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Author Topic: Look what else the new year has brought us...(NATAMI)  (Read 2745 times)

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Offline MskoDestny

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Re: Look what else the new year has brought us...(NATAMI)
« on: January 05, 2010, 06:58:00 PM »
Quote from: klx300r;536573
the X1000 has the capability of emulating any past classic Amiga OS on the hardware level and also XBox, Play Station, C64, Atari etc etc etc etc etc...

No it doesn't. The XMOS chip is just a fast microcontroller with 8 hardware threads. Their marketing materials may call it "software defined silicon" but its really nothing of the sort. I'm sure you could write an emulator for some of those systems (the XBox is almost certainly out of reach, probably the PS1 as well), but it wouldn't be "in hardware" any more than it would if it ran on the main CPU.

It's also unclear to what extent the XMOS chip can access the rest of the system. I imagine the CPU can talk to it, but I doubt it has access to any of the other hardware in the system limiting its usefulness for emulation.
 

Offline MskoDestny

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Re: Look what else the new year has brought us...(NATAMI)
« Reply #1 on: January 05, 2010, 07:38:24 PM »
Quote from: SamuraiCrow;536594

But as I said before, the Natami already is planned to have the Robin core which is probably the same technique used internally as the XCore system.

Not at all. Natami uses an FPGA which is more or less an electrically reconfigurable custom chip. You write a description of the hardware you want in a language like VHDL or Verilog and the FPGA gets configured to act like a chip designed to your description.

The XCore from XMOS is basically a microcontroller (CPU plus some other stuff on the same chip). It's a little funky (8 hardware threads is an unusual feature and the main thing that differentiates it from other offerings), but it's still built like a CPU and writing an emulator to run on it wouldn't be that different from writing one for any other CPU whether it be PowerPC, x86 or something else.

Now for all practical purposes, emulating something in hardware doesn't necessarily give you any benefit (unless your CPU is too slow of course). So the distinction between hardware and software isn't all that important (but I tend to be a bit of a pedant).

Without more details about how the XCore is integrated to the rest of the system. If it can read and write directly to main RAM and access the rest of the hardware, offloading emulation tasks to it might make sense, but if the connection is more limited then you might spend more time shuffling data back and forth than you save.
 

Offline MskoDestny

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Re: Look what else the new year has brought us...(NATAMI)
« Reply #2 on: January 07, 2010, 05:49:42 PM »
Quote from: SamuraiCrow;536607
The Robin core is designed in VHDL.  The FPGA programming on the Natami is not dynamically generated, but the design for multiple cores being placed in it.  They have about 4 cores planned to be implemented in the FPGA.  1) SuperAGA, 2) 68050, 3) Tami the texture mapper, and 4) the Robin DSP core.

Sorry, I misunderstood what you were getting at. I doubt Robin has the hardware thread support that the XCore does, but that's probably not terribly useful for the kind of tasks you would use a DSP for anyway. The XCore will probably end up being faster, but without access to main RAM that speed won't be particularly useful since it only has 64KB on board. Really, I don't think the XCore on the X1000 will be useful for anything other than interacting with whatever is connected to the Xorro slot. The DSP proposed for Natami could potentially be useful for accelerating some operations (MP3 playback for instance).

Quote from: runequester
A big difference is that X1000 is aimed at a current market

What current market? Seems to me that they are both aimed at nostalgic Amiga hobbyists.