Whatever happend to the Coldfire project?

[jdiffend]

The Coldfire is a good low cost alternative to a PowerPC but there are a lot of software incompatibilities that Oli has to deal with.  I don't think it's quite as simple as he expects it to be... but hey... what do I know?

[jdiffend]

There are some points I should make here (bad and good)...

BAD:
1. The emulation isn't 100%.  Some stuff will never run on it without being recompiled, rewritten or patched.
2. User mode emulation has between a 10% and 20% speed penalty... running the emulation on the OS will be worse since the 5407 doesn't have a supervisor stack pointer.
3. No FPU and current math libs probably won't be compatible thanks to differences in the MPY/DIV and other instructions.
4. Motorola has seemed reluctant or slow to publicly release any parts based on the V4e or V5 core.  (though someone at HP seemed to have access to a V4e part)
5. All that stuff Oli put on the board still needs drivers.
6. Has Oli even gotton the Amiga ROM to boot yet?

Good:
1. Future parts are supposed to have a supervisor stack pointer, FPU and MMU (though the FPU and MMU probably won't be compatible).
2. Future parts on Motorola's roadmap indicate speeds in the 800+Mhz range.
3. Future parts with multiple CPU cores.  If the exec supported multiple CPUs that would be a very quick machine.  Two 800Mhz cores wouldn't offer the peak performance of a 1.6Ghz CPU but could be faster at multiple tasks at the same time and multi-treaded apps.
4. Future parts that can be used (V4 core and above) will have built in USB and 10/100 interfaces... (hopefully on the same part).  Possibly other devices as well.
Personally I want High Speed USB 2.0, 10/100 and IDE.  They have already released parts with USB, 10/100 and/or IDE and with the way the Coldfire is designed they could easily be added to any Coldfire core.
5. If Oli gets the AmigaOS to boot, porting AROS would be pretty easy.

[jdiffend]

Once I get my Coldfire dev board (in a couple weeks) I'll see about porting AROS to it.  It's a V2 core though so some changes would be needed for a V4.

[jdiffend]

There is a huge difference between a non-working prototype and a production board.  And he hasn't even demonstrated a 5407 can run the AmigaOS yet.

I won't say he can't do it.. but at this point he hasn't done it so we need to wait and see.

[jdiffend]

1) since it takes a couple of seconds for a HD to spin up, could a person load the OS into flashrom to boot up off of, is it big enough, could you put a second flashrom on there for this?

Not really practical... only put the drivers and Kickstart related stuff in the flashrom.  These devices have a limited life and you don't want to waste it tinkering with your startup sequence.  Once they burn out they would be difficult to replace.  And the more FLASH the more expensive the accellerator.

1a) Could I boot off of a Compact Flash card? The 25 speed ones?

With USB, some built in drivers (in FLASH) and an external card reader you could do that.
You need the drivers for USB and common USB devices in ROM so they don't have to be loaded.
Since the device is easily replaced if it gets worn out that is a much smarter option than using the flash on the accellerator board.  Speed is only limited by USB transfer speeds.  If you have support for High Speed USB 2.0 it will be more than fast enough.

BTW, RAM size is limited by the OS but I can't remember what the limit is... something about the exec using some bits for a special purpose limits actual size below the limit of the CPU.  There is also a limit to how much RAM the controller on the Coldfire supports.