Do you approve of PPC (in some form) as the future of Amiga?

[SamuraiCrow]

I vote for the 680x0.  Since the heart of the Amiga is its unique graphics chipset, that limits the future to FPGA and similar technologies.  As long as FPGAs are affordable, we should stick with 680x0 softcores to make them a compact SoC.  Viva MiniMig, NatAmi, and CloneAA!

[SamuraiCrow]

@matthey
You rather missed my point: Only a lazy programmer writes the smallest possible loop to do a job and then blames the architecture if performance sucks. The 68060 is forgiving, PPC is not, but the PPC will deliver far better perfomance when it's rules are respected.

Regarding move16, it also depends on how much you want your cache polluting. If you are copying large amounts of data it has many advantages. You should never assume that because most copies are small, they all will be; well written code ought to be prepared for any reasonable eventuality.

And you missed MattHey's point that a small inlined loop that can execute at the same efficiency of the big optimized loop in a subroutine makes the latter technique obsolete.  The N68050 can execute an iteration of the small loop at about 2 clock cycles per iteration at 130 MHz due to improved pipelining of the instruction cycles and opcode fusion.  Using move16 is only suitable for use on cacheable memory also.  If you need to use it on a source or destination in Chip RAM while the custom chips are still whirring away, you may be in trouble.

The PPC requires that the cache be locked onto the loop adding additional steps to the process making inlining a disaster and brings back all of the calling overhead.  The fact that the PPC is unforgiving makes it entirely unsuitable for a hobby computer anyway.  Leave POWER on the big iron machines and make the hobby machine fun to use.