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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: Atheist on March 11, 2003, 07:44:54 AM
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Could an accelerator card be made where a 2.26 GHz P4 is on the board?
Now, I'm not talking about the bridgeboard slot, but the standard accelerator slot used by 680x0's.
There's the big endian little endian issue. What if you just reverse the traces, so that the bytes that go into and come out of the CPU are reversed, thereby, being correct instructions/data?
AmigaOne! Keep the originals strong.
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There used to be an accelerator called...
"The Pentitraitor" Dunno what happened to it though, or how well it worked.
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Atheist, I feel you're going to be jumped on here. Basically, just reversing the byte order only fixes one relatively small problem. The instructions for the 680x0 processors bear no resemblance to the instructions for the x86, and there is no correspondence between them, so a program written for a 680x0 will not run on a Pentium, no matter how you re-arrange the data.
That's why there are such things as emulators, which read the instructions meant for one processor, and translate them into instructions for another processor. Often they need several instructions on the new processor to do the work that a single instruction did on the original.
In any case, a Pentium P4 @ 2400 MHz is already severely threatened by a G4 @800 MHz. By the time we have 1.3 GHz G4s available, trying to shoehorn a Pentium into an Amiga wil be a waste of effort.
tony
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Atheist wrote:
Could an accelerator card be made where a 2.26 GHz P4 is on the board?
Now, I'm not talking about the bridgeboard slot, but the standard accelerator slot used by 680x0's.
There's the big endian little endian issue. What if you just reverse the traces, so that the bytes that go into and come out of the CPU are reversed, thereby, being correct instructions/data?
AmigaOne! Keep the originals strong.
I like your thinking, Because you could then run AROS or an x86 emulator (Umilator...) and you Amiga would go on... even though the Chipset is too slow to be usefull. But I wouldn't want to run a P4 from the Power supply of the trapdoor, And certainly not from a standard A1200 PSU!?!?!?! A 1Ghz C3 might be a more worthy canditate at 12Watts.
But reversing the traces is not good, it will sort out the Data reading and writing problems in some cases, but I imagine it will cause problems with differing word sizes, 64bit anyone?
I think a glue logic chip to perform intelegent byte order conversion would be a better idea.
Still a nice idea, but a little too late for the Amiga IMHO, the chipset is just too old for the idea to make sense, 2 meg/s across the Custom chip bus!!!
Too slow.
A better idea is to pick up a Mini-ITX for £60 and run AROS or an Emulator on it.
:-)
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yes, absolutely a PC processor can be put in the accelerator slot, and it has been done before, the A500 had a 8088 or 8086 accelerator. Effectively giving you a dual processor machine.
It was not used to accelerate Amiga OS.
While this may be possible, its so much cheaper right now just to sit a whole pc down next to your Amiga, and network them together if you want.
Speaking of cheap pc's...I decided I needed a 2nd machine so I could browse while my wife worked....well I picked up a Compaq IA-1 (Flat Screen Color) it is an old internet appliance with 266mhz AMD....well, slapped linux in that machine and now I have an internet capable machine in a cool form factor, the ia-1 was $40, linux free, and I had to add a USB NIC $30, and, I also bought a crossover patch cable and a new keyboard for it.....bringing the total price to still under 100 bucks.....so you see, pc's are mostly free nowadays :-)
btw, people have gotten BeOS, QNX, even Windows 98 to run on the ia-1....(it was originally using only the 'MSN companion software').....
I chose linux because it supported the USB NIC and I didn't have a copy of Windows 98. QNX and BeOS would have been interesting but lacked support for my NIC..
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Making a classic Amiga run on a x86 processor is not only very diffecult but also not logical.
And why stay with the old machines where parts are getting hard to get a hold on ?
Sure my Amiga's are still pretty fast both have a power pc and a fast gfx card,lot's of memory,disk space,zorro and pci expansions etc..... but if you would make an x86 accelerator you still be stuck with some big bottlenecks.
Compared to the vast majority of the pc's it is still a lot faster in getting the job done but when it comes down to raw CPU power,bus&memory speed then i notice the age of my machine's.
In my opinion PPC is atm the only logical way to go for the Amiga and thus preserving the technology that makes the Amiga uniqe.
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In any case, a Pentium P4 @ 2400 MHz is already severely threatened by a G4 @800 MHz.
:-o :-o :-o :-o :-o
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Could an accelerator card be made where a 2.26 GHz P4 is on the board?
No, wouldn't work. A P4 can't execute 68K code.
There's the big endian little endian issue.
Yes, and even if you solved that one, there is still the much bigger issue of them using different assembly languages. A problem that can only be solved through emulation.
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Yes, and even if you solved that one, there is still the much bigger issue of them using different assembly languages. A problem that can only be solved through emulation.
Or simply have a ROM on the board containing AROS :-D
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"The Pentitraitor" Dunno what happened to it though, or how well it worked.
Nope, that was a bridgeboard like pc-on-a-card.
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Rather than trying to build a card to put an x86 into an Amiga, surely you'd be far better off putting whatever emulation/OS solution you'd be using onto a PC, and gaining all the advantages of cheap, fast and available hardware, rather than that just for the CPU.
The only advantage I can think of with an add-on card is being able to utilise a real AGA chipset for better backwards compatibility.
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I think somebody drinks too much moonshine.:pint:
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How is the Amiga Coldfire project going???