[Vampire] The AMIGA Future Is NOW! AROS!

[Iggy]

bad photos but here we go again.
https://ibb.co/cXQAo5
http://ibb.co/ijTrvk
http://ibb.co/dFART5
aros can, not only boot on an amiga. it can utilize an rtg card. it can utilize networking card. it can utilize poseidon stack and usb hardware as it has been reported by another member of a1k. i need yet to test it.
all that using genuine amiga device driver.
above some snapshots of browsing the web with an amiga 4000 and own on aros68k.
the speed is probably comparable to that of netsurf.. google needs few seconds to load, even if some graphics may load later, but the page is usable.

Agreed, horrible photos.
So, what was the point?
BTW - I did not know that anyone had gotten AROS 68K to work with RTG cards yet.
How long until that extends to PCI video cards?

[Iggy]

feels good to deliver something you can again complain about.

Glad to be of service.
Still, those were A2000s, weren't they?
That is reassuring.
And you can't cobble a PCI bus to that anyway.

it does matters. aros pci subsytsem device drivers for amiga pci bridges are not complete.

Bingo, Amiga PCI  bridges are pretty kludgy.

I'm not sure you can fault AROS for incomplete support here.
Those devices are fairly proprietary.

Still, it would be nice to support a Radeon 9200 or a Voodoo3 instead of a Zorro bus card.

[Iggy]

no. a4ks- dont you recognize an amiga when you see one?

I only gave it a brief glance.
And I wasn't really expecting to see a machine that isn't compatible with a Vampire accelerator pictured in a thread about Vampires and AROS.

[Iggy]

AROS always worked on old amiga hardware

Great statement of the obvious (fact is it really needs something powerful like an A4000 if you're not using a Vampire), but again, the thread is about running AROS on Vampire equipped hardware.

[Iggy]

you might change your mind if this ever happens :

"But we actually want to reach more.
We know that we can put APOLLO in to an ASIC.
And we know that then we can compete and beat even G3/G4/.. latest PowerPC or ARM Asics in performance."

(citation : ) http://www.apollo-core.com/knowledge.php?b=1¬e=5768

Sounds remarkably clueless for someone that has produced a working core.
Current predictions of faster speeds in FPGA are extremely unlikely without adding cache to the processor.
Much higher speeds in an ASIC will require further re-engineering of the cpu.

Do you actually think you just turn up the clock speed of a cpu like a rheostat in an analog circuit?

A small team of developers is going to make a 68K derivative outperform 2GHz 64bit PPC and ARM cpus?  

"we know..."

REALLY?

When monkeys fly out of Gunnar's butt.

[Iggy]

@ mikej

Sounds good Mike.
And the goals are realistic.
Hey, functional MMU and FPUs, what an idea!

Instead of focusing on features that aren't supported by existing software.

[Iggy]

@Iggy

Gunnar never claimed to outperform 2 Ghz CPUs... he wants to beat them per Mhz. He is a CPU guy so it is his personal motivation obviously (next to other things)

Regarding CISC they say it would be possible to do one with 1.2 Ghz. If true I do not know

That is closer to reality. It will still require a lot of reworking.
The problem with "quotes" is that they are usually fragmentary and often taken out of context.

That "we know" comment being a good example.
Inferring "we know" an ASIC descendant of the 68080 will outperform high end PPC and ARM cpus (with no mention of a "per mhz" basis).

[Iggy]

This was discussed. I have no interest in doing it, the accelerator market is somewhat saturated. It's much easier to interface the compute module directly to the FPGA as you can control timing. To fit in a 68K socket you would need a bridge device so you are losing the cost benefit. Perhaps a zynq with embedded CPU core would be interesting, but they are quite pricey.

"We know that we can put APOLLO in to an ASIC."

I can put anything into an ASIC. My day job is working for a fables ASIC house that actually makes chips (specialist high performance 28nm CPUs amusingly). I keep meaning to run the TG68K CPU through the Cadence synthesiser and get a timing estimate - it would probably go at least 500Mhz, maybe more.

That doesn't mean it's going to happen though. Licence costs for the tools, cells and memory compilers are very steep, as are the production costs. We make high price devices so there is a business case. I don't see a fast 68K processor selling for more than a few$ - it's got to compete against Atmel etc who make really quite nice ARM based SOCs.

There is test, characterisation and a million other things to consider apart from having just the RTL.

NXP still make 68K devices. While making a few hobby FPGA designs is not going to interest them, they will aggressively protect their IP if you try to make a business out of it.

The vampire core is fun and seems to work well, but I don't believe it's going to take over the world (unless ARM was to vanish tomorrow).
/Mike

500MHz? Sounds realistic with a little tweaking.
Possibly higher with cache and a bit more work.
But once its finalized in dedicated silicon, no more changes...;-(

[Iggy]

You can park some wafers during production so you can do metal mask changes later without re-running the whole process. Let's you correct minor bugs for less cash.

The amount of verification done on ASIC designs is huge to avoid this kinda thing. ...

At least we are talking about  somewhat realistic speeds again.
And here is where your idea of an accurate recreation really helps.

But an '020 at a few hundred MHz still faces a pretty tough competition from the much more competent superscalar '060.

Ideally, a new 68K would be as compatible as the '020/'030 but have pipelining and scalar advantages that would speed up operations and make them more concurrent.

[Iggy]

according to what ive been told again, 020 represents the widest possible instruction set of the whole 68k family. all the others cpus except few small exceptions use the subset of instructions available on 020 (and 6888x, counting fpu in). apollo identifies itself as 040 but provides all the extensions there have been to 020 instruction set.

so, if this is true, apollo core is functionally the most compatible alround 68k implementation there is.

"020 represents the widest possible instruction set of the whole 68k family"

Fair statement.
The '030 isn't really that different.

"and 6888x, counting fpu in"?

FPU is now functional?

[Iggy]

128MB of addressable memory (chip+fast), SOLD!

Pack me one of those mofos up, we now have enough power to run AROS on an A2000.

[Iggy]

I guess it would simplify things a lot regarding m68k emulation layer if one built AROS for a big-endian architecture. I had plans to get an ARM board capable of running Linux in big-endian mode, and then build AROS hosted on that, but I never got around to ordering any board. At the time I was looking at the nVidia Jetson TK1.

PPC possibly?
But then you've kind of got MorphOS.

[Iggy]

As you say there is no fatwah on somebody working on it. Not even need for fork or branch, just make it a separate cpu, e.g. i386be and x86_64be.

Sounds like a winner to me, Staf.
If I had the time, I'd try to resurrect the PPC port.
But neither AROS variant was originally focused on 68K applications.

Once up and running, the real work would have to commence.