New ppc board by Acube/A-Eon: A1222 "Tabor"

[broadblues]

Let's assume that Acube/A-Eon knew about the FPU problem. If so, then what would be the reason to choose it anyway? Are there no price worthy alternatives they could have used instead? Or did they reason that the FPU isn't that important?

Reading everyones comments in various sites I'm not really sure how important FPU is. Some says it's used for a lot of OS and software related stuff, others that it's only used in some games. Which is it?

It's used in games, programs like blender, my own SketchBlock is very floating point based as I use ARGBfloat pixels , these kind of things would benefit from a recompile, much as you might have for 68060 in the olden days.

I have read people say that FPU is also used in OS for optimised coppies etc, if so this is done inside the OS and so alternate optimisations can be used, every machine type has a slightly different kernel, there no reason to expect this one would differ in that.

[broadblues]

Do you use the OS Maths libraries in your own stuff or internal routines?  I'm wondering just how big a percentage of 3rd native OS4 programs don't use the OS libs and also how this incompatible FPU would affect 68k programs that don't use them.

There are no OS maths libraries in the sense you mean for PPC code only for backward compatabilty with 68k.

On the other hand pretty much all higher level maths functions are handled via newlib.library  which is a shared library.

AS to 68k programs that don't use the Math#?.libraies well they are running on and emulated CPU  so probably irrelavent.

[broadblues]

Amiga 68k users complain about 128MB of memory not being enough compared to Amiga PPC users complaining about 512MB not being enough?

Ridiculous thing to say, modern memory usage is all about data, code is like 1% of it.

eg SketchBlock is 3.5MB unstripped (plus some small libraries and filters) but as I'm working in quad float pixels I can max out on 1.5Gb of free ram when dealing with modern digital camera images.

blender needs about 100MB to start but only 10% of that is code.

[broadblues]

Why does PPC need another ~60MB for "data"?

Not sure where you get youtr 60 MB number from but:

3.1 plain backdrop 4 colour icons. 24 pixels square icons, really small HD at most with few disk buffers and no caching

4.1 full colour backdrop 32bit icons 64 bit square, potentially teratbytes of HD space, many more disk buffers per partition, other caching (SFS has write through caching I think FFS2 has cache hooks that may be enabled) etc etc.

What kind of floating point range and precision are needed to require quad precision floating point in SketchBlock?

Sorry not quad precision floats, I meant 4 floats per pixel, ARGBFloat. Size of buffers still mounts up when dealing with modern image data sizes.

[broadblues]

Yet many masochists *do* choose to run it on AmigaONE branded hardware. ;-)

I run it on a SAM-Flex 440 733MHz, works okay. I mean it's not going to knock out the likes of Sintel or Tears of Steel, but it's okay for small projects and editing music videos.

I admit if I'm in a hurry I use my loonix laptop with a more recent version of blender, but I like using it on the SAM.  But my loonix laptop stil falls far short of those specs posted above!


It also works on the x1k but I don;t have a Warp3D capable gfx card and so WaZp3D is a bit sloe and glitchy.