Motorola got into the PowerPC project because IBM had persuaded Apple to switch from 680x0 to a new chip based on their POWER architecture. Apple invited Motorola to join. Apple knew that Motorola had more experience in making single chip microprocessors, but also having two sources gave them more bargaining power.
Sure - as said, RISC ("risk") was a fashion statement back then, and people believed that it would be a beneficial architecture. In some sense, this is true, but I would believe that history tells now something different.  
Quote from: psxphill;812406
I'm sure there are examples of 1 68060 instruction needing to be expanded to 3 PPC instructions. But the question I would ask is how often those types of expansions occur & whether it's mitigated by any situations where the opposite occurs and whether the PPC can run multiple instructions more often than the 68060.
At the expense of higher memory throughput, sure. So let's see some facts. If we believe Wikipedia, then the 68060 has 110Mips at 75Mhz, the PPC601 157 Mips at 80Mhz, which is 1.46Mips/MHz for the 68K and 1.96 for the PPC, thus indeed better.  

This improvement is mostly, as I believe, because the IPC of the PPC is higher, due to the simpler instruction set. IPC of the 68060 is only 1.3, of the PPC 1.9. Of course, the PPC is also a later design, so it's a bit apples vs. oranges, as most of these tests.

At least this source:  

http://www.microapl.co.uk/Porting/ColdFire/cf_68k_diffs.html

also critically remarks the lower code density of the PPC, which seems quite natural given the simplicity of the instruction set and the design. Unfortunately, no hard numbers there on particular algorithms.  
Quote from: psxphill;812406
I'm reasonably confident that if someone put the same effort in then they could create a PPC that has a similar real world performance to a 100mhz 68060.
Well, maybe, I'm not a technical expert in this field, though one should note that such a design would still be far behind existing PPCs available on the market, so the attempt would be a bit pointless.  
Quote from: psxphill;812406
What would make sense is for there to be a board that allows you to fit an FPGA and an off the shelf PowerPC, so that people don't have to choose between vampire or a phase 5 PPC.

Again, I consider this somewhat pointless given the rather small software library for PPC on the Amiga - or possibly - the typical "applications" Amiga has found today. That's of course a completely different argument.

It's in my eyes mainly a retro system - if you want to make it fast by a modern CPU, one would pick an intel design and RTG graphics and not PPC and custom chip graphics. Wait, that's called a PC, right? (-:
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: guest11527 on August 11, 2016, 01:24:56 PM
Quote from: Dandy;812407
Why "dreaded"?
:confused:

Well, because the CPU connector is not exactly working as in the "B" models, and hence, it is not exactly obvious that a card created for the "B" would also work in the "A". Typically, you would have to remove the 68K from the "Braunschweig" ("A") models to get turbo boards working. Whether that's sufficient for any possible Turbo card is something I cannot answer.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: cunnpole on August 11, 2016, 01:33:06 PM
Gunnar seems to have already done the comparison at IBM: http://www.apollo-core.com/index.htm?page=performance

"IBM compared three FPGA cores: The POWERPC 440, NIOS and APOLLO. The study was conducted in simulation and on a PLDA FPGA PCIe card using a ALTERA Stratix4 230C2."

I think those are the same results he had 2 years ago before he started adding all the new performance enhancements to the apollo core
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: AJCopland on August 11, 2016, 02:08:41 PM
Why bother with an FPGA based PPC though when these things are ~£31 individually? http://www.digikey.co.uk/product-detail/en/freescale-semiconductor-nxp/MPC5200CVR400B/MPC5200CVR400B-ND/1168085

That's what powered the Efika and is a 603e based chip, why go to the hassle of designing a PPC based FPGA system?

It made sense for the 68060 as it's incredbily expensive and the end of the road for the 68k series compatibility/availability wise. Those arguments don't hold true for PPC though.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: kolla on August 11, 2016, 02:47:21 PM
Many years ago I had a router developer board with a PPC440 and FPGA on the same board, and I think maybe it even was in the same chip.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: biggun on August 11, 2016, 04:12:15 PM
Quote from: Thomas Richter;812404
whereas in PPC, it would be something approximately like
Code: [Select]
lwz r1,4(r2) add r1,r3,r1 st r1,4(r2) which are three instructions .


Thomas is 100% correct.

A RISC CPU needs significant more instruction for the same amount of work in comparison to a CISC CPU.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: Bennymee on August 11, 2016, 04:22:58 PM
Quote from: AJCopland;812413
Why bother with an FPGA based PPC though when these things are ~£31 individually? http://www.digikey.co.uk/product-detail/en/freescale-semiconductor-nxp/MPC5200CVR400B/MPC5200CVR400B-ND/1168085

That's what powered the Efika and is a 603e based chip, why go to the hassle of designing a PPC based FPGA system?

It made sense for the 68060 as it's incredbily expensive and the end of the road for the 68k series compatibility/availability wise. Those arguments don't hold true for PPC though.


Indeed, lot faster then any fpga now and PPC's cpu's are for sale. Why bother making a FPGA implementation which needs several years of debugging.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: Pentad on August 11, 2016, 04:49:56 PM
Quote from: psxphill;812406
I'm struggling to take you seriously as you keep calling it "risk" when it is RISC.

Motorola got into the PowerPC project because IBM had persuaded Apple to switch from 680x0 to a new chip based on their POWER architecture. Apple invited Motorola to join. Apple knew that Motorola had more experience in making single chip microprocessors, but also having two sources gave them more bargaining power.


Actually, that is not true. Andy Hertzfeld gave a talk about the Mac, PowerPC, and AIM which was a fascinating look into what he fighting the rise of Wintel.  I don't have time to go into much detail (you can see his talks online anyway).

By the late 80s, everyone knew CISC was a dead end.  Apple had developed a secret quad-core RISC chip that was very powerful (for the time) but would make new Macs incompatible with the 68k software base. Sculley was not enthusiastic about this at all (I think because it was a leftover from Jobs and the mac market was pretty soft for this kind of shock by 1988).

Anyway, IBM, Motorola, and Apple watching the rise of Wintel felt this could benefit them all to some degree. IBM had POWER but no real traction, Apple riding a dead end platform, Motorola looking to help fight off Intel. The AIM alliance was a good one.

Apple's move to PowerPC was the right decision but they woefully underestimated how much of a hole the MacOS had put them in. They were never really able to move away from underlying 68k code which hurt the PowerPC performance on the Mac.  Look how long (and messy) their nano kernel was.

Running PPC BeOS on a Mac was quite an eye opening experience and really showed how much the MacOS was crippling PowerPC performance.

You know the end, WinTel would be the winner.

If you don't know, Carl Sassenrath (wrote Amiga Exec) worked on Apple's CPU along with some other amazing people.  

I apologize, I left out a lot of details but look it up.  It is a great story of struggle against WinTel that ultimately failed to be the huge success they were all hoping for.

-P
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: Heiroglyph on August 11, 2016, 05:11:45 PM
I believe very strongly that making a fast 68k compatible CPU is the right way to go for the majority of Amigans whether it is FPGA or emulation.

The majority of us have never had the opportunity to use a PPC due to cost, availability or simply a lack of interest. Most PPC software could be recompiled for 68k since assembly isn't as common.

I'll never understand why the copyright holders have abandoned the majority of their user base, the 68k users, but perhaps Apollo will give them a reason to notice us again rather than pushing platforms most of us don't own.

If not, at least we'll finally have the potential for faster 68k CPUs as FPGA technology advances and the core improves.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: psxphill on August 11, 2016, 05:42:21 PM
Quote from: Thomas Richter;812408
Sure - as said, RISC ("risk") was a fashion statement back then, and people believed that it would be a beneficial architecture. In some sense, this is true, but I would believe that history tells now something different.

It was a beneficial architecture when it was introduced, not a fashion statement at all. What happened over time however is that the percentage of a chip that is risc vs cisc became so small that for computers the benefit is towards the chip that has market traction, which was x86 and is now x64. The phone market has proved that when there are other factors in play (like power usage and licensing the cpu to use in a SOC) that a RISC cpu like Arm can still sell in large numbers.

The Pentium Pro was Intel's first chip where the code was translated into another form, which is effectively executed by a RISC cpu. The translated code is cached, so loops are fast etc.

Quote from: Thomas Richter;812408
Again, I consider this somewhat pointless given the rather small software library for PPC on the Amiga - or possibly - the typical "applications" Amiga has found today. That's of course a completely different argument.

It's in my eyes mainly a retro system - if you want to make it fast by a modern CPU, one would pick an intel design and RTG graphics and not PPC and custom chip graphics. Wait, that's called a PC, right? (-:

I'm not talking about making it as fast as a modern CPU. I'm talking about making it fast enough to run late 90's Amiga PPC software. That sounds pretty retro to me. It wouldn't hurt if it could go quicker of course, but compatibility and price are the most important aspects. Arguing to use RTG graphics instead of custom chip graphics seems a little odd, on a thread about vampire which has it's own custom graphics.

Quote from: Pentad;812419
Apple had developed a secret quad-core RISC chip that was very powerful (for the time) but would make new Macs incompatible with the 68k software base. Sculley was not enthusiastic about this at all (I think because it was a leftover from Jobs and the mac market was pretty soft for this kind of shock by 1988).

Project Aquarius was going nowhere.

http://lowendmac.com/2006/growing-apple-with-the-macintosh-the-sculley-years/

Sculley loved it, he hated that it was going nowhere and the chip designer they had hired thought it was impossible.

Quote from: Pentad;812419
Anyway, IBM, Motorola, and Apple watching the rise of Wintel felt this could benefit them all to some degree. IBM had POWER but no real traction, Apple riding a dead end platform, Motorola looking to help fight off Intel. The AIM alliance was a good one.

Motorola wasn't there to help fight off Intel, they were there to make money. Apple had decided to ditch the 680x0 cpu's, but aquarius and all the other internal projects had failed. Motorola's own RISC CPU (the 88000) was a disaster, so after IBM contacted Apple and got them excited about POWER then joining up with IBM was Motorola's only chance to hold onto some of the pie.

Apple even had an OS running on x86 before they had it running on PPC, but when that project collapsed they quickly hacked something together to run on PPC and then bought NextStep. They knew that MacOS7/8/9 were a problem, but all their efforts to move away had failed. OSX has always run on x86, even though they never sold it until they started selling x86 hardware. I suspect they regretted choosing PPC for a long time, it was only the Pentium 4 failing that gave them any cause for celebration. When Intel realised they had to do something serious and went back to the Pentium 3 design and improved it to make Intel Core, then there really was no stopping them. The PPC didn't recover and even the PS3/Xbox360 cpu cores aren't that good.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system)

But we seem to be going off topic, PPC wasn't a great choice. But it was a choice that Phase 5 made, so it would be nice to be able to run PPC software as well as taking advantage of the new software for vampire.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: guest11527 on August 11, 2016, 07:40:07 PM
Quote from: psxphill;812425
It was a beneficial architecture when it was introduced.
So it seemed, at least. There is nothing completely wrong with the observation that a simpler CPU could run faster, but what Mot and IBM underestimated is that bandwidth did not grew proportional to the clock speed of the CPU, and that compiler performance and optimization did not improve as much as they hoped for. Intel's IA64 is a failure as well, for related reasons.  Nowadays, the CPU - due to increased complexity - can perform the "compilation" of "abstract code" (say, x86 assembly) to its "raw form" much better (due to code and execution statistics) than a static compiler analysis can, and shorter instructions also help to cut down bandwidth requirements.  All, of course, if you have the power to drive this complex machinery.  
Quote from: psxphill;812425
not a fashion statement at all.
Oh, 'mon. Back in those days, it was "RISC" here, "RISC" there, all around. If you believe that engineering does not have fashion movements, you've probably not yet observed one. Currently, it's the "IoT" business and "Cloud everything" all around. Back then, "RISC" was the thing to do.  
Quote from: psxphill;812425
What happened over time however is that the percentage of a chip that is risc vs cisc became so small that for computers the benefit is towards the chip that has market traction, which was x86 and is now x64.  
Which is, deep inside, also a RISC design, but (wisely) with a backwards compatible high-level just-in-time CISC compiler. (-: Yes, that means added complexity.  
Quote from: psxphill;812425
The phone market has proved that when there are other factors in play (like power usage and licensing the cpu to use in a SOC) that a RISC cpu like Arm can still sell in large numbers.
Oh, sure. But there is also a reason why ARM has thumb code, you know? (-;  
Quote from: psxphill;812425
The Pentium Pro was Intel's first chip where the code was translated into another form, which is effectively executed by a RISC cpu. The translated code is cached, so loops are fast etc.

Clearly. But it avoids the problem of the PPC RISC design of overly long instructions and low code density, but uses a "abbreviated high-level" assembler syntax.  
Quote from: psxphill;812425
I'm not talking about making it as fast as a modern CPU. I'm talking about making it fast enough to run late 90's Amiga PPC software. That sounds pretty retro to me.
But, unlike the 68K, you *can* buy fast PPC chips. So, again, what's the point?  Or, what's the point with PPC on Amiga anyhow? As said, the software library is not exactly "huge".  
Quote from: psxphill;812425
Arguing to use RTG graphics instead of custom chip graphics seems a little odd, on a thread about vampire which has it's own custom graphics.
Who argues against RTG graphics?  
Quote from: psxphill;812425
Motorola wasn't there to help fight off Intel, they were there to make money. Apple had decided to ditch the 680x0 cpu's, but aquarius and all the other internal projects had failed. Motorola's own RISC CPU (the 88000) was a disaster, so after IBM contacted Apple and got them excited about POWER then joining up with IBM was Motorola's only chance to hold onto some of the pie.  
At the time back then, the choice made of course sense. I certainly don't argue against it. CISC seemed to run into a dead end, RISC was a fashionable new toy that made huge promises - and all the arguments were also quite reasonable, no question.  The problem is just that the development did not quite work out as expected. Memory speed fell behind raw CPU power, bandwidth and compatibility with legacy applications became more important than simplicity of the CPU design, so RISC did not met its expectations.  
Quote from: psxphill;812425
I suspect they regretted choosing PPC for a long time, it was only the Pentium 4 failing that gave them any cause for celebration.
Not only Apple. Also AMD. The Pentium 4 was really a big disaster, more designed by the needs of the marketing department than by smart engineering, driven by the need to sell CPUs by the GHz number on them.  This broke down when execution speed hit the brick wall at 4GHz, a speed at which a signal takes several clock cycles to run from one edge of a chip to another... Actually, it was not *that* unexpected as the physical limits were known. I'm not clear which miracle intel was actually hoping for.  
Quote from: psxphill;812425
When Intel realised they had to do something serious and went back to the Pentium 3 design and improved it to make Intel Core, then there really was no stopping them. The PPC didn't recover and even the PS3/Xbox360 cpu cores aren't that good.
The market was too small to allow improvement, Apple had to pay $$$ for them, and finally, the CPU design also showed its limitations, see above. If bandwidth is limited, many long and simple instructions are not the best choice. ARM targets a completely different market, where raw performance is not important, but performance per Watt is. *There*, a simpler design helps that can be upscaled to the requirements of the design. That's something ARM is really good at - customizing CPU cores for specific needs.  
Quote from: psxphill;812425
But we seem to be going off topic, PPC wasn't a great choice. But it was a choice that Phase 5 made, so it would be nice to be able to run PPC software as well as taking advantage of the new software for vampire.

No, PPC wasn't a great choice, indeed. X86 would have been a much better choice, but a choice that wouldn't have been accepted by users that are driven more by ideology than technology. The x86 chips are probably an unorthogonal mess, but they are still high performing, powerful chips.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: Rob on August 11, 2016, 08:57:42 PM
Quote from: wawrzon;812402
ppc was an attempted (and failed) solution for lack of further development on 68k front.


I hardly call PPC a failed attempt.  It was held its own against Intel hardware for quite some time and it was used in mainstream computing hardware up until 2006.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: psxphill on August 11, 2016, 09:13:04 PM
Quote from: Thomas Richter;812432
Oh, 'mon. Back in those days, it was "RISC" here, "RISC" there, all around.


Berkley RISC-I CPU outperformed every other single chip microprocessor in 1982. People talk about things that are good.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: biggun on August 11, 2016, 09:24:27 PM
Quote from: psxphill;812438
Berkley RISC-I CPU outperformed every other single chip microprocessor in 1982. People talk about things that are good.


When a RISC CPU needs in avg 2 instruction to do the same work as the CISC CPU.
And the RISC CPU can execute 1 instruction per clock -
and the CISC CPU (like 68000) needs in average 8 clocks per instruction.

Then the RISC CPU is faster.. in avg by factor x4
This is your story of the 80th.

Now if the CISC CPU upgrades and does 4 instructions in a single cycle then the CISC CPU does the amount of work of 8 RISC instructions per cycle.
This means now the 68080 CISC CPU is many times faster then the RISC.

Very easy to understand.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: wawrzon on August 11, 2016, 09:25:40 PM
Quote from: Heiroglyph;812423
I'll never understand why the copyright holders have abandoned the majority of their user base, the 68k users, but perhaps Apollo will give them a reason to notice us again rather than pushing platforms most of us don't own.


lets pray not, we have been prey to those long enough..
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: wawrzon on August 11, 2016, 09:36:48 PM
Quote from: Rob;812437
I hardly call PPC a failed attempt.  It was held its own against Intel hardware for quite some time and it was used in mainstream computing hardware up until 2006.


with apple, perhaps. for the (past) time being, but with amiga it has been a crook and a hack all along, first as a powerup/warpos nonsense, and then as if this hasnt failed enough, with so called ng ppc systems. among those morphos have proven more sensible and competent, with choosing and reaching their goals, and especially with stepping away from trying to design and establish (lol) their own ppc hardware platform. heck, it was their devs, who started it once. nevertheless even them, they have left most of the interested audience behind..
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: psxphill on August 12, 2016, 06:38:02 AM
Quote from: biggun;812439
Now if the CISC CPU upgrades and does 4 instructions in a single cycle then the CISC CPU does the amount of work of 8 RISC instructions per cycle.
This means now the 68080 CISC CPU is many times faster then the RISC.

Very easy to understand.

It is easy to understand. However the 68060 didn't do 4 instructions in a single cycle. So it sounds like you are comparing optimised vampire to an existing PPC chip, which wasn't relevant to the decision made to switch from 680x0 to PPC in the 90's.

It's also not relevant now, unless you can software emulate the PPC on vampire quicker than a phase 5 PPC board.

I'm interested in how maintainable that 4 instructions in a single cycle is. I assume that doesn't involve touching ram in any way, i.e. both code and data all fits in caches. Also how complex are the instructions?

Quote from: Thomas Richter;812432
X86 would have been a much better choice, but a choice that wouldn't have been accepted by users that are driven more by ideology than technology. The x86 chips are probably an unorthogonal mess, but they are still high performing, powerful chips.

I don't think enough Mac owners would have cared what CPU it had, as it would still have been marketed as better than a PC. Apple didn't even wait for x64 to jump to Intel and they have ditched support of x86 now. If Microsoft dropped support for x86 then there would be mass outrage, but it's socially accepted that it's ok to hate Microsoft. If you disrespect Apple then you damage the brand and then people might question why you paid extra for it in the first place.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: guest11527 on August 12, 2016, 08:12:20 AM
Quote from: psxphill;812438
Berkley RISC-I CPU outperformed every other single chip microprocessor in 1982. People talk about things that are good.

Which was about the best thing you could do in 1982 on a CISC CPU back then - but look, the "boundary conditions" changed over the time, as the complexity in the CISC cores increased, and memory bandwidth did not increase proportionally. In 1982, CISC CPUs where mostly controlled by microcode, hence slow. A 68K required multiple cycles for a single instruction, a much less complex RISC design could be "hardwired" and execute a (simpler) instruction in one or two cycles.  Now, technology advanced. 68060 was hardwired again, and could run many instructions in one cycle - and by offloading some computations to the sEOP, even multiple instructions in parallel in some cases. But complexity had its price - early releases of the 68060 were/are buggy.   It's a complexity/development cost/execution speed trade-off. In 1982, nobody believed that one could hardwire a CISC core in silicon, or those that tried have failed (Z8000, anyone?) due to complexity - and that memory bandwidth and code density was not an issue. Back then, this seemed all plausible. RISC is faster to the market, cheaper to design, simpler to upgrade, simpler to upscale, or so it seemed.  That its design parameters - lower code density - would at some point work against it was not exactly expected.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: biggun on August 12, 2016, 08:56:26 AM
Quote from: Thomas Richter;812454
RISC is faster to the market, cheaper to design, simpler to upgrade, simpler to upscale, or so it seemed.  That its design parameters - lower code density - would at some point work against it was not exactly expected.


Thomas is spot on here!

The main design goal of RISC CPUs was to be simpler and cheaper to do !
The main goal was NOT to have the fastest possible CPU - clock by clock.

A well tuned CISC is harder to develop than a RISC.
But a well tuned CISC is also faster than a RISC.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: psxphill on August 12, 2016, 05:23:06 PM
Quote from: Thomas Richter;812454
In 1982, nobody believed that one could hardwire a CISC core in silicon

No, you could do it. The problem was the size it took. Microcode allowed you to fit complex instructions into a smaller space. RISC was just an alternate way to reduce the space taken on the die. It was all about pushing the envelope as that is how you got someone to buy your product over someone elses. Once you got your CPU core size down then you could fit in more registers & larger caches.

The Pentium Pro merged CISC & RISC, it had the benefit of being able to run all the same code that a Pentium could (although 16 bit code was quit a lot slower) but was essentially a RISC chip.

The lines between RISC & CISC have blurred considerably and it matters little what the actual code you are executing, because it's likely to be translated into another form anyway.

Memory bandwidth is terrible so running uncached will seriously slow down any cpu whether it's risc or cisc. But as fetching and executing have become a less tightly coupled process, then it's probably not that important either.

First time round executing code it might make a difference, but once it's in the cache (loops or subroutines) then the internal representation is likely to be similar for the same amount of work. You can even fetch and translate code ahead of time.

If a RISC design was able to more accurately predict what code needed to be in the caches (both kept and prefetched), then it would erode any benefit the CISC design had when filling the caches. It may even end up with a positive for the RISC design.

The PS3/Xbox 360 cpu show what a mistake it is to rely on brute force, the PPC in it is very weak but it can run at a high clock speed (but then it needs to get the same performance as the more traditional PPC).

Although code density is enough of an issue that Arm ended up going with a much higher density for thumb code, it's a pity that there wasn't an Arm chip that Apple could have used at the time.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: kolla on August 12, 2016, 06:15:00 PM
Apple has used ARM since at least the Newton was developed.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: biggun on August 12, 2016, 07:27:50 PM
To clarify the open question:

Goal of the Apollo/Vampire card is _NOT_ to run PPC software.

Goal is to have a _very_ fast 68K system to run
AMIGA OS 3...
MAC OS 7,  MAC OS 8
ATARI TOS
AROS
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: psxphill on August 12, 2016, 08:14:58 PM
Quote from: biggun;812486
To clarify the open question:

Goal of the Apollo/Vampire card is _NOT_ to run PPC software.

I don't think anyone thought it was.

If a PPC and Apollo could somehow be plugged in at the same time then we wouldn't have to choose.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: kolla on August 13, 2016, 01:41:20 AM
Quote from: biggun;812486

Goal is to have a _very_ fast 68K system to run
AMIGA OS 3...
MAC OS 7,  MAC OS 8
ATARI TOS
AROS


So you plan acc cards for old 68k macs and ataris as well?
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: wawrzon on August 13, 2016, 03:24:28 AM
Quote from: kolla;812492
So you plan acc cards for old 68k macs and ataris as well?


i think if anyoune came around with an appropriate expansion design, why not. though f i observe right, you can run macos, dosbox, probably atari and soon aros with reasonable speeds on your amiga/vampire box already, let alone potential standalone system. whats wrong with it?
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: kolla on August 13, 2016, 08:43:52 AM
Nothing, the more the better. Ideally any 68k OS should run well on a 68080, it's too late to adapt the software to the hardware, but with FPGA you can adapt the hardware to the software. I would love to run *nix type OSes (old classics like NeXTStep, Apple UX, SunOS, Domain/OS, as well as modern Linux and NetBSD) on 68080 too, but as it is currently a 68EC080, missing the essential MMU, this is not possible.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: Iggy on August 13, 2016, 10:01:07 PM
All these execution per clock comments just crack me up.
If you to look at it this simplistically, a 6809 would look just as good as a 68000 in that the 6809 executes memory reads or writes in one cycle while the 68000 requires four cycles.
Of course the 68000 can do this on a bus that is twice as large, so comparing an 8 bit processor (with some limited internal 16 bit capability) to a 32 bit processor (even if it addresses memory on a 16 bit bus), is perfectly silly.
As to comparing a 200-300 MHz 68K equivalent (or even 68040 equivalent) to a PPC, that's completely absurd.
When you have your hardware, run ANY basic benchmark for CPU performance and memory bandwidth and I'll throw you back figures from a relatively slow PPC based system.
If you really think you're going to approach it, you're delusional.
There was a reason Motorola halted development of the 68K.
But then I guess you guys (and Gunnar) know better.
Right?

Look I have an A2000, and this looks tempting, but there is no real contest.
If I decide to buy a Vampire for my A2000, I'm still buying an X5000.
Because even a Tabor board would mop up a Vampire based computer.
And an X5000 is going to be much more competent than Tabor.

You guys can argue whatever you'd like, but you you can't have a separate set of facts because the truth is...well its reality.

So before you sound too much like "the moon landings were fake" conspiracy nut jobs (or worse yet, people dumb enough to buy into Donald Trump), take the tinfoil cap off your head, get a cool drink of water and think this over.

Its FPGA based, and not even a high end FPGA (which would cost big bucks), so its never going to be competitive with an even moderately modern ASIC.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: QuikSanz on August 13, 2016, 10:43:38 PM
Quote from: Iggy;812515
All these execution per clock comments just crack me up.
If you to look at it this simplistically, a 6809 would look just as good as a 68000 in that the 6809 executes memory reads or writes in one cycle while the 68000 requires four cycles.
Of course the 68000 can do this on a bus that is twice as large, so comparing an 8 bit processor (with some limited internal 16 bit capability) to a 32 bit processor (even if it addresses memory on a 16 bit bus), is perfectly silly.
As to comparing a 200-300 MHz 68K equivalent (or even 68040 equivalent) to a PPC, that's completely absurd.
When you have your hardware, run ANY basic benchmark for CPU performance and memory bandwidth and I'll throw you back figures from a relatively slow PPC based system.
If you really think you're going to approach it, you're delusional.
There was a reason Motorola halted development of the 68K.
But then I guess you guys (and Gunnar) know better.
Right?

Look I have an A2000, and this looks tempting, but there is no real contest.
If I decide to buy a Vampire for my A2000, I'm still buying an X5000.
Because even a Tabor board would mop up a Vampire based computer.
And an X5000 is going to be much more competent than Tabor.

You guys can argue whatever you'd like, but you you can't have a separate set of facts because the truth is...well its reality.

So before you sound too much like "the moon landings were fake" conspiracy nut jobs (or worse yet, people dumb enough to buy into Donald Trump), take the tinfoil cap off your head, get a cool drink of water and think this over.

Its FPGA based, and not even a high end FPGA (which would cost big bucks), so its never going to be competitive with an even moderately modern ASIC.


OS4+ is a much bigger OS so of course it needs more resources, same with all its programs.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: OlafS3 on August 13, 2016, 10:47:09 PM
Quote from: Iggy;812515
All these execution per clock comments just crack me up.
If you to look at it this simplistically, a 6809 would look just as good as a 68000 in that the 6809 executes memory reads or writes in one cycle while the 68000 requires four cycles.
Of course the 68000 can do this on a bus that is twice as large, so comparing an 8 bit processor (with some limited internal 16 bit capability) to a 32 bit processor (even if it addresses memory on a 16 bit bus), is perfectly silly.
As to comparing a 200-300 MHz 68K equivalent (or even 68040 equivalent) to a PPC, that's completely absurd.
When you have your hardware, run ANY basic benchmark for CPU performance and memory bandwidth and I'll throw you back figures from a relatively slow PPC based system.
If you really think you're going to approach it, you're delusional.
There was a reason Motorola halted development of the 68K.
But then I guess you guys (and Gunnar) know better.
Right?

Look I have an A2000, and this looks tempting, but there is no real contest.
If I decide to buy a Vampire for my A2000, I'm still buying an X5000.
Because even a Tabor board would mop up a Vampire based computer.
And an X5000 is going to be much more competent than Tabor.

You guys can argue whatever you'd like, but you you can't have a separate set of facts because the truth is...well its reality.

So before you sound too much like "the moon landings were fake" conspiracy nut jobs (or worse yet, people dumb enough to buy into Donald Trump), take the tinfoil cap off your head, get a cool drink of water and think this over.

Its FPGA based, and not even a high end FPGA (which would cost big bucks), so its never going to be competitive with an even moderately modern ASIC.

And a modern Intel/AMD-System runs cycle around your X5000 at a fraction of cost. Now what? Let Gunnar have his fun there.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: QuikSanz on August 13, 2016, 11:01:25 PM
Quote from: OlafS3;812518
And a modern Intel/AMD-System runs cycle around your X5000 at a fraction of cost. Now what? Let Gunnar have his fun there.


+1
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: guest11527 on August 13, 2016, 11:52:30 PM
Quote from: Iggy;812515
All these execution per clock comments just crack me up.
If you to look at it this simplistically, a 6809 would look just as good as a 68000 in that the 6809 executes memory reads or writes in one cycle while the 68000 requires four cycles.
Well, but that's because the 68K is microcoded. The 68060 is not, and it requires only one cycle for all simple instructions. And 4 cycles/instruction also only holds for simple ones on the 68K. I do not know about the 6809, but it is likely that this is a hardwired design. At least the 6502 was,  but of course both are much simpler, so no surprise. If you look at microcode, the Z80 required much more cycles for similar instructions - same problem.  
Quote from: Iggy;812515
As to comparing a 200-300 MHz 68K equivalent (or even 68040 equivalent) to a PPC, that's completely absurd.
To bring this back to an apples vs. apples comparison, you *can* compare it to a 233 MHz G3-PPC, which existed back then. Still have a machine sitting somewhere in the basement. I do not know what the result might be, but I wouldn't be too much surprised if the G3-PPC @ 233Mhz would - on approximately equivalent algorithms - perform worse.

Yes, of course, *that* is a pretty slow machine (an old power mac) by today's standards. Don't tell me, I'm perfectly aware of this.
Quote from: Iggy;812515
When you have your hardware, run ANY basic benchmark for CPU performance and memory bandwidth and I'll throw you back figures from a relatively slow PPC based system.
You can certainly do that, but then that's not what my software runs on. It would - at best - run under emulation under the PPC, and that gives you yet again completely different figures.

When we talk about about emulation - and we can do that of course - then what do I need a PPC for in first place? I've here a pretty nice i5 sitting in my office. fsUAE is not exactly usable on this machine due to the bad quality of the user interface and the overall integration of the system, but *if* you want to compare raw horse power, not counting the quality of the emulation, the GUI, the system integration and the performance of the chip set emulation, my immediate guess would be that this is quite a bit faster than emulation on any PPC you can buy today.

Unfortunately, that's not exactly a usable solution for me - actually neither the PPC.  
Quote from: Iggy;812515
But then I guess you guys (and Gunnar) know better.
Right?

It's a matter of the problem definition, or your requirements. Not a matter of "knowing better". If your goal is to have an Amiga system that feels like an Amiga system, then that's a perfectly fine option.  
Quote from: Iggy;812515
If I decide to buy a Vampire for my A2000, I'm still buying an X5000.
Because even a Tabor board would mop up a Vampire based computer.
And an X5000 is going to be much more competent than Tabor.
And I don't have a problem with that, either. Go, have your fun - if this is what you want, why should anyone stop you.

Just because you consider this a good hobby, does not mean I do. But that doesn't make things better or worse.  
Quote from: Iggy;812515
So before you sound too much like "the moon landings were fake" conspiracy nut jobs (or worse yet, people dumb enough to buy into Donald Trump), take the tinfoil cap off your head, get a cool drink of water and think this over.
Conspiracy? I don't think anyone here has illusions on the performance of the system, or on why the 68K development was stopped. That was certainly not a conspiracy of any kind. It was a market decision Motorola made, and a plausible one back then with the facts they had. Looking back, with what we know today, it was probably not the ideal decision, but so what. No hard feelings about it.  
Quote from: Iggy;812515
Its FPGA based, and not even a high end FPGA (which would cost big bucks), so its never going to be competitive with an even moderately modern ASIC.

Sure, and your point is? I mean, is anyone seriously considering doing - or willing to pay - an ASIC? It's not a realistic option in first place, so why bother?
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: kolla on August 14, 2016, 12:41:47 AM
For what it is worth, FS-UAE on my macbook (that isn't even "pro") runs in large rings around Vampire, as does FS-UAE my Intel NUC running DragonflyBSD... my only insensitive to get a Vampire would be if SAGA really provides improved experience of the Amiga chipset architecture, I already have excellent RTG experience of Amiga OS with UAE incarnations.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: QuikSanz on August 14, 2016, 12:48:47 AM
Quote from: kolla;812526
For what it is worth, FS-UAE on my macbook (that isn't even "pro") runs in large rings around Vampire, as does FS-UAE my Intel NUC running DragonflyBSD... my only insensitive to get a Vampire would be if SAGA really provides improved experience of the Amiga chipset architecture, I already have excellent RTG experience of Amiga OS with UAE incarnations.


My Wintel machine will remain just that! My A2000 & 4000T will continue to work just fine for AOS
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: kolla on August 14, 2016, 01:16:33 AM
Exactly. It's nice and cool with the 68080, but as long as it remains 68EC080, without FPU and without MMU - what does it hold over emulation? 64 bit this and that and new functionality is only interesting if there is software around to use it. 100% of the software library is legacy, and can make zero use of new functionality.

Does (Free)MiNT run on the 68080?
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: Iggy on August 14, 2016, 03:03:38 AM
Quote from: OlafS3;812518
And a modern Intel/AMD-System runs cycle around your X5000 at a fraction of cost. Now what? Let Gunnar have his fun there.

Seriously? I'm thrilled that Gunnar pulled this thing off.
I worked for several years for a firm that sold 68K based systems.

And its going to completely flatten any other 68K based upgrades.
For that matter, if you were comparing the Vampire to a 200-300 MHz PPC (like those on a Amiga accelerator) it might very well win.

BTW - My X64 system is faster than yours. :laugh1:
But I still like the PPC based stuff.
My over 10 year old 2.5 GHz Quad core G5 PowerMac runs Ubuntu Mate with about the same performance as my Core2 Quad (which in itself is much faster than my i7 laptop).

Its all up to what you value.

My only real problem the Gun is that we were discussing a cross platform game a few years ago, now I regularly get to hear these silly comments "we though about PPC...".
No you didn't because an FPGA based PPC would really suck compared to the real thing.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: JimDrew on August 14, 2016, 04:51:16 AM
Quote from: kolla;812530
Exactly. It's nice and cool with the 68080, but as long as it remains 68EC080, without FPU and without MMU - what does it hold over emulation?

Well, for one it runs on real hardware.

Secondly, it's faster than 132MHz PPC PowerMacs from back in the day when running FUSION.  No need for PPC... it's junk anyways.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: QuikSanz on August 14, 2016, 05:10:22 AM
Quote from: JimDrew;812534
Well, for one it runs on real hardware.

Secondly, it's faster than 132MHz PPC PowerMacs from back in the day when running FUSION.  No need for PPC... it's junk anyways.


PPC is not junk, but neither is a good 68K machine
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: klx300r on August 14, 2016, 05:26:57 AM
Quote from: QuikSanz;812535
PPC is not junk, but neither is a good 68K machine


+1 :-) FWIW I'll be buying a Vampire for my 1200 when it comes out with full FPU and mmu & at the same time enjoying my PPC miggy so all good!
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: JimDrew on August 14, 2016, 05:50:21 AM
Quote from: QuikSanz;812535
PPC is not junk, but neither is a good 68K machine

Oh no, trust me... PPC is junk.  I know it quite well!  I would use an x86 over a PPC any day.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: guest11527 on August 14, 2016, 09:31:20 AM
Quote from: JimDrew;812537
Oh no, trust me... PPC is junk.  I know it quite well!  I would use an x86 over a PPC any day.

Well, it's all a nice processor platform with a nice orthogonal assembler language which is something I can admire, but all that doesn't help.

Performance wise, x64 is really a lot better. Not Motorola's fault, of course. They don't have the same resources intel had. Or, to be fair, AMD, which really pushed x86 into the 21st century with their 64bit extensions.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: psxphill on August 14, 2016, 10:17:51 AM
Quote from: JimDrew;812537
Oh no, trust me... PPC is junk.  I know it quite well!  I would use an x86 over a PPC any day.


I'm sold, lets forget these slow fpga's. Who is going to make an i7 accelerator for the a1200?
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: guest11527 on August 14, 2016, 11:01:29 AM
Quote from: psxphill;812539
I'm sold, lets forget these slow fpga's. Who is going to make an i7 accelerator for the a1200?

Compared to a PPC accelerator or the X-something PPC machines, that's at least a much more sensible option, yes.  Well, provided you can somehow get the power into the system. But it doesn't have to be an i7 for that means. Even a mobile i5 would certainly work.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: wawrzon on August 14, 2016, 11:19:49 AM
Quote from: Thomas Richter;812540
Compared to a PPC accelerator or the X-something PPC machines, that's at least a much more sensible option, yes.  Well, provided you can somehow get the power into the system. But it doesn't have to be an i7 for that means. Even a mobile i5 would certainly work.


yeah, x86 expansion running 68k emu under jit emu, is another thing i ever suggested. one thing is, this way it wouldnt give us mmu either as it doesnt work with jit.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: psxphill on August 14, 2016, 01:41:59 PM
Quote from: wawrzon;812542
this way it wouldnt give us mmu either as it doesnt work with jit.

It could, you might even be able to use the x86 mmu/virtualisation to do it.

Then you don't need to do anything special with memory apart from endian issues.

You'd probably need to use one of the low power i7's that they use in the surface pro 4. A core m3 would probably be good enough though http://ark.intel.com/products/88198
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: wawrzon on August 14, 2016, 02:25:54 PM
Quote from: JimDrew;812537
Oh no, trust me... PPC is junk.  I know it quite well!  I would use an x86 over a PPC any day.


btw. ive heard it before from other hardware designers, but interesting, why do you think that?

edit: ohmm, sorry, youre not actually a hardware designer for what i know, but nevertheless..
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: Terminills on August 14, 2016, 03:09:56 PM
Quote from: wawrzon;812547
btw. ive heard it before from other hardware designers, but interesting, why do you think that?

edit: ohmm, sorry, youre not actually a hardware designer for what i know, but nevertheless..


iirc Jim has a long history of hardware design.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: JimDrew on August 14, 2016, 03:21:51 PM
Yep, lots of hardware designs and products besides the software I have written.

PPC is just too confined being RISC (too many instructions required to be productive compared to CISC).  When I was working on the Motorola coreless CPU project (basically a Xilinix clone with a microcode code engine that could be programmed), we got the CPU speed of the 68K emulation much faster than the 060 (much like Gunnar has done now with the Apollo core).  It had the ability to swap endians and anything we wanted to do.  Unfortunately, IBM really pushed the PPC architecture and that was the way Motorola went.

My 68040 core (with FPU and MMU) I wrote for FUSION-PC under Virtual Box for Windows runs circles around the Apollo core and WinUAE w/JIT on my 4930K Intel setup.  Most benchmark programs break due to the speed.  So, yes a CPU core running even on a low-end Intel or AMD CPU would make a better accelerator option.  Powering it would be the problem though, so I don't see this as a real viable option without having a lot of extra power supply related hardware.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: kolla on August 14, 2016, 03:59:13 PM
How does it compare against Qemu?

https://github.com/vivier/qemu-m68k/
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: Iggy on August 14, 2016, 04:38:35 PM
Quote from: JimDrew;812534
Well, for one it runs on real hardware.

Secondly, it's faster than 132MHz PPC PowerMacs from back in the day when running FUSION.  No need for PPC... it's junk anyways.

Again, hilarious, having worked with both.

BTW - 68080 would not be a good designation. That would place it immediately after the Signetics 68070, which performs worse the a standard 68000.
And the Apollo core does perform better than a 68000, just not anywhere near a PPC.

"...it's junk anyways" - Is this the point where we are supposed to descend to quips about each other's mothers?

So, once again, provide any basic benchmark that measures cpu or memory performance.
God, I feel like a bully here.
But I feel compelled to address your sniveling twitness.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: biggun on August 14, 2016, 04:57:40 PM
Quote from: Iggy;812553

So, once again, provide any basic benchmark that measures cpu or memory performance.


attached comparison 68060 versus Apollo 68080.
Result is very clear.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: Heiroglyph on August 14, 2016, 05:07:38 PM
Can we just lock or split this thread so we can discuss the original topic somewhere?

It's embarrassing how badly Amigans fit their angry, argumentative pseudo-religious stereotype.

This is why we can't get anywhere while the Atari guys can replace their whole OS and hardware from scratch. We'd rather argue over pointless details of which is the one true CPU (newsflash: they all have pros and cons) than to be pragmatic and work together.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: QuikSanz on August 14, 2016, 05:22:14 PM
Quote from: JimDrew;812537
Oh no, trust me... PPC is junk.  I know it quite well!  I would use an x86 over a PPC any day.


I have a wintel machine also, so what? The tool is picked by the job. Why wait for win7 for a quick job that Final Writer could do before the win is ready to get a password.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: Iggy on August 14, 2016, 07:14:32 PM
Quote from: biggun;812554
attached comparison 68060 versus Apollo 68080.
Result is very clear.

Hey Gunnar,
I wasn't sniping at your core, I'm damned impressed.

Nope, it was the tired old argument about ISAs.

But then I guess we could stick things in this order:
68K...PPC...X64
And I still wouldn't be happy, as I really freaking don't like the Intel.

Hey, have you ever considered just a 68K processor replacement?
I'd kill to update a old PT68K4 board with something this radical.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: Iggy on August 14, 2016, 07:24:12 PM
Quote from: Heiroglyph;812556
Can we just lock or split this thread so we can discuss the original topic somewhere?

It's embarrassing how badly Amigans fit their angry, argumentative pseudo-religious stereotype.

This is why we can't get anywhere while the Atari guys can replace their whole OS and hardware from scratch. We'd rather argue over pointless details of which is the one true CPU (newsflash: they all have pros and cons) than to be pragmatic and work together.

"...which is the one true CPU" :)
And one cpu to rule them all!
Yeah, it gets silly.

As to the Atarians, their work on their OS', and the new hardware (like FireBee)...it still works like an Atari - no thanks.
Although...since they did provide a gui-less OS for my Coldfire development board that's pretty cool.

Hey, THAT'S IT!
We need to chastise ourselves for using every other cpu option except Coldfire (not really, as I explored it and dismissed it awhile ago - but its funny).
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: kolla on August 14, 2016, 07:38:19 PM
Quote from: biggun;812554
attached comparison 68060 versus Apollo 68080.
Result is very clear.


You mean Apollo 68EC080. A 68EC060 can be overclocked quite a lot from what I have seen, so what then?
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: biggun on August 14, 2016, 08:19:51 PM
Quote from: kolla;812562
overclocked quite a lot from what I have seen, so what then?


Not sure what you ask for..

The max clockrate of the Apollo 68080 in the Vampire?
The max clockrate of the Apollo 68080 in an expensive FPGA?
The max clockrate of the Apollo 68080 implemented in an ASIC?

What is your question?
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: psxphill on August 14, 2016, 08:30:19 PM
Quote from: biggun;812564
Not sure what you ask for..

The max clockrate of the Apollo 68080 in the Vampire?
The max clockrate of the Apollo 68080 in an expensive FPGA?
The max clockrate of the Apollo 68080 implemented in an ASIC?

What is your question?

What is the speed of something that we will be able to buy and fit to an a500/a600/a1000/a1200/a2000/a3000/a4000/cdtv/cd32?
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: biggun on August 14, 2016, 08:37:34 PM
Quote from: psxphill;812566
What is the speed of something that we will be able to buy and fit to an a500/a600/a1000/a1200/a2000/a3000/a4000/cdtv/cd32?


Here is the AIBB speed comparison of the cards that you can buy TODAY for A600 / A500  / A2000 / A1000

http://www.apollo-core.com/index.htm?page=performance
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: kolla on August 14, 2016, 08:56:28 PM
Quote from: biggun;812564
Not sure what you ask for..

The max clockrate of the Apollo 68080 in the Vampire?
The max clockrate of the Apollo 68080 in an expensive FPGA?
The max clockrate of the Apollo 68080 implemented in an ASIC?

What is your question?

I am insinuating that comparing 68080 with a 68060 is so-so relevant as there is yet no way the 68080 can actually replace the 68060. I also think it is not right to call it 68080 when in 68k lingo should be named 68EC080 at this point, and then it would make more sense to compare with 68EC060, which many of us run at much higher clockrate than 50MHz.

What impact on speed would (will?) implementing MMU on the 68080 have? (and hence making it a more relevant comparison to 68060)
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: IanP on August 15, 2016, 05:51:31 AM
EC in Motorola 680x0 processor naming stands for Embedded Controller. As such it is cut down is some way(s) compared to the full version of that CPU, be it data bus width, address bus width, FPU, MMU or instruction set. Although targeted at the embedded market they are also suitable for general computer use when cost is an issue.

What the Apollo team choose to call their cores and what they choose to implement in them is up to them. The cores are not 68000, 68020, 68030, 68040 or 68060 clones in either Full or EC configurations, they implement the vast majority of (used by Amiga/Mac etc software) instructions from across the range of MC680x0 CPUs as well as new instructions not found on any MC680x0 CPU. Lack of an MMU doesn't require them to label their cores as EC. Inclusion of an FPU is planned for the future. The Apollo Cores in the Vampire boards are FAST for a 680x0 compatible FPGA core on a low cost FPGA.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: guest11527 on August 15, 2016, 07:36:56 AM
Quote from: IanP;812579
What the Apollo team choose to call their cores and what they choose to implement in them is up to them.

Yet, EC ("Economy Class") seems fitting. Motorola branded their CPUs with missing (or disabled) FPU and MMU as EC, and what we have here is a CPU core with missing FPU and MMU. So similarities are stunning.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: Sparky on August 15, 2016, 09:31:43 AM
Wow ... is nothing good enough anymore ?
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: psxphill on August 15, 2016, 09:55:13 AM
Quote from: biggun;812567
Here is the AIBB speed comparison of the cards that you can buy TODAY for A600 / A500  / A2000 / A1000

http://www.apollo-core.com/index.htm?page=performance


Where can you buy one today? All I found was a place to pre-order one.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: Sparky on August 15, 2016, 10:12:20 AM
Quote from: psxphill;812587
Where can you buy one today? All I found was a place to pre-order one.

It's not a mass produced item, so you get in the queue and as they get made they get dished out.
This is probably the best place for "how to buy" .. has link to where to go :-)
http://www.apollo-accelerators.com

I have one, so the process does work ... though maybe with a little application with the cat o'nine tails they could churn them out faster ;-)
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: AJCopland on August 15, 2016, 10:28:15 AM
Quote from: psxphill;812587
Where can you buy one today? All I found was a place to pre-order one.


http://kipper2k.com/accel600.html

That's who I got mine from, though there is a BIG backlog of orders right now.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: kolla on August 15, 2016, 01:54:45 PM
Quote from: Sparky;812586
Wow ... is nothing good enough anymore ?


Well, the 68080 in its current state is not good enough to replace my 68060 systems, that's for sure.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: Iggy on August 15, 2016, 02:30:17 PM
Quote from: Terminills;812548
iirc Jim has a long history of hardware design.

I've read Jim's quotes and whether he has a history or not seems irrelevant as he apparently either has developed biases or...he simply doesn't  know what he is talking about.
CISC vs. RISC - the important factor is IPC (or in most cases cycle per instruction).
The reason CISC seems to do more is that the instructions DO, but in how much time?

It is a question of efficiency.

AMD uses RISC at the core of all recent CISC cores.
CISC instructions are decoded internally into strings of RISC instructions.
If the CISC instructions were more efficient, they simply wouldn't bother?

I built my first computer in the '70's (you know, kind of "here's the bare board, now populate it, debug it, THEN try to get software working on it").
I continue to work with hardware to this day.

If I'd paid attention to all the "Jims" along the way, I would have made some pretty dumb decisions.

Remember, success in the market is NOT always tied solely to specific design issues.
The factors that influence  that are far more complex.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: kolla on August 15, 2016, 02:34:12 PM
Quote from: IanP;812579
EC in Motorola 680x0 processor naming stands for Embedded Controller. As such it is cut down is some way(s) compared to the full version of that CPU, be it data bus width, address bus width, FPU, MMU or instruction set. Although targeted at the embedded market they are also suitable for general computer use when cost is an issue.

What the Apollo team choose to call their cores and what they choose to implement in them is up to them. The cores are not 68000, 68020, 68030, 68040 or 68060 clones in either Full or EC configurations, they implement the vast majority of (used by Amiga/Mac etc software) instructions from across the range of MC680x0 CPUs as well as new instructions not found on any MC680x0 CPU. Lack of an MMU doesn't require them to label their cores as EC. Inclusion of an FPU is planned for the future. The Apollo Cores in the Vampire boards are FAST for a 680x0 compatible FPGA core on a low cost FPGA.


That is all well and good, so a comparison with FAST existing 680x0 solutions would be much more preferable than a comparison with the lowest possible clocked 68060.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: Iggy on August 15, 2016, 02:34:15 PM
Quote from: IanP;812579
...The Apollo Cores in the Vampire boards are FAST for a 680x0 compatible FPGA core on a low cost FPGA.

No, not really.
The 680x0 is just really slow compared to even the low-end FPGAs of today.

Its an Apples and Oranges comparison.

The former started out about 30 years ago.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: guest11527 on August 15, 2016, 03:00:46 PM
Quote from: Iggy;812595
AMD uses RISC at the core of all recent CISC cores.
CISC instructions are decoded internally into strings of RISC instructions.
If the CISC instructions were more efficient, they simply wouldn't bother?
So does intel. You seem confused.  

The point why CISC works better these days is because the instructions are shorter, and memory bandwidth and cache capacity matters more than back then.  

Shorter, more powerful instructions -> more instructions fit into the cache, more work is done per instruction.

Once the instruction is in the internal wirings of the CPU, it does not really matter anymore. The CPU can operate at the full clock rate, and *there* it makes sense to split the instructions up into smaller units because you can pipeline the pieces. It's much more convenient for the CPU core.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: guest11527 on August 15, 2016, 03:03:55 PM
Quote from: Iggy;812597
No, not really.
The 680x0 is just really slow compared to even the low-end FPGAs of today.
Huh? How fast an FPGA is depends on what it is programmed to do. Yes, an FPGA will be slower than an ASIC, and that will be slower than raw silicon. But we don't have any.

Yet, technology advanced, and an FPGA can be programmed to be faster than raw silicon back then. That's not surprising.

What might be interesting in how far the FPGA hardware "emulation" performs compared to a software emulation on top of a PPC. I wouldn't hold my breath, but my best guess is that the FPGA is here the better option.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: wawrzon on August 15, 2016, 03:05:58 PM
Quote from: Iggy;812597
No, not really.
The 680x0 is just really slow compared to even the low-end FPGAs of today.

Its an Apples and Oranges comparison.

The former started out about 30 years ago.


not long ago, before igor came around and made his first attempts as what appeared to become 68000 decelerator best case, every regular discussion about possibility of an 68k fpga accelerator led to agreement, that it isnt workable, at least beyond 68000 at the speed equivalent of 68030/25, as tg68k was. tg is probably most advanced, at least when it comes to open source 68k cores, and has not seen any more development for years, afair some bitfield instructions have been added, but thats it.

so maybe it is just overall inability and lack of creativity of amiga fans. but in current comparison vampire cards are fast and cheap. i know that you always make bold statements, as when you promissed to deliver an os4 ppc platform within a year, but you are talking here about a real project and people doing actual development. some respect is due, imho.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: Acill on August 15, 2016, 03:24:41 PM
Hey can we get back on topic of this thread please? It would be nice to see a moderator move these last several replies to a new thread about the processors they are talking about and leave the stuff about the vampire in here. I am getting a bit tired of seeing the off topic stuff when I want to read more about the new accelerators.

:furious::rtfm:
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: Iggy on August 15, 2016, 05:00:23 PM
Quote from: Thomas Richter;812598
So does intel. You seem confused.  

The point why CISC works better these days is because the instructions are shorter, and memory bandwidth and cache capacity matters more than back then.  

Shorter, more powerful instructions -> more instructions fit into the cache, more work is done per instruction.

Once the instruction is in the internal wirings of the CPU, it does not really matter anymore. The CPU can operate at the full clock rate, and *there* it makes sense to split the instructions up into smaller units because you can pipeline the pieces. It's much more convenient for the CPU core.

That IS a good point, but confused? Not really.
A little bit it favor of one approach, a little for the other.
Using coarse definitions like CISC or RISC is somewhat deceptive.
How would you class specific processors?
For instance, take Coldfire.
It certainly has some reduction compared to the 68060.
But is it an RISC cpu?
After all, its still an offshoot of the 68K family.
Then there is ARM which grows upward in its higher end cpus, and yet strives to service the lower end with a more compact version of its basic instructions.
RISC? Of course, but one that strives to compete in the higher end (where CISC tends to dominate) and in the low end (where simpler cpus provide performance advantages (doubt me? seen any CISC Intel based cpus in cell phone?).
Then there is Power.
Risc?
Well...that was the original intention anyway.
And it holds true if you compare it to Intel's current lineup.

One or the other?
Not a choice I am making, I use whatever works best)
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: kolla on August 15, 2016, 05:09:57 PM
Aside from x86, what other genuine CISC architectures are still alive?
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: Iggy on August 15, 2016, 05:18:53 PM
Quote from: Thomas Richter;812599
Huh? How fast an FPGA is depends on what it is programmed to do. Yes, an FPGA will be slower than an ASIC, and that will be slower than raw silicon. But we don't have any.

Yet, technology advanced, and an FPGA can be programmed to be faster than raw silicon back then. That's not surprising.

What might be interesting in how far the FPGA hardware "emulation" performs compared to a software emulation on top of a PPC. I wouldn't hold my breath, but my best guess is that the FPGA is here the better option.

OK...now you have managed to confuse me.
Yes, faster, like ALL modern silicon, FPGAs have benefited from a reduction in process.
So, to give you a crude example, I can run a 6809 in a CycloneIII  based system (like my Altera DE-1) at 25 MHz.
Fastest legacy compatible?
The 63C09 which is listed at 3 MHz (although I run those at 3.58, and some have them clocked at 4 MHz or higher).

680x0?
Exactly the same.  Slow in legacy hardware, faster in newer FPGA based designs.

So crediting Gunnar for the speed of the device is completely deceptive.
And we haven't even addressed the ability to do things in in the FPGA re-implementation that weren't done in the legacy design (these are factors you CAN credit Gunnar for some of, and frankly, they are more important).

So...yes, when running older designs via FPGA there will always be improvement.
Newer designs?
Always a performance reduction.

Any other issues, Thomas?

BTW - FPGA emulation versus the use of a higher end cpu?
I want to know about that answer too.
The factors are complex.
The speed of a newer cpu would be uniformly much higher, but as someone who has had a hand in 6809 emulation under the 68000, I can tell you there is a great deal lost in the interpretation and translation.

However...I wouldn't get ready to inflate yourself at this point as we are talking about FPGAs that only run at about 10% of the speed of dedicated silicon.
Would a Vampire based system beat a PPC in the execution of 68K code?
My guess is that it would be closer to a draw.

Then there are the legacy Amiga elements outside the cpu that the FPGA provides for.
That will get really interesting when it come to comparisions.

However, a decent PC running something like UAE would probably have some advantages in a few areas (and the Vampire would in others).
Again, too complex to address in theory, lets benchmark.

Oh, sorry, one last thing.
What would the Apollo core manage in an ASIC?
Now there is an interesting proposal.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: guest11527 on August 15, 2016, 06:31:23 PM
Quote from: Iggy;812605
How would you class specific processors?
By the instruction set. Not by its internal workings.  
Quote from: Iggy;812605
For instance, take Coldfire.
It certainly has some reduction compared to the 68060.
But is it an RISC cpu?
No. Unlike RISC CPUs, it is not a load/store architecture, i.e. it supports instructions such as "add.l d0,-(a0)" which affects memory as a side effect of the instruction. This has a couple of implications on exception handling - and makes it much harder to recover from them.  
Quote from: Iggy;812605
Then there is ARM which grows upward in its higher end cpus, and yet strives to service the lower end with a more compact version of its basic instructions.
RISC? Of course, but one that strives to compete in the higher end (where CISC tends to dominate) and in the low end (where simpler cpus provide performance advantages (doubt me? seen any CISC Intel based cpus in cell phone?).
I do not know ARM well enough to tell, but given the size of the instruction and the number of registers, it is very much on the RISC side. Intel does have low-end CPUs (Atom), but they are not very successful marketing them.  
Quote from: Iggy;812605
Then there is Power.
Risc?
Well...that was the original intention anyway.
And it holds true if you compare it to Intel's current lineup.
POWER is very much on the RISC side.    
Quote from: Iggy;812605
Not a choice I am making, I use whatever works best)

Exactly. And that's precisely the point. My problem is to execute 68K programs. A PPC is not precisely good at it. It requires a software emulation layer, and that makes it comparably slow for the problem I want to solve. I cannot tell you how well it performs. I can only tell you how well my i5 here in the office performs at this problem. With all the emulation layers around it, I'm not very convinced that this is a good solution.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: wawrzon on August 15, 2016, 08:37:49 PM
Quote from: Thomas Richter;812618
Exactly. And that's precisely the point. My problem is to execute 68K programs. A PPC is not precisely good at it. It requires a software emulation layer, and that makes it comparably slow for the problem I want to solve. I cannot tell you how well it performs. I can only tell you how well my i5 here in the office performs at this problem. With all the emulation layers around it, I'm not very convinced that this is a good solution.


you re feeding iggy ;)

 what concens performance we had made some tests once upon a time, years ago, with mixed up float-integer real life apps, like ffmpeg  and ppc emulated 68k rather well (on os4) afair clock by clock. that means s 604 @ 150mhz was three times as fast as 060 @ 50mhz, but im citing from memory and i wont take responsibility for that now. certainly it doesnt mean much even on a single core in comparison to an intel/amd wit jit today. it night havw in the nineties though. dumb, the artificial ppc ideology is lasting here till today.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: psxphill on August 15, 2016, 09:34:52 PM
Quote from: Thomas Richter;812618
I can only tell you how well my i5 here in the office performs at this problem. With all the emulation layers around it, I'm not very convinced that this is a good solution.


Your i5 running what software? If it's winuae then you've got the chipset emulation and windows that wouldn't be running. Once you only have to worry about emulating instructions and not counting cycles etc then you can emulate much more efficiently.

Putting an intel chip onto an amiga motherboard might seem like blasphemy, but it would have even less overhead than amithlon. The only annoyance is big vs little endian. For bytes you just xor the address with 3, for words you xor the address with 2 and dwords are the same. Which works great for aligned accesses (which for 68000 code is fine as it can only do aligned accesses). For unaligned accesses you can either put in a check and branch on every read/write to memory, or x86 can enable unaligned access checking and it will then throw an exception & get the exception handler to figure out what to do. If you are doing a lot of unaligned accesses the former is better, if you are doing very few unaligned accesses then the later is better. But it doesn't look like you can do it on windows, if you don't have an os getting in the way then it's a lot easier.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26919269/how-to-enable-alignment-exceptions-for-my-process-on-x64

I found out about a similar situation recently, on later slim playstation 2's (SCPH-7500x or later), the IOP (which handles IO and running PS1 games) is emulated by a PPC chip. The PPC code pretty much just runs an emulation of the cpu code, with only very minimal hardware emulation.

The best implementation would essentially be a modern bridge board, so you could run pc software on it at the same time as running amiga software. Or have it run a 68k emulator and access the amiga motherboard resources. Bonus points if you can make the keyboard and mouse appear as standard pc peripherals, not sure what you'd do about the floppy drive. But it's a dream, power would be tricky but doable, cooling would probably be harder.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: guest11527 on August 15, 2016, 10:07:53 PM
Quote from: psxphill;812627
Your i5 running what software?
Several. It's a Linux system. I've tried eUAE, with rather mixed results giving me a system that boots incredibly slow even when emulating a 68040 at full speed (no speed brake active, really), so slow that I can see the workbench drawing the background image tile by tile. Then after a minute, it seems to recover and then works  for *most* things at acceptable speed. Something's broken.

I've tried fsUAE, which I cannot even use due to its interface. I've found no menu or no button how to setup a harddisk, or to define the kickstart, so I gave up before I could measure anything. It's ok to insert a game disk - that's something I see in the user interface. Unfortunately, I'm not really into games.

I've put *a lot* of work into vamos in the last year, which runs acceptable, on top of the musashi 68K emulator. It's not a particularly fair comparison because it is not a high-performance emulator. The speed is better than my 68060, but not stunning. Without having made detailed measurements, I would say that this is probably a factor of around two at most. Workable, but nothing to call home about. As said, it's a simple emulator, no JIT. Gets the job done I wanted to do, but probably nothing to build a hardware around it.  
Quote from: psxphill;812627
Putting an intel chip onto an amiga motherboard might seem like blasphemy, but it would have even less overhead than amithlon. The only annoyance is big vs little endian.  
It's no more or no less "blasphemy" than putting a PPC on it. In the end, if running "foreign" code on it, an intel is considerably more useful than a PPC. At least, there is a software library for it. Concerning emulation, I wouldn't hold my breath - but as long as you have the chipset available instead of depending on emulation, it might be more workable than eUAE.

Quote from: psxphill;812627
The best implementation would essentially be a modern bridge board, so you could run pc software on it at the same time as running amiga software. Or have it run a 68k emulator and access the amiga motherboard resources. Bonus points if you can make the keyboard and mouse appear as standard pc peripherals, not sure what you'd do about the floppy drive. But it's a dream, power would be tricky but doable, cooling would probably be harder.


Well, that sounds much more like a plan than the PPC experiments here in Amiga land, if you ask me. It would also give you a computer that could do something productive (ehem) if you don't want to run it on an Amiga.

The problem with emulation is really that - depending on what you emulate - the performance might be "very reasonable" to "dog slow", and that on exactly the same machine. See my experience with eUAE. Depending on what I do, it is quite acceptable (excluding anoying user interface glitches, another discussion) to "unbearably slow", as soon as you do something with the chipset.

Yet again, it is a matter of your problem definition: For me, the primary purpose is 68K code execution, and *for that* the vampire is just an excellent solution (or might become one, depending on your needs). A x64 might also be a *workable* solution, with an added bonus on top that you could also run something "useful" and "productive" (i.e. "non-Amiga", excuse the irony) on it.  

What I need a PPC for I still haven't really found out. Nice machine, sure. But that's all about it. Yes, I do have an old G3 Power Mac at home, 233Mhz, ATI graphics. Works - that's the best to say about it.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: psxphill on August 15, 2016, 10:24:23 PM
Quote from: Thomas Richter;812630
What I need a PPC for I still haven't really found out.

Need? Isn't this all just digital pornography?

There are some PPC demos that I'd like to be able to run. There are demos that need a faster 680x0 than ever existed as they were purely written for and tested on *uae.

Other than that it would probably just sit there looking cool.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: kolla on August 16, 2016, 08:53:48 AM
Quote from: Thomas Richter;812630

I've tried fsUAE, which I cannot even use due to its interface. I've found no menu or no button how to setup a harddisk, or to define the kickstart, so I gave up before I could measure anything. It's ok to insert a game disk - that's something I see in the user interface.


My mind boggles - I run FS-UAE on macOS, Linux and DragonFlyBSD, building it myself from git, using fs-uae launcher as GUI - that you, a skilled self acclaimed Linux developer, is not capable of getting it to work on... Linux - is a bit absurd.

Quote
I've put *a lot* of work into vamos in the last year, which runs acceptable, on top of the musashi 68K emulator. It's not a particularly fair comparison because it is not a high-performance emulator. The speed is better than my 68060, but not stunning. Without having made detailed measurements, I would say that this is probably a factor of around two at most. Workable, but nothing to call home about. As said, it's a simple emulator, no JIT. Gets the job done I wanted to do, but probably nothing to build a hardware around it.   It's no more or no less "blasphemy" than putting a PPC on it. In the end, if running "foreign" code on it, an intel is considerably more useful than a PPC. At least, there is a software library for it. Concerning emulation, I wouldn't hold my breath - but as long as you have the chipset available instead of depending on emulation, it might be more workable than eUAE.


Why not give Qemu a go, it is currently used by Debian Linux/m68k team (and myself for Gentoo Linux/m68k):

https://github.com/vivier/qemu-m68k
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: clebin on August 16, 2016, 12:03:42 PM
Quote from: Thomas Richter;812630
I've tried fsUAE, which I cannot even use due to its interface. I've found no menu or no button how to setup a harddisk, or to define the kickstart, so I gave up before I could measure anything. It's ok to insert a game disk - that's something I see in the user interface. Unfortunately, I'm not really into games.

At a guess, you downloaded the wrong version, ie. without the Launcher (listed as emulator only (No configuration GUI)). That requires you to have or create a text config file.

Make sure you download the one with FS-UAE Launcher and then you can set up and save a configuration with hard-disk/kickstart/etc just like in WinUAE.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: Dandy on August 16, 2016, 12:22:12 PM
Quote from: psxphill;812627


...
Putting an intel chip onto an amiga motherboard might seem like blasphemy, but it would have even less overhead than amithlon. The only annoyance is big vs little endian.
...
The best implementation would essentially be a modern bridge board, so you could run pc software on it at the same time as running amiga software.
...



Hummm.
If something like a "realtime endian converter chip" existed and would be used in conjunction with an Intel CPU for an Amiga motherboard or accelerator board - could that work?

I mean - as far as I understand all the hardware talk - Amiga code should run on Intel CPUs, once the endianess of the code is changed, right?
Or did I get it completely wrong?

Does something like an "endianess converter" chip exist?
I seem to remember having read somewhere that there actually are CPUs where the endianess does not matter - it is changed "on the fly", IIRC. So there must exist something like an "endianess converter" chip, right?
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: psxphill on August 16, 2016, 02:04:44 PM
Quote from: Dandy;812659
I mean - as far as I understand all the hardware talk - Amiga code should run on Intel CPUs, once the endianess of the code is changed, right?
Or did I get it completely wrong?

Does something like an "endianess converter" chip exist?
I seem to remember having read somewhere that there actually are CPUs where the endianess does not matter - it is changed "on the fly", IIRC. So there must exist something like an "endianess converter" chip, right?

Amiga code won't run on Intel CPUs unless it's translated, but once translated it's usually the memory accessing that takes a lot of the emulation time. In this environment you could simplify everything apart from the endian.

Some CPU's can just switch between all instructions using big or little endian, like some PPC's (although some are fixed little or big endian).

An endian conversion chip is possible in theory, but in practice it would need to be inserted inside the intel cpu because when accessing the data cache the signals don't ever escape the chip. Disabling the cache would be far worse for performance than doing the endian conversion in software. Converting a 68000 to little endian on the other hand would be trivial.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: kolla on August 16, 2016, 03:30:03 PM
The major issue with endianess comes when you have native software sharing memory with software running under emulation, as Amiga OS is all about sharing the memory.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: psxphill on August 16, 2016, 04:35:47 PM
Quote from: kolla;812663
The major issue with endianess comes when you have native software sharing memory with software running under emulation, as Amiga OS is all about sharing the memory.

That is a problem if you want little endian AROS and big endian AROS in the same memory map. Amithlon solved the problem with an alternative GCC build that automatically converts x86 to big endian. So you can build native code that runs in the same memory map, but the memory reads/writes are slower because of the overhead.

The emulator always has to do the endian conversion, although there are various ways you could try to reduce the overhead.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: Iggy on August 16, 2016, 10:13:41 PM
Quote from: Thomas Richter;812630
Several. It's a Linux system. I've tried eUAE, with rather mixed results giving me a system that boots incredibly slow even when emulating a 68040 at full speed (no speed brake active, really), so slow that I can see the workbench drawing the background image tile by tile. Then after a minute, it seems to recover and then works  for *most* things at acceptable speed. Something's broken.

I've tried fsUAE, which I cannot even use due to its interface. I've found no menu or no button how to setup a harddisk, or to define the kickstart, so I gave up before I could measure anything. It's ok to insert a game disk - that's something I see in the user interface. Unfortunately, I'm not really into games.

I've put *a lot* of work into vamos in the last year, which runs acceptable, on top of the musashi 68K emulator. It's not a particularly fair comparison because it is not a high-performance emulator. The speed is better than my 68060, but not stunning. Without having made detailed measurements, I would say that this is probably a factor of around two at most. Workable, but nothing to call home about. As said, it's a simple emulator, no JIT. Gets the job done I wanted to do, but probably nothing to build a hardware around it.   It's no more or no less "blasphemy" than putting a PPC on it. In the end, if running "foreign" code on it, an intel is considerably more useful than a PPC. At least, there is a software library for it. Concerning emulation, I wouldn't hold my breath - but as long as you have the chipset available instead of depending on emulation, it might be more workable than eUAE.

 

Well, that sounds much more like a plan than the PPC experiments here in Amiga land, if you ask me. It would also give you a computer that could do something productive (ehem) if you don't want to run it on an Amiga.

The problem with emulation is really that - depending on what you emulate - the performance might be "very reasonable" to "dog slow", and that on exactly the same machine. See my experience with eUAE. Depending on what I do, it is quite acceptable (excluding anoying user interface glitches, another discussion) to "unbearably slow", as soon as you do something with the chipset.

Yet again, it is a matter of your problem definition: For me, the primary purpose is 68K code execution, and *for that* the vampire is just an excellent solution (or might become one, depending on your needs). A x64 might also be a *workable* solution, with an added bonus on top that you could also run something "useful" and "productive" (i.e. "non-Amiga", excuse the irony) on it.  

What I need a PPC for I still haven't really found out. Nice machine, sure. But that's all about it. Yes, I do have an old G3 Power Mac at home, 233Mhz, ATI graphics. Works - that's the best to say about it.


G3 @233? Yes that would be painful. Rather like trying to run an old Pentium cup.
As I have said before, I have a quad core 2.5 G5 Power Mac running Ubuntu Mate.
More than powerful enough.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: JimDrew on August 17, 2016, 02:14:35 AM
One of the things that was added to the Apollo core is the ability to reorder any bits using a single instruction.  There is also the capability to move from memory to a register (vice versa) doing a byte swap and/or word swap.

PCx is the PC emulation that I wrote.  Intel is in fact backwards endian from Motorola.  So, every word and longword fetch for the instruction look to emulate the x86 CPU requires byte/word swapping.  This adds a lot of extra time.  So, I made a version of PCx for the Vampire board that uses the new instructions... I see maybe a 5% increase in speed over the stock PCx.  Why?  The pipeline architecture is so good in the Apollo core that swaps are virtually absorbed.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: JimDrew on August 17, 2016, 02:15:43 AM
One of the things that was added to the Apollo core is the ability to reorder any bits using a single instruction.  There is also the capability to move from memory to a register (vice versa) doing a byte swap and/or word swap.

PCx is the PC emulation that I wrote.  Intel is in fact backwards endian from Motorola.  So, every word and longword fetch for the instruction look to emulate the x86 CPU requires byte/word swapping.  This adds a lot of extra time.  So, I made a version of PCx for the Vampire board that uses the new instructions... I see maybe a 5% increase in speed over the stock PCx.  Why?  The pipeline architecture is so good in the Apollo core that swaps are virtually absorbed.  Kuddos to Gunnar.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: guest11527 on August 17, 2016, 07:21:03 AM
Quote from: JimDrew;812673
So, I made a version of PCx for the Vampire board that uses the new instructions... I see maybe a 5% increase in speed over the stock PCx.  Why?  The pipeline architecture is so good in the Apollo core that swaps are virtually absorbed.

Actually, that doesn't surprise me that much. Given the overall amount of cycles an emulator has to spend to emulate a host CPU - instruction fetch, operation and generation of condition codes - the endian swap is really a minor contribution to the overall execution time. I would guess you would see a similar increase if you would compare a little endian emulation on a (native) 68K with a emulation of a (non-existing) big-endian emulation on the same hardware.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: gertsy on August 17, 2016, 08:27:58 AM
Quote from: Oldsmobile_Mike;812371
Just remembered. I recall hearing a while back that the Vampires weren't compatible with Zorro slot expansions. Installing one would render all your other cards inoperable. I wonder if this has been addressed yet?

Yeahbut is it Zorro or a2000 cpu slot?  Pic looks cpu slot to me.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: magnetic on August 17, 2016, 11:24:03 AM
Hey Jim
I was very happy to hear that you are now part of the Vampire project! Congratulations!
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: magnetic on August 17, 2016, 11:30:09 AM
Quote from: biggun;812554
attached comparison 68060 versus Apollo 68080.
Result is very clear.


Gunne, congratulations on the continued success of the Apollo and Vampire project.Thanks for all the hardwork you and the team put in.  The speeds are impressive. I had the 600 vampire v1 and used to test cores. Im sure its come a long way. My main hope and wish is for the full MMU and FPU support. I need this in my classic amiga. Also the full usage of A2000 zorro and vid slots. Is this supported in A2k version? One more question if you dont mind will it work with CDTV and be able to close the case? (vampire v500)
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: jack-3d on August 17, 2016, 02:05:18 PM
Simple this is the only reason I bought A2000 recently. I think this Amiga model deserves fast accelerator way more then A500 or 600. Waiting for the pre-order moment ;o)
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: kolla on August 17, 2016, 02:19:24 PM
Quote from: gertsy;812677
Yeahbut is it Zorro or a2000 cpu slot?  Pic looks cpu slot to me.


???

You put the Vampire in an adapter that fits into the CPU slot of the A2000, _or_ you just pull out the 68000 and insert the Vampire there, but that may not fit so well inside the A2000, and in any case it does not matter.

A2000 only has 16 bit Zorro2 slots that were made with 68000 in mind, and these will work well with Vampire.

What would _not_ work, is using current Apollo core with Zorro3 cards, but at this point that is not so relevant, as there are no Vampire cards for A3000(T)/A4000(T) systems.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: gertsy on August 18, 2016, 12:07:51 AM
Quote from: kolla;812691
???

You put the Vampire in an adapter that fits into the CPU slot of the A2000, _or_ you just pull out the 68000 and insert the Vampire there, but that may not fit so well inside the A2000, and in any case it does not matter.

A2000 only has 16 bit Zorro2 slots that were made with 68000 in mind, and these will work well with Vampire.

What would _not_ work, is using current Apollo core with Zorro3 cards, but at this point that is not so relevant, as there are no Vampire cards for A3000(T)/A4000(T) systems.


Thanks for that. There you go @oldsmobile_mike. Your answer from an authoritative source.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: Oldsmobile_Mike on August 18, 2016, 03:41:07 AM
Quote from: gertsy;812726
Thanks for that. There you go @oldsmobile_mike. Your answer from an authoritative source.

That's an authoritative source?  :lol:

Kidding, kidding.  Thanks for the clarification!  :D
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: gertsy on August 18, 2016, 05:49:31 AM
@Oldsmobile_mike. You'd be keen to get one for your 2k..?
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: biggun on August 18, 2016, 07:54:08 AM
To prevent misunderstandings here some facts:

* Apollo 68080 support _ALL_ CPU instructions of the 68060 and 68040.
The instruction set of the Apollo 68080 is 100% supporting the 68k family.

* Zorro Cards run just fine with Apollo 68080.
We ran several cards in AMIGA 2000.

* We also assume that Zorro 3 cards will run just fine. As we have no Apollo Card for A4000 yet, we can not prove this today - but there is no reason why Zorro 3 card should not just run fine.

* Apollo 68080 is not GPL but you can perfectly legal combine it with GPL VHDL in the same FPGA.
The legal requirement for instantiating several FPGA designs in the same FPGA is that each design is an separate entity for which its license then is valid.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: guest11527 on August 18, 2016, 09:01:38 AM
Quote from: biggun;812734
* Apollo 68080 support _ALL_ CPU instructions of the 68060 and 68040.
The instruction set of the Apollo 68080 is 100% supporting the 68k family.
Really? The following are valid instructions on a 68040:

movec a0,srp ?
pflush (a0) ?
ptestr (a1) ?
fsqrt.x fp0,fp1 ?
movec d0,sfc ?
movec dfc,d1 ?
moves.l (a0),d3 ?

Quote from: biggun;812734
* Apollo 68080 is not GPL but you can perfectly legal combine it with GPL VHDL in the same FPGA.
The legal requirement for instantiating several FPGA designs in the same FPGA is that each design is an separate entity for which its license then is valid.
Did you ask the folks from the FSF about this? The question is whether this is considered "linking" or not. It sounds potentially like a grey area to me.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: kolla on August 18, 2016, 04:31:20 PM
Quote from: biggun;812734
* We also assume that Zorro 3 cards will run just fine. As we have no Apollo Card for A4000 yet, we can not prove this today - but there is no reason why Zorro 3 card should not just run fine.

There are plenty of hurdles to work around to get Zorro3 working - and it is one thing to support the spec, another to actually support all the trick&hacks to support all the cards out there.

Both A3000 and A4000 make use of the MMUs in the 68030 and 68040 respectively to work around issues.

Quote
As the 68040.library requires an MMU to map address space, the fix
described above will not work on systems with an MC68EC040.  Because
burst mode on the 68040 is activated along with the cache, there is
no way to prevent a 68EC040-equipped Amiga from doing full line
bursts when accessing cachable address space.  This means a 68EC040
cannot prevent the excessive reads and writes when reading
non-cachable Zorro III devices that reside in cachable address space.
A 68EC040-equipped Amiga will experience a significant decrease in
performance when accessing non-cachable Zorro III devices.  For this
reason we cannot recommend that anyone use a 68EC040 (or any future
68000 series CPU that has no MMU) as the CPU on a Zorro III bus
system.

http://amigadev.elowar.com/read/ADCD_2.1/AmigaMail_Vol2_guide/node0161.html
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: guest11527 on August 18, 2016, 04:41:12 PM
Quote from: kolla;812751
Both A3000 and A4000 make use of the MMUs in the 68030 and 68040 respectively to work around issues.



http://amigadev.elowar.com/read/ADCD_2.1/AmigaMail_Vol2_guide/node0161.html

Yes, indeed. While in principle even the ECs can disable caching by means of the TTx registers, their granularity is "somewhat limited" to 16MB, too coarse to be useful, and there are not enough registers available (ITT0,ITT1,DTT0,DTT1) to allow a flexible setup as required by Zorro-III. For Zorro-II, the story is somewhat simpler: Disable caches in the entire lower 16MB window, and off you go (or.. crawl).

That's, however, not quite what Gunnar offers. As far as I understand, they have some sort of unit that can control caching, though it remains unclear to me to which extend it is flexible enough to allow the above.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: kolla on August 18, 2016, 04:45:58 PM
Quote from: biggun;812734

* Apollo 68080 is not GPL but you can perfectly legal combine it with GPL VHDL in the same FPGA.
The legal requirement for instantiating several FPGA designs in the same FPGA is that each design is an separate entity for which its license then is valid.


I guess that will be settled in court at some point, the Amiga way :)
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: Oldsmobile_Mike on September 27, 2016, 08:29:51 PM
Found another picture of a Vampire installed in an Amiga 2000 on one of the Google+ forums.  (picture attached)

Original source:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+SimoKoivukoski/posts/XQf5X281YDg?cfem=1

I haven't compared this to my A2000 but off-hand I don't think they're getting particularly good speeds.  Maybe it's the old version of AmiTCP mentioned in the post that they're using?  Bet it'd be faster with a better stack.  :)
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: psxphill on September 27, 2016, 11:59:12 PM
Quote from: Thomas Richter;812755
That's, however, not quite what Gunnar offers. As far as I understand, they have some sort of unit that can control caching, though it remains unclear to me to which extend it is flexible enough to allow the above.

I'm sure he can make it flexible enough, he just refuses to make it compatible with old software. The 68040 issue may not be applicable if he's not doing bus accesses in the same way.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: guest11527 on September 28, 2016, 02:28:49 AM
Quote from: psxphill;814506
I'm sure he can make it flexible enough, he just refuses to make it compatible with old software.
That's an ongoing discussion. I personally would be "happy enough" if the core would be powerful enough to at least allow an emulation in software.

Quote from: psxphill;814506
The 68040 issue may not be applicable if he's not doing bus accesses in the same way.
There are two problems of the 68040. The first is that it does bursting for cachable regions, which is not acceptable for Zorro-III I/O regions. This is the bus problem you mention.

The second problem is the cache granularity of 16 bytes per entry. The 68040 cannot see modifications of RAM in Zorro space only, and a dirty cache line is always written back completely, regardless of which individual entry is dirty. That is at least the source of the DMA problem and (one) source of the need for CachePreDMA/CachePostDMA().
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: psxphill on September 28, 2016, 09:27:59 AM
Quote from: Thomas Richter;814510
The second problem is the cache granularity of 16 bytes per entry. The 68040 cannot see modifications of RAM in Zorro space only, and a dirty cache line is always written back completely, regardless of which individual entry is dirty. That is at least the source of the DMA problem and (one) source of the need for CachePreDMA/CachePostDMA().

That again can be solved by deviating from the 040/060 and having byte granularity in the write cache. My guess is that Gunnar can't see what we're making a fuss over. However I'd rather see the 68060 replicated warts and all, at least as a fallback option.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: wawrzon on September 28, 2016, 12:08:27 PM
Quote from: psxphill;814518
My guess is that Gunnar can't see what we're making a fuss over.


likely. but the fuss you are making is wasted with the uninvolved. get touch with the team and contribute if you think its worth. however if the problem doesnt show with non dma systems as a600 then it can be ignored for the time being. when vampire becomes available for zorro3 systems and problems appear the core can be adjusted.

Quote
However I'd rather see the 68060 replicated warts and all, at least as a fallback option.


you keep telling this. but this is a different construction i fear. you wont make it hapen simply insisting. as you may recall the team delivered most if not all features demanded on forums, such as movep (?) or bitfields in hardware, but they will do this on teir own schedule, i fear.
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: psxphill on September 28, 2016, 01:08:04 PM
Quote from: wawrzon;814523
likely. but the fuss you are making is wasted with the uninvolved.


Who knows where it will lead, it doesn't particularly waste my time.

I've not given up on Apollo yet, but I'm also looking at other fpga systems (not amiga targetted). It's not been announced yet and I'm still unsure whether that one will also be run by an unfriendly overlord..
Title: Re: A2080 i.e. Vampire 500 V2 on an Amiga 2000
Post by: Iggy on September 29, 2016, 01:21:27 AM
Quote from: psxphill;814525
...I'm also looking at other fpga systems (not amiga targetted). It's not been announced yet and I'm still unsure whether that one will also be run by an unfriendly overlord..

hah! now that IS funny. :hammer: