Have any of you seen the PPC instuction set?
The PowerPC is design with a fixed-width instruction set. That makes instruction fetching and decoding much easier than on the 680x0. The direct consequence is that there are 1.4 Ghz PowerPC CPU's while the 68060 topped at around 100 Mhz. That's a factor 14, mind you.
Between 3.9 and 4.0 there shouldn't be many changes that would account for a much larger size, other than the PPC not being as code-efficient a chip as we were lead to believe.
Apart from a virtual memory system, lots of new functions, a complete 68k emulator, and being written in C instead of assembler...
If the ColdFire supports most of the common 680X0 instructions (and addressing modes) and the net effect is that it runs several times faster than a 68060, then i'm interested
Only that a PPC is several times faster than several times 68060... Oh well.
What's even more troubling is the off-the-shelf card approach we see for the video-graphics subsystems on the new "Amigas" or Amiga-like contenders. Why have none of them thought to include a module to add elegant Amiga videographic features to the gfx cards they plan to slap in?
LOL! That was a good one, really :-)
What "elegant Amiga videographic feature" are you referring to? The 8 bitplanes maximum? The bandwidth requirements that make chip ram access almost impossible with high-res modes? Planar displays that require you to split a single pixel across 8 bits? The ability to run 8 bit video modes only?
If the core AGA features (or an extension) could be overlaid with existing AGP gfx systems, that would be very good indeed.
"Core AGA features" are as outdated as they come. Hardware sprites? They are so limited that I hardly know a game that would ever have used them except for the mouse pointer (but then, the Radeon can have a true-color mouse pointer).
If only we had all pooled our money some 5 years ago to fund Mick Tinker and Jeri Ellsworth to work together on that one subsystem. Then these new Amiga-wannabe machines would be more than just PPC boxes with AmigaOS and Amiga hardware emulators
No offence to these undoubtedly very talented people, but do you honestly believe that a handful of people could at all beat multi-billion dollar companies like nVidia or ATI or Matrox?
And could you cram this and an A1200 moboard into an A500 case?
At 266 MHz I'd wager to say you'd run into a heat problem. Also, I have my doubts that a standard A1200 power supply can handle that, especially if it has an AGP slot and you would want to put one of those dispiseful ATI Radeon's into it (after you grow tired of HAM8, that is ;-) )
