Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: persia on February 22, 2010, 01:21:30 AM
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What does having it on board do for the AmigaONe machine? So far all I know is that it's integer only and you could fry your motherboard if you hook power up to it wrong. While those maybe considered selling points, what else does it do?
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Drives up price.
Makes it look like they are making unique hardware that would be worth the cost.
Makes them look busy.
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I couldnt agree more!
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C'mon guys, at least give some developers a chance to play with it before writing it off as useless.
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C'mon guys, at least give some developers a chance to play with it before writing it off as useless.
How much RAM does it have? 64K?
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Not useless, merely uselessly attached to the X1000.
C'mon guys, at least give some developers a chance to play with it before writing it off as useless.
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I'm thinking of porting the compiler over to AROS, just to be a dick, just so AROS users can brag that they got to play with the cheap XMOS dev kits first without paying 2,000 for the privilege of having the uber l33t new hyperion OS/mobo combo and still have to compile their junk on a mac or pc.
https://www.xmos.com/technology/design-tools-source
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How much RAM does it have? 64K?
64k per core shared between the hardware threads. The XS1-L1 on the x1000 is a single core chip.
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How much RAM does it have? 64K?
640k ought to be enough... ;)
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Its definitely good for looking busy, and it gives you the ability to say your computer uses "custom chips" when all your doing is taking an off the shelf microcontroller and adding it to your substandard, slow, overpriced,outdated before its even sold power pc motherboard.
Its the basic equivelant of attaching a basic stamp microcontroller to a pc motherboard with velcro, and then calling it a "revolutionary new computer".
I have no idea what these people are thinking. Port OS4 to x86 (or arm at least) or die. I'm beginning to think that amiga curse people talk about is true. Newsflash POWER PC is dead. You can add all the off the shelf components you want to it, but its still dead, dead dead at its core...
Steven
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Perhaps the xmos can do the akiko stuff! :hammer:
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What's all this negativity about? Puzzles me....
How come people know the price already before it's announced? How come people already know the board will be underpowered? How come people already know the XMOS chip is useless? I mean, all these could indeed be true, but - well - they also could be false assumptions. So, back to my original point, why all this negativity? *scratches head*
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XMOS reminds me of the transputer board made by a company called US Cybernetics in the early nineties. I may be wrong about the name of the company.
http://www.gowdy.us/~gowdy/Amiga/AmigaReport/AR220_Sections/P1-2.HTML
compt.sys.amiga
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Yes my post sounds negative, but its the truth. Anyone can go read what this "custom chip" does and also, anyone can buy it off the shelf.
Personally, I think its a bold faced lie to make announcements saying your making a new computer that uses custom chips, when your just using an off the shelf component anyone can buy.
Of course it will be underpowered, power pc is dead, dead chips don't get
any faster, its not an assumption, its just reality.
Of course it will be too expensive, look at what they sell now, an 800$ 733mhz computer motherboard. Do you think they will charge less for
a higher powered motherboard? after all, it will include custom chips :)
I wish the best for them but this computer was dead before it was ever even sold. Can you say FLOP?
Help us morph os and Aros people, you are our only hope...
Steven
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How come people already know the board will be underpowered? How come people already know the XMOS chip is useless?
I've been working with these chips for months. It's a neat little micro controller with cool architecture but it doesn't bring anything to the table on a desktop machine. There's nothing it can do that isn't better suited to doing on the host processor.
(http://i.imgur.com/yIt7t.jpg)
I'm not just trolling here, I'm actually using these things in projects.
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Isn't the XMOS chip this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XCore
according to wikipedia?
It seems pretty powerfull, at least on paper.
I, for one, would be happy if it could emulate classic miggy and keep this load (or a big part of it anyway) away from the CPU. I've no idea if it'd be possible, but that would be a useful utilization.
Also, afaik, PPC chips are still developed and manufactured under the PowerISA specs which is updated fairly regulary. Price-wise, well, I don't expect it to be cheap, but the 2000$ mark seems too high. Of course I can see the train of logic leading to that figure, but I think it's gonna be much cheaper than that. We'll see....
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What's all this negativity about? Puzzles me....
How come people know the price already before it's announced? How come people already know the board will be underpowered? How come people already know the XMOS chip is useless? I mean, all these could indeed be true, but - well - they also could be false assumptions. So, back to my original point, why all this negativity? *scratches head*
In a way, they're sort of inviting this upon themselves by burning the momentum they generated with the puzzles back in January and dancing around the actual complete specs of the machine.
Still, I agree. This thread is just a liiiitle too hostile. Let's see what can be done with it in a real-world implementation. Or, if it must be put another way, give them enough rope to hang themselves and see what happens.
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I'm thinking of porting the compiler over to AROS, just to be a dick, just so AROS users can brag that they got to play with the cheap XMOS dev kits first without paying 2,000 for the privilege of having the uber l33t new hyperion OS/mobo combo and still have to compile their junk on a mac or pc.
https://www.xmos.com/technology/design-tools-source
I thought it was all closed sourced tools, nice to see I'm wrong. How big of a job would it be to do the port?
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>Its definitely good for looking busy, and it gives you the ability to say your computer >uses "custom chips" when
The xmos is no custom chip.Its a mass ware that is not only available in the X1000
A custom Chip is more common called as a ASIC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASIC
The sense of the xmos in the X1000 mainboard i cant understand.I read in the docu and as far i can see when use maximum of 5 wires the Chip can transfer max 800 megabit /Sec.
(page 9/26)
http://www.google.de/search?q=xmos+link+speed&rlz=1I7RNTN_de
So this make in best case a Interconnect rate of 100 megabyte/sec.Thats little slower as a PCI and USB3 is fast enough to connect the Chips.
But the transfer speed of the xmos is way too few to do some acceleration, because even a slow PPC CPU as the SAM can load and store data at 250 Megabyte /Sec
also when somebody want use the XMOS, he need a controller card that offer the IO.Maybe this should put in the Xorro Slot.
But when this should put in the Xorro slot the xmos Xhip can also put on the Card.this make the X1000 little cheaper and need little less power.
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I, for one, would be happy if it could emulate classic miggy and keep this load (or a big part of it anyway) away from the CPU.
It can't.
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Newsflash POWER PC is dead. You can add all the off the shelf components you want to it, but its still dead, dead dead at its core...
Steven
Looked inside a PS3 did you? .....hmmm, well, what did you see? Oh yes, one of them. Don't look dead to me buddy! Got a 360? yeah, in that one too......geesh, glad your not my doctor.
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@ Piru
Please justify your comments. "No" is meaningless without an explanation.
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@ Koaftder
Cool stuff, good to see someone on the thread with some hands on knowledge of the chip.
So, rather than dwelling on what can't be done, please tell us a bit about your experience, what have you done with the chip so far?
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@ Piru
Please justify your comments. "No" is meaningless without an explanation.
Justify? You mean "elaborate" I guess.
Right here we go:
1. The device has 64Kb of RAM. That is way way too little for most tasks. Certainly too little for any kind of emulation.
2. The device has no direct access to system RAM (the access is really slow and software aided. The device doesn't cache such memory accesses). Emulation needs to have fast access to the state information.
3. Emulation in general isn't suitable for threading. That's why we don't (and won't) have any dual core support in WinUAE, for instance. Thus, having 8 or more cores doesn't make any difference.
4. Trying to use XCore for some parts of the emulation would probably only end up slowing the whole down. It'd be much faster to do the whole thing with the main CPU (which has direct fast access to system memory, with L1 and L2 caches).
These are the obvious reasons why XMOS sucks at emulation. Same reasons make many other things unsuitable, aswell. For example using the device for some kind of graphics or audio acceleration.
I haven't even looked into instruction set and such issues, yet. What is clear however that there is no FPU, which means any floating point math would need to be done with integers (possible but very slow).
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Thanks Piru, that's a fair answer. Looks like an NVidia or ATI chip may have been a better choice, at least CUDA, physX etc.. have some worthwhile uses.
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I'm thinking of porting the compiler over to AROS, just to be a dick, just so AROS users can brag that they got to play with the cheap XMOS dev kits first without paying 2,000 for the privilege of having the uber l33t new hyperion OS/mobo combo and still have to compile their junk on a mac or pc.
https://www.xmos.com/technology/design-tools-source
It's an LLVM-based toolchain! I hope you do port it because I want to make Mattathias BASIC use that same toolchain! The trickiest part should be that their IDE is Eclipse and requires Java. Other than that, it's just a matter of making the calling conventions for AROS libraries using TableGen and setting the alignment for AROS' structure alignment policies. There's already an x86 and PowerPC backend for LLVM but x86 seems to get more attention.
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Tripitaka
Okay, except for embedded devices and video game consoles... which use 2+year old slower chips...Power pc is dead dead dead.
From wikipedia :
"In 2004, Motorola exited the chip manufacturing business by spinning off its semiconductor business as an independent company called Freescale Semiconductor (http://www.amiga.org/wiki/Freescale_Semiconductor). Around the same time, IBM exited the embedded processor market by selling its line of PowerPC products to Applied Micro Circuits Corporation (http://www.amiga.org/wiki/Applied_Micro_Circuits_Corporation) (AMCC) "
What do you think about the future of power pc without the millions and millions of R+D by IBM and Motorola GONE? Intel/AMD wins hands down and thats that my friend. Freescale and applied micro circuits corporation don't have 5% of the budget of motorola or ibm.
They can not and will never again compete with intel/amd, no way.
I for one, can't understand anyone gambling the future of their company
on a dying processor. Its dead or dying. It will NEVER be the competitor it once was, NEVER. You can be ignorant of this and put your blinders on
but that fact will NEVER change.
I for one would buy AOS in a hearbeat if it ran on x86 and so would so many others, yet they still ignorantly think thats not a good idea.
Also, I love "Our most ambitious project to date" If the most ambition they can muster is attaching an off the shelf microcontroller to a substandard overpriced power pc motherboard... I don't know thats kind of sad really.
Somehow I hoped for more ambition than that...
Steven
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Haywirepc >> I think I remember a thread about not doing drugs..
PowerPC is so far from dead. Its true that the consoles mentioned, PS3, Xbox, Wii are a few years old, but they all uses PowerPC¨, they are still being made, and you get a lot of power, very cheap.
IBM uses PowerPC in some of their servers.
But I guess, that its easy to claim that PPC is dead, when your agenda is to have AOS4.1 on X86. Go buy the iMica, its cheap, its AOS, sort of, and its X86..
@all I can definetly see some very good uses of the xmos. Like integrated robotics interface, advanced gate controller plus lots more. I am sure its some thing the company I hope to start can use.
I am excited about this.. honestly..
I am very tired of reading all thsi negative stuff over and over againg.
A saying gose some thing like: "if you have nothing nice to say, dont say anything"
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@all I can definetly see some very good uses of the xmos. Like integrated robotics interface, advanced gate controller plus lots more. I am sure its some thing the company I hope to start can use.
What does integrated robotics or advance gate controller have to do with end users and their desktops? Or for that matter on a pure hobby level, why wouldn't USB be enough for a hobby robotic controller?
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Tripitaka
Okay, except for embedded devices and video game consoles... which use 2+year old slower chips...Power pc is dead dead dead.
From wikipedia :
"In 2004, Motorola exited the chip manufacturing business by spinning off its semiconductor business as an independent company called Freescale Semiconductor (http://www.amiga.org/wiki/Freescale_Semiconductor). Around the same time, IBM exited the embedded processor market by selling its line of PowerPC products to Applied Micro Circuits Corporation (http://www.amiga.org/wiki/Applied_Micro_Circuits_Corporation) (AMCC) "
What do you think about the future of power pc without the millions and millions of R+D by IBM and Motorola GONE? Intel/AMD wins hands down and thats that my friend. Freescale and applied micro circuits corporation don't have 5% of the budget of motorola or ibm.
IBM exited the embedded processor market not the PowerPC market (IBM has just recently announced the new PowerPC A2), and while I don't have the numbers, I would imagine Freescale spends about as much on semiconductor R+D as Motorola did.
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What does integrated robotics or advance gate controller have to do with end users and their desktops? Or for that matter on a pure hobby level, why wouldn't USB be enough for a hobby robotic controller?
I am just telling you what I can see it used for.
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IBM exited the embedded processor market not the PowerPC market (IBM has just recently announced the new PowerPC A2), and while I don't have the numbers, I would imagine Freescale spends about as much on semiconductor R+D as Motorola did.
Freescale's main focus is on ARM market and not PPC.
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I guess the blinders are really firmly placed on. I understand powerpc continues on in small markets, but it will never be a major part of
the desktop market ever again. NEVER.
For the record, I have no agenda, and I have and run AROS already. It would be fine with me if AOS continues to beat the dead powerpc horse.
I think it will be better for everyone is the future of amiga was open source, and that can never die or be controlled by people with blinders on, who refuse to accept the simple facts of the industry they are in, the same industry they are trying (and failing miserably) to make money in.
And finally, in answer to the original posters question "What is xmos good for?" - Nothing you can not do better on the host processor, or through a printer, serial or usb port on any 10 year old computer.
Steven
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hmm ... lots of negative points!
I just hope they have something up there sleeves because most people seem to think the SAM boards are pricey, so if this thing is going to come out costing twice as much they may struggle to shift them!!
@PIRU ... Any ideas on what the XMOS "could" be used for?
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I am just telling you what I can see it used for.
Your opinion is based on what, PR spin? Here is a good place to inform me of what the virtues of having XMOS vs USB (2.x or 3.x) for those who want to use OS4.
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Instead of being so extremely negative and shooting down every positive thing there is to say. BTW its very hard to have a debate with that attitude..
But please tell me what kind of mobo you, thats all you nay sayers, would have come up with?
I dont know what CPU it will use, I dont know the price, so I would not say its under powered and way to expensive.
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I guess the blinders are really firmly placed on. I understand powerpc continues on in small markets, but it will never be a major part of
the desktop market ever again. NEVER.
The Amiga will never be a major part of the desktop market, so what is your point?
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Yes and it never will be when they stick to hardware no one has or can
afford to buy just to try it out.
I wish them the best but I don't understand what they are doing. I hope this computer comes out and is very useful and affordable, but I just don't see it happening. I can hope, and when all else fails, enter AROS.
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Yes and it never will be when they stick to hardware no one has or can
afford to buy just to try it out.
Aren't you the one who said "I guess the blinders are really firmly placed on"?
The Amiga will never be a major part of the desktop market.
You could give away the hardware for free and it wouldn't change this.
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Any ideas on what the XMOS "could" be used for?
Other than use it as a marketing gimmick, no (http://www.amiga.org/forums/showpost.php?p=544270&postcount=21).
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I don't really get the point of the XMOS chip, if I'm honest. All I know is that it's a low latency device suitable for handling IO events. In terms of processing power, what can it do that a few more tens of megahertz CPU power wouldn't?
For me, a far more pertinent set of X1000 questions would be:
1) Which CPU will be used and at what speed?
2) Why 4 DDR slots? That suggests a wide architecture. Assuming 64-bit operation is out of the question on the grounds of backwards compatibility, Is a 32-bit PAE style kernel planned?
3) Given the PCIe, which display cards will be supported? (I know RadeonHD drivers are being developed for OS4.x)
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Let's not forget that the XMOS has the Xorro slot available. What about a Xorro board with, say 8 sockets for XMOS chips (so they can be added as required) and a socket linking to another box with more Xorro slots each with a board with 8 sockets...etc...
This is an untried chip for desktop computing so I refuse to write it off quite yet.
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Let's not forget that the XMOS has the Xorro slot available. What about a Xorro board with, say 8 sockets for XMOS chips (so they can be added as required) and a socket linking to another box with more Xorro slots each with a board with 8 sockets...etc...
This is an untried chip for desktop computing so I refuse to write it off quite yet.
8 XMOS chips isn't even going to scratch the surface of what a modern GPU can do in terms of parallel processing, even using basic GLSlang (let alone CUDA, Stream or OpenCL).
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Well that's a bit sad isn't it. TBH I would have rather have seen a GPU in the space for the XMOS but as it is, the X1000 is still the fastest hardware Amiga OS can run on. That's something we should all at least be a little happy about.
BTW, love the value avatar.
I'm going over to Amigaworld forum now to see if anyone from Hyperion has made any comment that reflects the issues in this thread, I'll let you all know if I find anything positive.
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Drives up price.
Makes it look like they are making unique hardware that would be worth the cost.
Makes them look busy.
Uh, those XCore chips cost less than $10 US. I know that it's fun to be negative and piss on someone else's work, but do try to keep the criticism sane.
XMOS call their chips "software defined silicon." What I think that they mean with this** is that there are no built in peripherals. Instead, its low latency event-driven multi-threaded architecture means that you can create any peripheral I/O that you like using software. This is something that "normal" micro-controllers can't do (or would struggle to do reliably).
What would it be used for on the X1000? No idea exactly. It's greatest use is likely to be with the Xena slot. Forget about using it for graphics or emulation, because it's no processing powerhouse, unless you string a whole set of these cores together (via the Xena slot) and figure out how to use them as stream processors. Given its strength with low latency event driven processing, this would be useful for hardware hackers, people doing robotics stuff, etc.
"But that's not desktop," I hear some people say. Who cares? People call the Amiga a "hobby" computer, so why not put stuff in it that caters to computer/electronics hobbyists?
Why not just put it on a PCI card or on a USB dongle? Well, what's the point of having a low latency device if you then put it at the end of a high latency bus? Sure, you could still develop XCore stuff via a USB connected Xcore chip, but you would immediately take anything that would work better being tightly integrated off the table.
Why put the XCore chip on all machines instead of just the hobbyists who want to use it? Well, let us say that one of these hobbyists makes some cool gizmo that you like, and want to have. With standardized hardware you could ask the hobbyist to make you one, and plug it straight in.
All of this is completely hypothetical. We're not going to know what can be done with it until the machine is available, and in the hands of those who can develop stuff. If you don't see the point in the XCore chip, then maybe you should focus on the rest of the machine; multi-core >1.6 GHz, PCI-Express, etc. Surely that's interesting enough in its own right?
Hans
** I'm not familiar with their architecture, so I could be completely wrong
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I believe that the XMOS chip is in the X1K either for:
1-Marketing BS: Trying to convince you it is a custom chip and so the X1K board itself follows an Amiga concept, when it doesnt and that it can be a powerfull coprocessor when it is another thing.
2-Leftover: The X1K is just another embedded PPC motherboard, some company has as leftover because they couldnt market them, and as embedded mobo, it came with a microcontroller, the XMOS.
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Instead of being so extremely negative and shooting down every positive thing there is to say. BTW its very hard to have a debate with that attitude..
In other words, you have nothing to bring to the discussion on the value of XMOS brings to desktop OS4 users over a USB controller?
But please tell me what kind of mobo you, thats all you nay sayers, would have come up with?
Anything cheap. If you haven't noticed, it's very rough economic environment out there and there is so little excessive cash that users
I dont know what CPU it will use, I dont know the price, so I would not say its under powered and way to expensive.
We do know it's PPC so that alone for the best you can hope for is what we already find mid level desktops. I have yet to see a cheap PPC for desktop.
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8 XMOS chips isn't even going to scratch the surface of what a modern GPU can do in terms of parallel processing, even using basic GLSlang (let alone CUDA, Stream or OpenCL).
Agreed. However, GPUs can't read back from the destination buffer, so they're not good for Infinite Impulse Response (IIR) filters. It's possible to do with a GPU via tricks (with sizable extra overhead), but this is something that a set of stream processors might have an edge. Of course, you're still contending with a brute of a processor, so 8 XMOS chips still won't do.
IIR filters are used in audio processing, and Gaussian blurs of any size can be done efficiently using IIR filters, whereas a Finite Impulse Response (FIR) based Gaussian blur slows down exponentially with blur size.
Hans
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Agreed. However, GPUs can't read back from the destination buffer, so they're not good for Infinite Impulse Response (IIR) filters. It's possible to do with a GPU via tricks (with sizable extra overhead), but this is something that a set of stream processors might have an edge. Of course, you're still contending with a brute of a processor, so 8 XMOS chips still won't do.
IIR filters are used in audio processing, and Gaussian blurs of any size can be done efficiently using IIR filters, whereas a Finite Impulse Response (FIR) based Gaussian blur slows down exponentially with blur size.
Hans
Actually, the CUDA n-body solver that got me into GPU coding initially uses a double buffer where the destination data becomes the source data for the next iteration. It's pretty effective.
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Why cant a company make money on Workbench, and work with the community, not towards them, stirring up more problems.
We all want to run Workbench on modern hardware that is not expensive. Yes, I know A1000 cost 1500 dollars back in 1985, but lets face it. Its not 1985 anymore.
It is 2010.
I have not met ANYONE in modern times that explicitly wants a PPC system for their workstation. This new X-factor motherboard is just weird IMHO (sorry).
Why not think outside the box and work towards uniting the community towards a common goal so that we become stronger, once we are united we could spread the word about new-school Amiga in a positive way and rewards would come back both to Amiga and to the company who are the new "Amiga".
My vision of Amiga is a system that can compete with the Windows and Apple world. By creating a system designed for a niche market such as a market that uses the x-chip, what kind of signals does that action send out?
That Amiga is not as good as PC/Mac and will never be so there is no point trying, "lets find a niche market instead"?
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We're not going to know what can be done with it until the machine is available
We know what can't be done with it, however.
If you don't see the point in the XCore chip, then maybe you should focus on the rest of the machine; multi-core >1.6 GHz, PCI-Express, etc.
Somehow the whole marketing drive of this "X1000" seems to be built around this chip. If it's not so important, then why make such a big deal about it? I find this odd.
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We know what can't be done with it, however.
Somehow the whole marketing drive of this "X1000" seems to be built around this chip. If it's not so important, then why make such a big deal about it? I find this odd.
My guess is that they are hoping to sell "expansion" modules that utilize the x-link switching feature of these devices. SO basically you can pay 100 bucks or something for each "device" that will do something lame. They're hoping to get developer support for it, which ain't gonna happen because it's lame and uninteresting and unprofitable in this context.
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So now we know it's slower than USB, has only 64K ram and has no no direct access to system ram... Curiouser, and curiouser. Unless these boards have some sort of other use and they were able to piggy back the Amiga One production onto a much larger production order...
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So... Let's try to summarize things a little bit. People make claims about what the XCore is or is not suitable for on a modern computer. With that in mind the following points seem to stick out:
Not suitable for:
* Graphics
* SATA
* Network
* USB 2.0
* Classic Amiga Emulation
Suitable for:
* Audio I/O
* USB 1.1
The above assumes that there is a sensible interconnection between the XCore chip(s) and the resources of the system (DMA, Interrupts, address and data lines).
Did I leave anything out? :P
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Blink LEDs at 50MHz
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For embedded solution motherboards (a.k.a. AmigaOne X-1000), as a microcontroller in some industrial enviroment ? :)
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Blink LEDs at 50MHz
Does this mean then, that the X1000 will finally be able to beat the original Amigas' joystick port response time? :shocked:
;)
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>* Graphics
Xcore could be used for simple GFX output.
(it can be done also with a 20Mhz micro controller + 1k of RAM, xena has 64k and 500Mhz)
It can also be used for custom graphics/video HW that plugs on xorro or bridges both xorro and PCIx1.
>* SATA
Most likely it could also do SATA and PATA, but it's better to use those onboard SATA and PATA connectors for that.
>* Network
Xcore could handle a lot of networking tasks. But things like ethernet is better to be handled by the onboard ethernet chip and by the telecom monster, the PPC.
>* USB 2.0
x1000 has 10 ports for USB2.
>* Classic Amiga Emulation
XCore could be used to build a bridge to classic expansions, lagacy ports and motherboards.
Page 32 defines relevant use cases1 and 2 for xena:
https://electronics.wesrch.com/User_images/Pdf/SE1_1261077219.pdf
>Suitable for:
>* Audio I/O
Yes, but SB600 already provides 7+1 Audio.
Xena could be used to connect to old MIDI adapters and to old midi devices.
>The above assumes that there is a sensible interconnection between the XCore chip(s) and the resources of the system (DMA, Interrupts, address and data lines).
According to latest information, xena uses 16 I/O lines to communcate with the PPC (perhaps the connection is to the serdes/Envoi lines of PA6T). And xena JTAG lines are connected to the PPC GPIO lines.
So, to me it seems that the interface is very powerfull for I/O toys.
(for calculation cluster we would need 64 core xcore chips on a xorro+PCIeX1, xena would only enable a good (low latency) control interface to that)
And about interrupt driven mouse pointer etc. stuff...
For memory refresh. The nonsmooth mouse movement in the mainstream is caused by what? Serial interface to the system? Polling I/O of the system? Wrong priorisation of GUI tasks?