ARM or x86 with FPGA emulator

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I suppose I was talking about the PowerUP cards, but that usually ends up being a fast computer with a slow computer tacked on.

This is the problem.

One could take a nice fast ARM chip, as used in a tablet or smart phone. These things are usually multiple core chips with a gig or so of RAM, and come in at a power budget of of only a couple of watts and don't produce much heat.

This makes them ideal for use in an Amiga accelerator... But they also tend to have a graphics core included (much better than AGA), also they have high def audio outputs, and they have USB as standard now... So why bother making all that effort to mate it up with an Amiga motherboard, the only parts you would probably use are the keyboard and disk drive...

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A 1GHz Cubox i-series ARM machine can hit 30fps when streaming 1080p from the Internet.  Why put an FPGA on it?

I like the FPGAArcade Replay board but it would never complete with the Cubox in price.

The Replay will go for $299 and the Cubox-i1 goes for $59.  The quad-core Cubox-i4Pro is $139.  All we really need is a multithreaded AGA core in the emulator and AROS/ARIX will do the rest.

I have to agree here, that said I find the FPGA projects really fun

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i think something like this is on schönfelds list, but he apparently aims for mips. curiously he always claimed ppc were unstable by design, if hard to comprehend how they could get away with major flaws all these years.

I think he might have been referring to the development path and supply of actual chips, which has never been particularly good. Even when Apple were using the chips, supply was poor due to Apple buying up all the Desktop/laptop grade units.

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PowerPC uses too many acronyms and aliases for the mnemonics. It is tedious and tricky to program efficiently being a load/store architecture but it does have more instructions than most RISC processors (the down side being some instructions are missing from the hardware of some PowerPC processors). Most instructions have 3 operands which is convenient. More has to be done manually and considered than the 68k which is auto everything and forgiving. Other than that, PowerPC is a clean and consistent 32 register load store architecture. It's actually similar in many ways to the new ARMv8 ISA.

 
Actually I noticed there was a slight similarity too, probably due to the 32 registers and inherent 64bit support. But the ARM v8 is very very clean, and not really meant for human eyes.

The 68k is still much easier to program and debug. It's simple (mostly 2 operands) and consistent (unlike x86) with powerful addressing modes for working directly in memory. I love the tiny programs which helps performance also. It's the easiest and funnest halfway modern CISC processor. It could use some modernization where ease of use and code density can be improved more.

68k is by far the nicest "CISC", and is assembly featured in my life I would opt for it... But the compiler (clang specifically) rules my coding now

That said, I totally love these 68k FPGA projects and think there is a place for them in our amiga world!

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BeOS failed on the x86 for the same reason it failed on the PPC, because it had no software legacy... Apple have been able to migrate through two CPU architecture changes and an entire Operating system change, simply because the have a software legacy that people wanted to run and they made sure would run.

Microsoft only survived as a near monopoly for so long only because they had a software legacy, and they stayed compatible with it through their OS architecture changes.

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Yeah but both drop compatibility relatively quick. Stuff from the 2000/XP era won't always run due to ABI changes, and since its closed, recompiling against the new ABI isn't possible. Likewise with Apple Rosetta is dead. Apple is a status symbol, it is a symbol of eliteness and that's why stupid people buy it. People with brains like me use Android and cheaper alternatives that work just as well.

Both drop compatibility when developers have caught up with the new architecture. That's simply good business sense.

Apple Rossetta is dead because it doesn't make any sense to keep it going... I don't even have any 32bit x86 Apple apps anymore, let alone any PPC apps.

People buy what they can afford which suits their needs, I'm sure your device suits your needs and fits in your budget, my device does the same. There is no need to be pejorative about anyone's choice.

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Apple produces expensive rubbish both in hardware and software. Its just an overpriced paperweight running a Mach kernel with proprietary bits and dressed up to look like UNIX.

My favourite development language is objective-c and I like the power of a 64bit CPU in my mobile devices... Apple gives me both of these things, oh and their OS is a Unix, it's POSIX certified.

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You're not correct at all, because the majority of designs that are getting notice besides RISC are VLIW and EDGE. In VLIW's case it is like super-RISC and even adopts some CISCy advantages.  VLIW is register-register/load-store architecture and basically just adds instruction level parallelism.

EDGE is another way to add instruction parallism by adding one advantage CISC genuinely has: variable length instruction words.

Anyways no, RISC is going to always be simpler and more efficient for most forms of computing. Even x86 cores nowadays break instructions down into simpler ones before processing them.

Of course, biggun you can always try proving me wrong by building this super orthogonal CPU and trying to benchmark it against a processor of the same application that is RISC. I'll be waiting.

You haven't studied the ARMv8 yet have you? It's not RISC or CISC or any other marketing term you can think of, it's a weird hybrid of ideas.