Apollo Team announces the Vampire V4

[mikej]

Hold on. If that's the goal, why do you start with the 68000 design in first place? It's purely microcode-based, and certainly completely outdated. If you'd want a "fast" 68000 design, why not start with a better performing member of the family?

I need a cycle accurate 68000. I can extend this to 68020 and faster performance, but I think ARM emulation for the CPU core is the way to go for 68060/MMU/FPU etc.

[wawrzon]

MMU is problematic with jit correct.

thanks for confirmation. thats what also toni says however psxphill has been always challenging that statement.

With jit, and note the ARM is Only emulating the CPU core, it flies. And its a ~$25 BOM cost.

fine, its expectable, as it is the case on a x86 with jit, but what precizely does it mean it files on your arm? are there benchmark results?

We are aiming for different things here, my model is something like an A1200 with a fast accelerator card and RTG plugged in.

sounds pretty close to what an amiga with vampire is supposed to be. curious which approach proves better in a long run

[wawrzon]

I need a cycle accurate 68000. I can extend this to 68020 and faster performance, but I think ARM emulation for the CPU core is the way to go for 68060/MMU/FPU etc.

i think cycle exact 68000 and everything above are two different things.
certainly it doesnt make sense to build a faster porcessor based on pure 68000 design. software that requires it expects it to run precisely at specified speed. all te software that reuires faster 68k cpus are better served with a reimplementation without strictly sticking to 68000 restrictions and design. good deal of binary compatibility is enough.

[grond]

I need a cycle accurate 68000. I can extend this to 68020 and faster performance

This sounds like taking a steam engine apart in order to build a formula 1 car from the insights you get while doing it.  

but I think ARM emulation for the CPU core is the way to go for 68060/MMU/FPU etc.

MMU only if without jit and thus a lot slower than the 080. As Wawa already mentioned, the 080 is faster than WinUAE without jit even when running it on a PC. The ARM SoC certainly is a lot slower than a standard PC.

In any case, it's good to have options. Go ahead with your project, it will certainly find its market. I don't think you need 060 speed at all for your project/product to succeed. After all there even is a market for 020 and 030 accelerators 20 or 50 times slower than the 080. I'm not going to sell my Blizzard 1230 and I can see that there will always be people that want the original Amiga experience and not the what-could-have-been Amiga experience so to say.

[mikej]

"Go ahead with your project, it will certainly find its market. "

Why thank you, I'm sure it will.

[Iggy]

...I can see that there will always be people that want the original Amiga experience and not the what-could-have-been Amiga experience so to say.

'What could have been'...hmm, nope 68K was dying. What WOULD have been was a shift to RISC.
And Vampire users don't want to admit that, they want to live in a fantasy where Motorola would have continued to develop to 68K.
That wasn't going to happen, and now we have these fantastic predictions that an FPGA reimplementation of the 68K is somehow going to outperform a modern cpu.

Let's face it, Vampire IS for those that want a higher performing implementation of the original Amiga experience.
There's nothing wrong with that, it's what I'm interested in.
But pretending it's competitive with more powerful hardware is foolish and only discredits the people proposing that argument.

[grond]

'What could have been'...hmm, nope 68K was dying.

I didn't specify the assumptions this hypothetical scenario would have been based on, did I?

[pierre]

So where and when are these going to be sold.  So far the whole Vampire thing is just vapor to me. I've seen them in youtube.  PPL talk like you can buy them but so far I can tell you can't.

[kolla]

i think cycle exact 68000 and everything above are two different things.

That is what I understand from MikeJ here - use the FPGA for 68000 (and possibly 68020), when cycle exact is important, and move to emulation on ARM when cycle exact is not important, and things like speed, FPU and optionally MMU is required. People should keep in mind that FPGA Arcade is not just about Amiga, but a whole range of systems, of which many need cycle exact 68000.

[kolla]

But pretending it's competitive with more powerful hardware is foolish and only discredits the people proposing that argument.

Yeah, Gunnar did not exactly take it kindly that I pointed out how a 5 dollar Raspberry Pi Zero outperforms the Vampire cards on his own benchmark tests.

Ironically, I have a Zero W in the A600 along with the Vampire :laughing:

[Niding]

So where and when are these going to be sold.  So far the whole Vampire thing is just vapor to me. I've seen them in youtube.  PPL talk like you can buy them but so far I can tell you can't.

Its not vapor. I have a V600, like alot of others do.

http://www.apollo-accelerators.com/

That said; since they have moved away from manual production, and will shift to vendors, you can soonish purchase from a webshop.

Details about Vendors; http://www.apollo-accelerators.com/files/V4_announcement_v1_5.pdf

Amedia Computer France SAS https://www.amedia-computer.com/fr/
Leaman Computing Ltd http://amigakit.com/
RELEC http://www.relec.ch
AmigaStore http://amigastore.eu
Amiten Store http://amiten.es/

[LoadWB]

@mikej

You looked familiar...

I only just put two and two together.

[pierre]

Ohh boy, that site look like well maybe.... not holding my breath.  Too bad this can't be managed better.  We can only hope AmigaKit gets them in stock.

[Niding]

Ohh boy, that site look like well maybe.... not holding my breath.  Too bad this can't be managed better.  We can only hope AmigaKit gets them in stock.

Thats the point; it IS getting managed better going forward. Its why they recently switched to factory production, and will use vendors.

[kolla]

Thats the point; it IS getting managed better going forward. Its why they recently switched to factory production, and will use vendors.

So it is becoming a business, with everything that implies. Curious what the price tag eventually will be, and whether enough people are prepared to pay that much for it.

[kolla]

MMU only if without jit and thus a lot slower than the 080. As Wawa already mentioned, the 080 is faster than WinUAE without jit even when running it on a PC.

So, WinUAE without accessible MMU is faster than 080 without accessible MMU, and that is somehow great for the 080? At least with WinUAE (and FS-UAE that I use) that is a choice left to the user - MMU, or damn bloody fast - and with functional FPU too!

Have you tried comparing with Aranym instead of WinUAE? Aranym can be configured to pretty much emulate just the CPU, and provide access to resources of the host operating system (typically linux) using optimal virtualised devices instead of emulation of hardware.

Oh, and here is some software that the 68080 is not capable of running...

http://ftp.ports.debian.org/debian-ports/pool-m68k/main/