Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: polyp2000 on August 22, 2013, 06:36:56 PM
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I just noticed a new video on majsta site :
http://www.majsta.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=65 (http://www.majsta.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=65)
Shows web browsing on a600 with his new accellerator!
Impressive stuff.
Watching made me wonder (I know we touched on other things that might be possible to add to the fpga core)
It made me wonder if perhaps by hooking into the amiga's datatypes image decoding libraries - if it would be possible to have hardware accellerated image decoding done on the FPGA? I've no idea if this is feasible or not - but i thought it might be a topic worthy of discussion. This would be a major speed boost for web browsing and image viewing on the Amiga and one thats not so dependent on CPU speed if it could be done by a dedicated part of the FPGA.
Would love to know if this is possible!
Nick
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Hi :)
Yes last few days I was browsing the web normally. Loading most of the things I use on windows and all of this gives me some conclusions. Lot of things can be done inside FPGA, lot of components are opensourced already,3D accelerators and bunch of other stuff and maybe they can be implemented also. So at the end we only need video output from FPGA, but that is something I won't do for now because I m aiming to much higher performance regarding CPU. At the end all of this shouldn't be so important because we will have CPU capable of much higher performance. Most of the limitations from slow amiga bus can be simply removed by loading most of the things from internal ROM or MicroSD card.
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Looks great :)
I remember trying to use IBrowse but than switching to AWeb because of the general speed issues , but that was waaaay back then and internet sites just didn't have so much crap on them :D
7 MIPS is great speed result , I would love to see gloom deluxe ecs (http://hol.abime.net/2741) running on vampire :o
It will make a lot of A500s and A600s a lot more useful and cheap to upgrade.
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It made me wonder if perhaps by hooking into the amiga's datatypes image decoding libraries - if it would be possible to have hardware accellerated image decoding done on the FPGA? I've no idea if this is feasible or not - but i thought it might be a topic worthy of discussion. This would be a major speed boost for web browsing and image viewing on the Amiga and one thats not so dependent on CPU speed if it could be done by a dedicated part of the FPGA.
I would say that this is possible, yes. And potentially even better than my old idea of FPGA on a Zorro card to be a reconfigurable hardware CODEC. Better in that it's much closer to the CPU and main memory, not having to go through the Zorro bottleneck.
I mention reconfigurable as I would have had the FPGA change what it was based on current need. Such as if you are doing mp3, then it's an mp3 codec. If you are doing mpeg2 video, then it's an mpeg2 codec. If you're doing Quicktime, then it's a Quicktime codec, etc. Reconfiguration may or may nto be as big a deal now as FPGAs are very much larger now than back then. (At the time, 40000 to 50000 logic gates was pretty big and 100k was crazy huge, now FPGAs are in the several millions of gates...)
Now, this would depend on capacity of FPGA chip used. I'm not sure what Majsta uses or how full it is with the CPU and memory stuff. But possible the concept is.
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Looks great :)
7 MIPS is great speed result , I would love to see gloom deluxe ecs (http://hol.abime.net/2741) running on vampire :o
Majsta made a video of playing ADoom on the Vampire 600:
http://youtu.be/ZB0lB_br6xI
It looks like 68020-68030 performance which is a nice upgrade over 68000. There is probably some 50% more potential with the TG68k and then a secret weapon new fpga CPU that is targeting 68040 performance in that little Cyclone II. We'll see :).
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I'd like to see CPU32 instructions implemented, not sure what exactly they could be used for but at least there must already be some algorithms written that use them.
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@matthey yes TG68 can give more performance, today i was trying to run complete design at 160MHz and I was close to get it working. On 158MHz I calculated that I should get about 10Mips but it seems to me that TG68 was just something for the start. You know something, I know something is going on let's surprise everyone :) Let's say TG68 is not going to be used anymore :)
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@matthey yes TG68 can give more performance, today i was trying to run complete design at 160MHz and I was close to get it working. On 158MHz I calculated that I should get about 10Mips but it seems to me that TG68 was just something for the start. You know something, I know something is going on let's surprise everyone :) Let's say TG68 is not going to be used anymore :)
300MIPS @200MHz 68k FPGA
http://www.apollo-core.com/index.htm?page=features
;)
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@Nicholas
Nice! When will it be available?
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@Nicholas
Nice! When will it be available?
Well I'm hoping this is what Majsta is going to be using. :)