in case you are interested to test new fpga accelerators for a600/a500

[Crumb]

I'm not sure what is not to understand about this.

For here just accept the truth - new ISA will double and tripple performance in certain areas.

I have the feeling the forum here is not the best place to explain.
Lets go to the whiteboard now..
If you have time just give me a call I'm happily explaining it then to you.
I'm sure on the phone all we be crystal clear for you in matter of minutes.

Hi Gunnar

First of all congratulations for your progress with your Apollo core.

I think Thor means that existing software won't be rewritten (as the rest of 99% of Amiga software) to use the new ISA so it won't take advantage of newer instructions.

Matthey prefers to take a conservative approach with ISA changes making it more similar to Coldfire etc so compiler changes are accepted in main GCC tree.

Most demanding 1% software like video players and web browsers may be rewritten to use your newer ISA so adding it may be useful as long as it's incorporated in main GCC tree.

I would love 68060 compatibility including MMU support (as long as it's supported by MMU.library I don't care if it's not 060 compatible). I guess that for emulators and monitoring screen updates it's more interesting to have small memory pages like 030 but I'm clueless about MMUs.

when you talk about SSE do you think that making the ISA 56002 compatible may make sense? or something like Altivec?

BTW, I think your team should perform benchmarks with existing optimized 060 software

Good luck

[Crumb]

Thus, I would believe that the FPGA-solution is probably not quite right for just running this type of software in first place, i.e. it does not address the use case. If you want to run such games that simply go directly to the hardware, I believe you would require the old hardware directly, or rather, would disable the FPGA, and *then* run WHDLoad.

Fusion also used MMU directly IIRC (You could run MacOS 8.1 with swapmemory enabled).
ArtEffect IIRC offered some kind of swap memory but I don't know if it used MMU.
ADoom too IIRC (to perform c2p&refresh just the changed gfx)
Didn't StormC offer some option to use MMU for debugging?
VMem and other swap memory tools.


I think that using smaller pages (e.g. 256bytes is more effective for c2p and emulators/virtual machines) but I may be wrong.