Piru is the only one with a sensible head on his shoulders.
NatAmi is going to be fun (for those who can afford it) at least as long as the devs remain interested.
The comparison of memory bandwidth was rather silly. The N68k should have some respectable memory bandwidth though. I did noticed that Piru left out the memory copy comparison. That is where the 68k DOES compare nicely to a PPC. Gunnar thinks he can double the 68060 memory copy speed for the N68k as well. What's not mentioned is that the 68k/N68k doesn't need as fast of memory access for good performance unlike the PPC. Also, the 68k/N68k performs very well with less than great code while the PPC needs highly tuned code to extract good performance. Simply mis-aligning data on the PPC can cause a program to run at 1/2 speed or less on many PPC processors. The 68040 outperformed the early PPC processors on the MAC because of slow and limited ram and poorly optimized PPC code. The 68060 was easily a better CPU at the time but Motorola had already decided to market the PPC. It's a shame that the best processor for another 5 years was never developed or clocked up further. If the N68070 was ever burned into a real chip, it should be competitive with low end PPC (and ARM) in performance while using very little electricity. It should be fast enough to have some fun anyway
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It's not going to replace your modern desktop x64 PC. I don't even think it will replace your Amiga in the short term as compatibility will be it's Achilles heel for the short term. Power benchmarks against anything other than accelerated classic Amiga's are pretty much irrelevant.
I think compatibility will eventually be BETTER than high end classic 68k systems. The CPU caches are planned to have bus sniffing allowing much larger caches with better compatibility than the 040 and 060. More 020/030 and 68881/68882 instructions are built in than the 040 or 060 giving better early boot compatibility without a (N)680x0.library. Many hardware registers will be less "timing" sensitive than originals. The programmable nature of a fpga and the flash ROM will allow more fixing and patching. There will be some things that make the compatibility worse like adding and extending registers. The early Natami's will likely have bugs and worse compatibility than other classic Amigas BUT everything can be fixed.
