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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: tabbybasco on January 26, 2012, 02:26:09 AM
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The Minimeg uses Field Programmable Logic Arrays to emulate The Classic Amiga chip set in hardware. One of the things that has fascinated me about the X1000 is the XMOS chip and the ability to add XMOS chips to it through the Xorro bus and the possibility to use the XMOS technology to also emulate the Custom Chip Set in hardware. This would vastly improve performance of the X1000 while running Classic Amiga Software especially some games that bang the metal.
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Hmmmmm... interesting concept :idea:
Although I wouldn't suggest using the Xena for emulation to Trevor Dick. He will have your head! :whack:
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He will have your head! :whack:
I did not realize wielded that kind of power....
That kind of power and he can't keep his forum accounts locked down?
What, me worry?
Off to hack Trev's email account... Whose head goes on the chopping block? Did somebody say McBill?
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You idiot. SHE will have your head!
(http://andallofthem.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/personxena.jpg)
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The Minimeg uses Field Programmable Logic Arrays to emulate The Classic Amiga chip set in hardware. One of the things that has fascinated me about the X1000 is the XMOS chip and the ability to add XMOS chips to it through the Xorro bus and the possibility to use the XMOS technology to also emulate the Custom Chip Set in hardware. This would vastly improve performance of the X1000 while running Classic Amiga Software especially some games that bang the metal.
Oh! My! God!
:rolleyes:
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You idiot. SHE will have your head!
(http://andallofthem.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/personxena.jpg)
He she what? I'm the idiot? have another beer.... you're not making sense yet...
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XMOS is code named Xena. You obviously didn't see the double meaning (punchline) so i will explain it to you. Trevor is in charge of the X1000 which Xena is attached to so he has control over Xena. So yes he will have your head but she will do it for him. You really didn't get that?
Besides Amiga custom chips are traditionally named after female names.
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Besides Amiga custom chips are traditionally named after female names.
What about Gary? And "Buster" is kind of a masculine name for a female...
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The Minimeg uses Field Programmable Logic Arrays to emulate The Classic Amiga chip set in hardware. One of the things that has fascinated me about the X1000 is the XMOS chip and the ability to add XMOS chips to it through the Xorro bus and the possibility to use the XMOS technology to also emulate the Custom Chip Set in hardware.
The XMOS chip included is totally unsuitable for emulation. The chip has nothing to do with FPGA.
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What about Gary? And "Buster" is kind of a masculine name for a female...
Both "Xena" and "Buster" sound like names for the punk chick on early-'90s teen shows who looks like the writers were trying to create a butch lesbian but couldn't quite commit to the concept, so they just gave her a mohawk and called it a day...
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John, I've been meaning to ask - what is your avatar? I've been trying to figure out what it means for over a year. What are the gestures he keeps on doing? Did you make it yourself? :confused:
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John, I've been meaning to ask - what is your avatar? I've been trying to figure out what it means for over a year. What are the gestures he keeps on doing? Did you make it yourself? :confused:
I always thought it was a woman in a dressing-gown having a meltdown.
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The XMOS chip included is totally unsuitable for emulation. The chip has nothing to do with FPGA.
Piru
All I hear about XMOS is what it is unsuitable for...
What CAN it do? Please tell me that it can create a cool plasma effect or something...
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I always thought it was a woman in a dressing-gown having a meltdown.
Actually it reminds me of Jesus Christ for some reason. Maybe Moses...
It also reminds me of IK+ for some reason.
Piru
All I hear about XMOS is what it is unsuitable for...
What CAN it do? Please tell me that it can create a cool plasma effect or something...
I second this. C'mon Piru, let's see if you are as smart as you claim to be.
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What CAN it do? Please tell me that it can create a cool plasma effect or something...
It could probably pull off a cool plasma, but then again, so can the vic20 (and every other machine ever made)
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John, I've been meaning to ask - what is your avatar? I've been trying to figure out what it means for over a year. What are the gestures he keeps on doing? Did you make it yourself? :confused:
I always thought it was a woman in a dressing-gown having a meltdown.
:lol: It's an animation test from one of my perpetually-in-development game projects - one of the protagonists is a temporally-dislocated druidess. I just needed an avatar, and I'd recently put this together, so I figured why not :D
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Piru
All I hear about XMOS is what it is unsuitable for...
What CAN it do? Please tell me that it can create a cool plasma effect or something...
It can drive the ventilators of the board. Hot air powered by Amiga :roflmao:
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Actually, Xena, the Warrior Princess is a lesbian. The blonde chick who is her "companion" became her lover in latter episodes. Sorry to bust your wet dream bubbles boys.
But Trever and his merry men build the hardware, it's up to us how we use it. The beauty of programmable hardware is it can basically do whatever you want it to within it's capability. It really started out with PLA or Programmable Logic Arrays to simulate chip designs before they are sent to manufacturing. So...what we do with his hardware is none of Trever's business. Okk...get your minds out of the gutter.
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Actually, Xena, the Warrior Princess is a lesbian. The blonde chick who is her "companion" became her lover in latter episodes. Sorry to bust your wet dream bubbles boys.
:D That ruins absolutely *nothing* for me I have to say... In fact, it probably has the opposite effect! ;)
But Trever and his merry men build the hardware, it's up to us how we use it. The beauty of programmable hardware is it can basically do whatever you want it to within it's capability. It really started out with PLA or Programmable Logic Arrays to simulate chip designs before they are sent to manufacturing. So...what we do with his hardware is none of Trever's business. Okk...get your minds out of the gutter.
As Piru said, the design of the Xena isn't suited to traditional computing ideas like chipset emulation. It might be possible, but you'd be much better off with an FPGA on a PCI card. What it's really about is real-time I/O. I'm sure someone will come up with some interesting uses, but using it as a traditional co-processor isn't really gonna happen.
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Real-time I/O? Amigas back in the game at JPL monitoring Delta rockets?
:D
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Piru
All I hear about XMOS is what it is unsuitable for...
What CAN it do?
Ask the X1000 board developers/manufacturers! Why did they put it there, what will they use it for? It must have some kind of point, there must be some kind of reason, right...?
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It can drive the ventilators of the board. Hot air powered by Amiga :roflmao:
Vapor! Brilliant! :lol:
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http://www.xmos.com/applications
...sadly not as exciting as a big ass FPGA IMHO, but then a clockport was once just a clockport, now it's a very useful expansion option.
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It's a low latency, hardware-threaded IO processor, not an FPGA.
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It's a low latency, hardware-threaded IO processor, not an FPGA.
It's got what, 64K of RAM per core?
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Can XENA be used to design some kind of "A1200 connector" with can be plugged inside the expansion slot for full custom chipset access
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a clockport was once just a clockport, now it's a very useful expansion option.
A hack to workaround the absence of PCI. The X1000 however does have PCI...
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It should be safe to assume that the X1000 XMOS will be used for the same kinds of things that it's been demoed doing at X1000 presentations.
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It's got what, 64K of RAM per core?
I don't know, to be honest. Koaftder would be the guy to ask, he's done some work with XMOS chips I believe.
The hardware designers must have had some intended use in mind.
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I used an xs1l1 in a commercial product. The advantage of using it over various other microcontrollers was that you could delegate parts of the software off to different threads instead of having to manage a nested interrupt scheme dealing with I/O. This made auditing the code and verifying the design extremely easy.
As for what it's use could be in a desktop computer... I'd call it useless and a waste of time. You have gigs of ram, a 2GHz 64 bit dual core processor to play with. A little microcontroller with 2 cores with 64KiB of ram each and no FPU doesn't look very interesting compared to that, not to mention the development environment which makes using said microcontroller a productive experience requires Java, which if I'm not mistaken doesn't run on on AOS4.
That's not to say there isn't lots of fun to be had with the Xmos microcontrollers. You won't have any fun with it as long as its bolted onto a motherboard and wired up to a card slot that's next to impossible for a hobbyist to interface to. For anyone wanting to get their feet wet I'd recommend visiting Xmos's website and picking up one of their inexpensive eval boards.
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A hack to workaround the absence of PCI. The X1000 however does have PCI...
While that's true I think your missing my point entirely.
We simply don't know what standards will become popular over the next few years. OK, we can guess, but that's all. It could be that Thunderbolt will be very popular within a couple of years... or not.
Can XMOS be used for adding a Thunderbolt port? Would we want one? I don't know, I'm not that techie or prescient, I'm an artist dammit. My point was that in the future we may end up being thankful for an option that doesn't seem so useful now.
I've said before that I would have rather seen an FPGA on the board instead but we have Xorro and Xena, Hyperion doesn't make the choices I would have made all of the time, that's for sure. Only time will tell how useful it really is.
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It should be safe to assume that the X1000 XMOS will be used for the same kinds of things that it's been demoed doing at X1000 presentations.
It's rare for me to agree with jorkany but for now at least this comment is spot on.
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Can XMOS be used for adding a Thunderbolt port?
No, it doesn't have enough bandwidth.
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No, it doesn't have enough bandwidth.
The bandwidth actually gets worse as you use more threads on a core. Clock is roundrobbined between active threads.
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As for what it's use could be in a desktop computer... I'd call it useless and a waste of time. You have gigs of ram, a 2GHz 64 bit dual core processor to play with. A little microcontroller with 2 cores with 64KiB of ram each and no FPU doesn't look very interesting compared to that,
You're considering exactly the wrong type of applications if you're even trying to compare it to the CPU performance. The benefit it has is hard realtime guarantees and extremely low latency with direct access to IO pins. If you don't need that, you don't need that and it cost you a handful of dollars more. If you do come up with applications that needs that, that powerful CPU won't do you much good on its own.
Given that this is a community where tons of people have all kinds of funky legacy hardware, I would not consider it surprising at all if we get to see some interesting uses of it.
not to mention the development environment which makes using said microcontroller a productive experience requires Java, which if I'm not mistaken doesn't run on on AOS4.
If you can't handle a command line compiler. Plenty of us have no problems dealing with gcc of the command line, and/or prefer it.
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Perhaps it could be used to implement some IO glue for people wanting to do crazy things, like attach legacy Amiga hardware.
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You're considering exactly the wrong type of applications if you're even trying to compare it to the CPU performance. The benefit it has is hard realtime guarantees and extremely low latency with direct access to IO pins. If you don't need that, you don't need that and it cost you a handful of dollars more. If you do come up with applications that needs that, that powerful CPU won't do you much good on its own.
It's only interesting in applications that are external to a desktop computer. It has no value bolted onto the gpio pins of a 2GHz dual core beast. There is absolutely nothing this microcontroller can do that the host processor isn't capable of exceeding. It's value as a compute engine is nil and if anything it represents a bandwidth bottle neck between the CPU and the pins on the XORRO bus it's connected to.
Given that this is a community where tons of people have all kinds of funky legacy hardware, I would not consider it surprising at all if we get to see some interesting uses of it.
I'd be surprised if anyone did anything with it at all considering that there's been nothing stopping people interested in xcore microcontrollers from having a go at it for the low price of 100 USD with kit directly from XMOS. We've had what, two years now since this was all announced? I've seen nothing from the hobby hackers.
If you can't handle a command line compiler. Plenty of us have no problems dealing with gcc of the command line, and/or prefer it.
The programming language created for this family of microcontrollers (XC) is proprietary and closed source. You won't even get to invoke it from the command line in AOS4. Their tool chain and development environment (centered around eclipse) is high class stuff, you'd simply be wasting your time and doing yourself a disservice if you didn't use it anyway.
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No, it doesn't have enough bandwidth.
LMAO, at least Piru gives a straight answer. It was only an example however. Sadly anything I think of that might be worth doing is either impossible or better off using USB for (like controlling a telescope for example).
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LMAO, at least Piru gives a straight answer. It was only an example however. Sadly anything I think of that might be worth doing is either impossible or better off using USB for (like controlling a telescope for example).
So, given this chip is absolutely worthless(unless you are building a giant doomsday robot and need extra granular servo controls), why did they seek this chip out as part of the x1000 specs?
Was this motherboard possibly designed for other purposes and simply re-branded and someone asked the question "what do say I if somebody asks about that funky chip?"
Seems like they should have been trying to be cutting costs, not adding a useless features.
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Begin rant :madashell:
This is funny. Just because you guys can't think of any uses for it doesn't mean it is "worthless".
A telescope? is that the best idea you can come up with?
I think the problem here is not the Xena itself it is just a lack of imagination. What you guys lack in imagination you make up for with obnoxious remarks. I don't like this "i can't think of anything to do with it that means it is a flawed design" attitude.
I have decided to ignore Kofters "expertise" in all things xmos and Piru's "not enough bandwidth" remarks and instead sit back and see how it turns out in a few years from now when people have actually had time to experiment with it. I mean, the thing isn't even out yet and you already have your minds made up.
Rant over :)
I feel much better now. Thanks :)
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It's going to get as much use as the FPGA in the Sam.
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I think the problem here is not the Xena itself it is just a lack of imagination.
Oh please... there have been plenty of people with imagination asking if the magical chip can be used for this or that..
and the people with the technical knowledge say no to each item for various reasons.
not enough bandwidth, CPU is better suited, etc...
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@Kesa
Sometimes the Emperor really doesn't have any clothes.....
XMOS is a wonderful microcontroller, but attaching it to a 1700 quid computer doesn't add anything to either XMOS or the computer. A food processor is a wonderful invention, so is a TV, but attaching the food processor to the TV doesn't give extra value to either the TV or Food Processor.
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Perhaps it could be used to implement some IO glue for people wanting to do crazy things, like attach legacy Amiga hardware.
That was my thinking too, but legacy Amiga hardware all sits on either a ZorroII bus (which little more than the 68000 bus) or ZorroIII... Both of which can built using a cheap FPGA. I think Dave Haynie said Buster was just a CPLD...
The XMOS chips might be quite useful in the telecoms industry... Which I note still use PPCs too... So this board might have a use there!
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@Kesa
Sometimes the Emperor really doesn't have any clothes.....
XMOS is a wonderful microcontroller, but attaching it to a 1700 quid computer doesn't add anything to either XMOS or the computer. A food processor is a wonderful invention, so is a TV, but attaching the food processor to the TV doesn't give extra value to either the TV or Food Processor.
Well, with all the cooking programs on TV these days....
Besides, you probably said the same thing about alarm clocks and radios.
:lol:
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Here's a whitepaper about XMOS
https://www.xmos.com/download/public/XMOS-Technology-Whitepaper%281.0%29.pdf
Here's a language reference guide
https://www.xmos.com/download/public/XC-Programming-Guide%28X1009C%29.pdf
and here's some projects thyat other people have designed for it
https://www.xcore.com/projects
XMOS is far from useless, but it's not the same kind of thing as FPGA. in FPGA, you use VHDL to design and connect logic gates.
XC, on the other hand, is similar to C, but it has easier ways to set up parallel threads and access I/O.
I'm not an expert. I've just been doing a little research in preparation for getting my new X1000. I'd like to put an FPGA card in it too. I can think of lots of uses for FPGA, but I'm still looking for an application that can use the massive parallelism that XMOS provides.
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Just wondering what about just emulating one of Amiga classic chipset on it, say the Paula. Why Paula well it was the one chip used in all classic amigas, it powered the audio, Xmos seams to be strong at handling sound, so having perfectly emulated sound would be good and maybe help speed up and improve emulation of classic amiga and not only that it handled the floppy controller, so it be pretty neat if you installed a floppy disk drive, the xmos chip could read classic amiga formatted disks. I know there is the Catweasel solution but it be pretty neat doing it on the xmos. PS: its just an idea.
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@Kesa
Sometimes the Emperor really doesn't have any clothes.....
XMOS is a wonderful microcontroller, but attaching it to a 1700 quid computer doesn't add anything to either XMOS or the computer. A food processor is a wonderful invention, so is a TV, but attaching the food processor to the TV doesn't give extra value to either the TV or Food Processor.
well, its a good thing they left it open for expansion - so you can add additional XMOS modules...
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Begin rant :madashell:
This is funny. Just because you guys can't think of any uses for it doesn't mean it is "worthless".
A telescope? is that the best idea you can come up with?
I think the problem here is not the Xena itself it is just a lack of imagination. What you guys lack in imagination you make up for with obnoxious remarks. I don't like this "i can't think of anything to do with it that means it is a flawed design" attitude.
I have decided to ignore Kofters "expertise" in all things xmos and Piru's "not enough bandwidth" remarks and instead sit back and see how it turns out in a few years from now when people have actually had time to experiment with it. I mean, the thing isn't even out yet and you already have your minds made up.
Rant over :)
I feel much better now. Thanks :)
Hey don't bite my head off. I would love to hear of a worthy use for it and I did say that over the coming years we may be thankful for it providing an (as yet not thought of) expansion option. It's just that I can't find one yet....
..and neither can anyone else so it seems.
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We simply don't know what standards will become popular over the next few years.
True, but one thing is for sure, it won't be "Xorro"... :p ;)
I don't know, to be honest. Koaftder would be the guy to ask, he's done some work with XMOS chips I believe.
The hardware designers must have had some intended use in mind.
Are you sure about that?
To me, it looks rather like a marketing gimmick, something to artificially create an emotional connection to the Amiga. "Zorro" became "Xorro", the X1000 got "custom HW" like the Amiga. That seems to be the main point to me?
Begin rant :madashell:
This is funny. Just because you guys can't think of any uses for it doesn't mean it is "worthless".
Problem is that it adds complexity and cost to an already complex and über-expensive motherboard, for no obvious reason. What does this do that couldn't be done better with the PCI-express or USB2 already present?
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Here's a whitepaper about XMOS
https://www.xmos.com/download/public/XMOS-Technology-Whitepaper%281.0%29.pdf
Here's a language reference guide
https://www.xmos.com/download/public/XC-Programming-Guide%28X1009C%29.pdf
and here's some projects thyat other people have designed for it
https://www.xcore.com/projects
XMOS is far from useless, but it's not the same kind of thing as FPGA. in FPGA, you use VHDL to design and connect logic gates.
XC, on the other hand, is similar to C, but it has easier ways to set up parallel threads and access I/O.
I'm not an expert. I've just been doing a little research in preparation for getting my new X1000. I'd like to put an FPGA card in it too. I can think of lots of uses for FPGA, but I'm still looking for an application that can use the massive parallelism that XMOS provides.
It's a controller, end of story. If you want to create a system that gives it full control over your house lights, this might be a key component. I can think of cheaper solutions then a $3K computer to do that type of work. The only reason I can possibly think on why someone would bolt this on a computer would be as a marketing ploy that sounds great but meaningless to the end user.
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It's only interesting in applications that are external to a desktop computer. It has no value bolted onto the gpio pins of a 2GHz dual core beast. There is absolutely nothing this microcontroller can do that the host processor isn't capable of exceeding.
Try to get the latency guarantees the XMOS chips offer from a desktop CPU running a multitasking OS. Just a plain context switch in most OS's takes many times longer than it takes the XMOS to handle IO. Modern CPU's have high throughput, but their latency for the CPU to respond is still abysmal.
Now, you might never need anything that requires those kind of low latency guarantees, but that doesn't mean nobody else can come up with uses for it.
I'd be surprised if anyone did anything with it at all considering that there's been nothing stopping people interested in xcore microcontrollers from having a go at it for the low price of 100 USD with kit directly from XMOS. We've had what, two years now since this was all announced? I've seen nothing from the hobby hackers.
That's meaningless. The appeal of its inclusion in the X1000 is that it's integrated in the X1000. While that may not be a rational response, the Amiga market is hardly rational - it is largely emotional.
We'll see once the X1000 is in the hands of more people whether or not people come up with something interesting - until then, the absence of Amiga-focused hacks hacks tells us nothing.
The programming language created for this family of microcontrollers (XC) is proprietary and closed source. You won't even get to invoke it from the command line in AOS4. Their tool chain and development environment (centered around eclipse) is high class stuff, you'd simply be wasting your time and doing yourself a disservice if you didn't use it anyway.
There's no need to use XC. The only functionality XC offers over plain C is some basic syntax support for channels that you can trivially do with a few lines of inline asm if you don't mind a slightly uglier syntax - their asm manuals are easily available.
And Eclipse is a pile of junk. I'll use a command line + my preferred editors over Eclipse any day.
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Explain something to me,x1000 would cost a lot of money,and i mean a LOT.A very expensive computer why hack it and make it compatible with old stuff like that,i heard stuff such as "emulate paula,gary etc".Even a 150$ dollar notebook can outperform a real amiga with uae,i mean a very expensive machine wouldn't it be able to run linux or even amiga os and then run uae in there?Is there any point in trying to make it emulate paula???
Is that why people would have to pay 1700 euros?for paula support?come on people,better spend your cash on cyberstorm ppc 233,at least the word rarity and value for rarity could come first,but for paula emulation?1700??? not me folks...sorry ,and i hate xena,her boobs do not have enough silicone stuff,and by the way i prefer gary and ramsey,sounds so much more masculine names....
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Is that why people would have to pay 1700 euros?for paula support?come on people
No, I bought it because i wanted the fastest and best AmigaOS4 system, I have a PC for UAE, and actually a real classic Amiga, Xmos is a nice extra to play with and see what happens, and it would be cool to do this kind of stuff with it. I doubt adding the xmos chip to the board raise the cost that much, the reason it cost this much is largely the small production run and I guess the CPU and OS4 development costs.
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I doubt adding the xmos chip to the board raise the cost that much, the reason it cost this much is largely the small production run and I guess the CPU and OS4 development costs.
Probably. I do wonder, though, how much could've been saved by not bothering. On the other hand, by $2000 you've probably reached a pricing saturation point... :/
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I'm still looking for an application that can use the massive parallelism that XMOS provides.
Calling XMOS parallelism massive is quite a stretch.
GPUs have that, however. My ATI Radeon HD 6970 has 1536 cores and total 2.7 TFLOPS (sp), and it's rather easy to utilize it with OpenCL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL).
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Just wondering what about just emulating one of Amiga classic chipset on it, say the Paula. Why Paula well it was the one chip used in all classic amigas, it powered the audio, Xmos seams to be strong at handling sound, so having perfectly emulated sound would be good and maybe help speed up and improve emulation of classic amiga and not only that it handled the floppy controller, so it be pretty neat if you installed a floppy disk drive, the xmos chip could read classic amiga formatted disks. I know there is the Catweasel solution but it be pretty neat doing it on the xmos. PS: its just an idea.
Paula emulation needs to access memory all the time (fetching sample data, outputting the generated audio waveform), and thus is quite inefficient to implement with XMOS. I'd say you're far better off by implementing paula emulation with the main CPU: You don't need to worry about synchronization issues or how to deal with transmitting the data to/from the XMOS.
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Calling XMOS parallelism massive is quite a stretch.
GPUs have that, however. My ATI Radeon HD 6970 has 1536 cores and total 2.7 TFLOPS (sp), and it's rather easy to utilize it with OpenCL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL).
Boooo! nVidia+CUDA 4.x FTW :lol:
I'd always be careful quoting teraflop values for graphics cards. They're almost always unattainable in real code, even code that is explicitly parallel by nature. Unless your code is a perfectly structured sequence of fused multiply-add without any memory accesses, branches or scheduling overhead, at any rate.
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Try to get the latency guarantees the XMOS chips offer from a desktop CPU running a multitasking OS. Just a plain context switch in most OS's takes many times longer than it takes the XMOS to handle IO. Modern CPU's have high throughput, but their latency for the CPU to respond is still abysmal.
You do have an entire processor core in the A1X1K doing nothing clipping along at 2GHz.
Now, you might never need anything that requires those kind of low latency guarantees, but that doesn't mean nobody else can come up with uses for it.
Sure, it's quite possible someone could come up with a use for it. That doesn't mean it makes any sense.
That's meaningless. The appeal of its inclusion in the X1000 is that it's integrated in the X1000. While that may not be a rational response, the Amiga market is hardly rational - it is largely emotional.
Highly emotional Amiga users doesn't mean it makes any sense
We'll see once the X1000 is in the hands of more people whether or not people come up with something interesting - until then, the absence of Amiga-focused hacks hacks tells us nothing.
It is absolutely telling. It tells us that people aren't actually interested in this enough to start hacking.
There's no need to use XC. The only functionality XC offers over plain C is some basic syntax support for channels that you can trivially do with a few lines of inline asm if you don't mind a slightly uglier syntax - their asm manuals are easily available.
You're right that you don't need XC, but you're wasting your time and making trouble for your self for no good reason by ignoring it. You'd also be shutting yourself off from using a large base of library code the Xcore community has developed and put out for others to use. The ASM documentation sucks, you'll find yourself on the forums begging XMos engineers for help.
And Eclipse is a pile of junk. I'll use a command line + my preferred editors over Eclipse any day.
Good for you, and you'll not have access to the simulator and code profiling tools. But who are we kidding here, you've never used this stuff and you'll never do any of the things you mentioned in the previous paragraph. Haven't we had this conversation before on that other site... like a year ago?
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I doubt adding the xmos chip to the board raise the cost that much, the reason it cost this much is largely the small production run and I guess the CPU and OS4 development costs.
In parts, may about 15 USD. Some people have mentioned an increase in design complexity, I don't really agree with that. There's nothing to it. I doubt it had anything to do with causing the project to be delayed. For sure there's some work to be done on the software side of the fence, but given ssolie's last conference, i get the impression that support will be minimal, if there's anything at all.
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XC, on the other hand, is similar to C, but it has easier ways to set up parallel threads and access I/O.
Yea, it's really slick and very intuitive.
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Clearly the XMOS chip is on the motherboard because the Military (UK and/or US) had a specific use for such a device and since Verisys can make a few quid slogging it to the Military. That's why they threw it on for not much extra money...
Perhaps it's for a drone that won't land when you muck up the GPS....
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It's a fair comment that the price of XMOS is pretty irrelevant overall.
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It's a fair comment that the price of XMOS is pretty irrelevant overall.
The chip itself, the sockets, support components etc may seem cheap, but when you start piling up all those "little" costs on top of each other...
But more importantly, and aside from components costs, added complexity means longer R&D and testing time (all done by an external firm on a consultant basis AFAIK, charging money for their time, unlike when, say, bPlan or Acube are doing it in-house for themselves) and potentially a more expensive PCB with more layers. This can be a major contributor to the end-user price tag, especially on extremely low volume projects, where *all* R&D and testing costs would have to be divided on just *a few hundreds* of units.
So I hope there is a plan for it, that there is an obvious point (at least obvious to *themselves*, since *nobody* outside seems to be able to come up with an idea where this makes sense), if not, then I would label it as a design flaw that played its part in putting the consumer price tag way out of reach for most potential customers...
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What CAN it do? Please tell me that it can create a cool plasma effect or something...
Throwing precisely timed interrupts and control a little digital I/O.
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What CAN it do? Please tell me that it can create a cool plasma effect or something...
If I had to guess, I'd suggest that perhaps the intended purpose of the XMOS chip is to allow the signal specification for the "xorro" slot to be customised from software. A customisable geek port that you can rewire using code, maybe?
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If I had to guess, I'd suggest that perhaps the intended purpose of the XMOS chip is to allow the signal specification for the "xorro" slot to be customised from software. A customisable geek port that you can rewire using code, maybe?
I agree.
But who will do it? I mean designing and manufacturing the custom PCB-things...? And for what purose that couldn't be done by existing USB/PCI devides?
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I agree.
But who will do it? I mean designing and manufacturing the custom PCB-things...? And for what purose that couldn't be done by existing USB/PCI devides?
Maybe there are a some interested engineers at Varisys that wanted to have something fun to play with?
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Maybe there are a some interested engineers at Varisys that wanted to have something fun to play with?
Yes, maybe those people was indeed the target audience...?
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Good for a PC on a stick with software so that it works kind of like the old Siamese system maybe?
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I'd be surprised if anyone did anything with it at all considering that there's been nothing stopping people interested in xcore microcontrollers from having a go at it for the low price of 100 USD with kit directly from XMOS. We've had what, two years now since this was all announced? I've seen nothing from the hobby hackers.
You obviously haven't been paying attention then.
We've had several interesting projects created with XMOS hardware.
But Piru is right, there is not enough bandwidth for emulating hardware as complex as a 68K.
I, myself, was looking at 6809 emulation with this hardware (closer to its capabilities).
Really, the Xena port is more of hacker oriented I/O port.
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Maybe there are a some interested engineers at Varisys that wanted to have something fun to play with?
maybe there are some interested engineers elsewhere that are looking forward to having something fun to play with? :)
-- eliyahu
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You obviously haven't been paying attention then.
We've had several interesting projects created with XMOS hardware.
Examples? And please don't refer to stuff on the xcore website project directory as those have nothing to do with the A1X1K.
Really, the Xena port is more of hacker oriented I/O port.
Is it really? What's hacker friendly about a PCIe connector?
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Examples? And please don't refer to stuff on the xcore website project directory as those have nothing to do with the A1X1K.
Sorry, but the only projects I have any interest in have nothing to do with the X1000.
Is it really? What's hacker friendly about a PCIe connector?
Have you actually looked into XMOS programming?
Its not just hacker friendly, its relatively easy to use (and quite flexible).
Its just not that fast.
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Have you actually looked into XMOS programming?
Its not just hacker friendly, its relatively easy to use (and quite flexible).
Its just not that fast.
Yes, I used the XS1L1 in a commercial product, where I designed the hardware and wrote the firmware. I'm very familiar with it.
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Its just not that fast.
For a microcontroller, it's no slouch.
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For a microcontroller, it's no slouch.
That I will agree with you on.
Its also a little easier to implement then most microcontrolleers.
But, you're also right to point out that development hasn't moved as fast as you might expect.
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Is it really? What's hacker friendly about a PCIe connector?
PCIe ribbon cables, for one. Since it's a point to point "many serial lanes" protocol, rather than some tricky to time parallel one, breaking out of a PCIe slot for some hacking probably involves getting a PCIe ribbon cable, chopping one end off and soldering the signal lines to your nefarious homebrew hardware...
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That I will agree with you on.
Its also a little easier to implement then most microcontrolleers.
But, you're also right to point out that development hasn't moved as fast as you might expect.
You won't get any disagreement from me on those points, I think it's a great little micro. Earlier in this thread I state why I used it in a commercial project. I do, however, think it's little more than a gimmick in the A1X1K and I expect that it'll get about as much use as the FPGA in the sam.
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PCIe ribbon cables, for one. Since it's a point to point "many serial lanes" protocol, rather than some tricky to time parallel one, breaking out of a PCIe slot for some hacking probably involves getting a PCIe ribbon cable, chopping one end off and soldering the signal lines to your nefarious homebrew hardware...
Looks like a pain but your suggestion is the best one i've heard of yet to interface to that thing.
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You do have an entire processor core in the A1X1K doing nothing clipping along at 2GHz.
Which still makes it a massive pain to keep latency down to the level the XMOS can without hand-writing asm with no OS support, and locking yourself into a situation where your code won't work whenever someone cooks up another use for that core.
Trying to do multi-threaded IO on a PPC core with the kind of latency the XMOS can achieve, for example, would be a rather impressive demonstration, if it's possible at all. They're not designed for that at all.
Throughput is another matter - there it'd totally thrash the XMOS chips.
It is absolutely telling. It tells us that people aren't actually interested in this enough to start hacking.
All it tells us is that people aren't interested in hacking Amiga-specific projects with the standalone units. I'm in that category. I want to play with it more, but what interests me is exploring what I can do with the integration, not really the standalone units.
You're right that you don't need XC, but you're wasting your time and making trouble for your self for no good reason by ignoring it. You'd also be shutting yourself off from using a large base of library code the Xcore community has developed and put out for others to use. The ASM documentation sucks, you'll find yourself on the forums begging XMos engineers for help.
The asm documentation coupled with assembler output from the XC compiler is more than sufficient. The channel extensions are simply and straightforward, and I had no problems finding out how to do it in asm. Have you actually looked at it? I have. It's a tiny amount of work.
As for "shutting yourself off", if that's so critical I doubt you'll find many people here who don't *have* other hardware if they absolutely need it, but even if not, converting XC source is not generally a lot of work - the syntax extensions are tiny.
And the "good reason" is to avoid a proprietary compiler and tools that aren't available everywhere you might want to use them.
Good for you, and you'll not have access to the simulator and code profiling tools.
The simulator can be run from the command line. No need to run Eclipse. Profiling can be done with the GNU toolchain, no need to run Eclipse (and/or you can do it with instruction traces from the simulator).
Have you even bothered looking at the command line tools available?
Though some of the tools including the simulator is still closed source so there you would be stuck with running them on a Windows/Mac/Linux box unless they're getting it ported.
But who are we kidding here, you've never used this stuff and you'll never do any of the things you mentioned in the previous paragraph. Haven't we had this conversation before on that other site... like a year ago?
I've used it. But I'm one of those that don't have all that much interest in the standalone units, at least not enough to compete with the far too many other projects I have ongoing.
And yes, we've had this conversation before, and we still don't have the X1000 and so like many others I still don't have a platform that'll make it interesting for me to invest time in it.
When I have one, I'll play with it. Whether or not anything "useful" will come of it, we'll have to wait and see, but I'm not buying an X1000 for productivity, but for fun - otherwise there'd be no way I'd be willing to spend that much money on it.
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Which still makes it a massive pain to keep latency down to the level the XMOS can without hand-writing asm with no OS support, and locking yourself into a situation where your code won't work whenever someone cooks up another use for that core.
The latency thing isn't very interesting. There isn't a damn thing you can do with an XCore micro controller that you can't do with a whole slew of other devices (obviously, we've been doing just that for decades). The only real advantage is that the architecture makes for some really simple and easy design albeit at a high per unit cost and with a chip that has an atrocious energy profile.
The asm documentation coupled with assembler output from the XC compiler is more than sufficient. The channel extensions are simply and straightforward, and I had no problems finding out how to do it in asm. Have you actually looked at it? I have. It's a tiny amount of work.
Yes I have looked at it, I wrote a BASIC compiler for it as well as a FORTH interpreter and quite frankly I think you're making this stuff up. If you think the documentation is sufficient I'd have to assume you've done nothing beyond the most trivial of things with it. There are all kinds of gaping holes in the documentation describing the execution environment and in order to get a complete view of how this chip works you will have to ask a lot of questions.
And the "good reason" is to avoid a proprietary compiler and tools that aren't available everywhere you might want to use them.
The compiler source is slated to be released some time in the future when they get the language spec finalized.
I've used it. But I'm one of those that don't have all that much interest in the standalone units, at least not enough to compete with the far too many other projects I have ongoing.
And yes, we've had this conversation before, and we still don't have the X1000 and so like many others I still don't have a platform that'll make it interesting for me to invest time in it.
When I have one, I'll play with it. Whether or not anything "useful" will come of it, we'll have to wait and see, but I'm not buying an X1000 for productivity, but for fun - otherwise there'd be no way I'd be willing to spend that much money on it.
Confused, you say in one sentence that you've used it, and in another that you'll have to wait for the A1X1K before you'll have a chance to work with it. Which is it? Have you done anything with XCore micro controllers or not?
I know you think you've got this stuff figured out, but you obviously don't.