UltimatePPC and everything else

[mousehouse]

Not sure if this is another IWin/ACK/Troika (aka deliberate fake) or another ColdFire, BoXer,Brainstormer .... (aka someone completly out of his depths).

It is definitely not fake. We waited with the announcement for months because we wanted to get the prototype boards up to a decent state before actually bringing the news to the community. As a long time Amiga fan I've been hurt by all the false news from Commodore and subsequent announcements by other parties.

We strongly believe we will be able to ship this to all enthusiasts, which will not be easy (or it would have been done a long time ago) but we're sure we can do it.

It should fit in any 3000 or 4000, desktop, tower or converted as the board has the same physical size as an A3640.

MorphOS support etc. would be super. We will try to be as open as possible to allow smart people to boot whatever they can get running on the PowerPC.

[mousehouse]

Amiga OS 68k has no need for PPC, and for the PPC OS:s the old 68k Amiga HW is a burden rather than a possibility. It's PowerUP all over again, 20 years after the era where something like PowerUP would have made sense (and probably without PowerUP/WarpUP as well...?)

But having the PowerPC on the board brings a lot of peripherals to the "classic side" such as USB, SATA and network. You can choose to never use the PowerPC but just enjoy the expansions...

[mousehouse]

I don't see how this could be happening though, considering we've pretty much given up the classic support. For instance PowerUP MorphOS is still available for download but isn't actively developed.

Why would you want to talk to Haage&Partner btw? All they did was screw everyone over left&right, and as far as I can tell they haven't had anything to do with amiga for ages.

It is so unclear who is doing what nowadays ;-)

Maybe the best statement is that we "will work and support everyone how wants to get something up and running on the PowerPC" and I have updated the relevant FAQ on the site to reflect that.

[mousehouse]

I have some queries:
Are the 68K and PPC not directly connected? It seems the PPC is a quite seperate entity. This means that it can't access the Amiga's chipset, surely? How are you communicating between the two CPUs? If you're using dual-ported RAM, how will you keep cache coherency?
It seems to me that this is a 68040 card with a PPC slapped on the side, which is great and impressive, but how do you actually use it? Is it like putting an SBC in a normal Amiga (i.e. a completely seperate computer which happens to be in the same tower)?

Without meaning any disrespect to the developers, given the complexity of the project, I'll believe it when I see it, and there's no way I'd pre-order one.... but I wish you all the best with it.

The PowerPC and 68040 are not directly connected and both have their own memory... essentially the UltimatePPC is two boards if you want to look at it like that and different in architecture from the CyberstormPPC. Both CPU's have their own bus and are connected together through the FPGA where we map the embedded devices in the PowerPC chip to the 68040 side. Having both CPU's access the main Amiga's devices will introduce cache coherency issues just as is the case with the CyberstormPPC cards.

When running a Classic OS the PowerPC chip provides the add-on devices (SATA, USB, ...) and the CPU core could be halted, run Linux, you name it.

And as the PowerPC chip is so much faster at emulating an 68000 than any 68000 can be, there is no point in keeping the 68040 running when you're running a PowerPC OS (eg. Linux, etc.) on your classic Amiga. In this mode it would run in a similar fashion as the Cyberstorm cards (but faster) and just do any 68000 stuff using JIT.

We understand you're skeptical - it is a complex card. Which is why we only announced it after we made sure we had the most essential parts running on our prototypes. We will surely demo the card before you can order it...

[mousehouse]

I'm not sure I understand; the SATA, USB and network is part of the PPC SoC, meaning you would have some kind of PPC OS (some kind of custom Linux?) transparently running on it to handle all this in the background, and then "relay" the data to the Amiga 68k side in some way? To me it sounds a bit expensive and over complicated way to get this kind of peripheral connectivity? You are using a FPGA, probably to "glue" it all togehter, but wouldn't it be better to simply "glue" some PCI-interface to the 68k and simply connect some standard controllers to this? Or perhaps even having the peripheral controllers inside the FPGA entirely?

The embedded devices in the P1013 share the same package but can be used externally without running an OS on the PowerPC (e500v2) CPU core.

[mousehouse]

@mousehouse

You should start making the most basic part (040+128MB ram) working. Then people will start to believe you.

Which is exactly what we're doing ;-)

[mousehouse]

BTW is Sam Jordan aware that the chosen CPU has an incompatible FPU?

Yes he is. I understand from him that in WarpOS there actually is some abstraction of the FPU code and that we can trap all FPU instructions. It is something we can work on to get this running.

While I understand the skeptical remarks it is the same in all projects. Trade-offs are always part of it - some turn out great, others don't. We believe we can make this work and want to offer a nice package to the Amiga community.

With regards to updates from our side, an often made remark... my current plan is to do a monthly update from our side regarding progress made. I'm really reading all posts on the UltimatePPC thread here, and at AmigaScene.nl and whenever I see something that strikes me as valuable input I discuss it with Gideon.

We showed the board at the last Dutch Amiga meeting in Maarssen on June 17th, and are working very hard to get it to a stage where we can demo the card to an audience. Please keep in mind this is something we do in what used to be the scarce spare time we had!

Next update is planned end of this month...