AROS68K and the Freescale Coldfire CPU

[Digiman]

The 68060 is already about the same MIPS/MHz as the V4 ColdFire with smaller caches, no link stack, etc. The 68060 can do more per cycle than the V4 ColdFire. Multilplication, division, shifting is all faster on the 68060. The 68060 has useful instructions that are missing on the ColdFire. Granted, the ColdFire has some useful instruction additions also. The N68k has everything except clock speed. None of the instructions are missing, ColdFire additions are included, other instruction additions are useful, multiple instructions per clock are possible, large caches, link stack, predicated branches, byte and word instructions are as fast as long, bitfield instructions are fast, large instruction prefetch, etc. The V4 ColdFire is nothing special. It's on par with a very fast 68040 with larger caches and a few other enhancements. The V5 ColdFire is a different story. It's more like a 68060 from what little information I could find on it. It would very likely be faster than the N68070 will be in fpga. The ColdFire does need optimized code and would be harder to get max performance from than the N68070 as currently planned. It's easy enough to say, just compile new code for it, but that's where a lot of the problem is. Compilers generate poor code especially on the 68k. I have a library that started out at 67648 bytes and I have optimized down to 39824 bytes so far. I think 1/2 the original size is possible although I'm optimizing for speed and not size. Before you say that this must have been some poor C coders, I'll tell you that this piece of work was done by a fairly famous pair of brothers (in Amiga land) who now work for Hyperion. I hope there PPC optimizing is better because the PPC is not nearly as forgiving of crap code.

Or RISC vs CISC lol

Acorn Archimedes had the same issue, and people all said 'whatever' 'what happens when you need to divide?'

Truth was when you all paid 1000s for crapp 7mhz A2000s and then played a 16 colour game called Virus at 10-15FPS the Archimedes did it in 256 colours and 30+ FPS in 1987

RISC is better, and a Coldfire v4 + AROS specific kernal recompile + UAE = Rocket Ranger running 100%.

Why do people have to make it so difficult. AROS Coldfire for legal Amiga apps written in guidelines, AROS+UAE for legacy/games stuff.

It's not like MorphOS does it any better, or OS4 come to that At least Coldfire is dirt cheap unlike way OTT priced PPC boards to run OS4/MOS

[Digiman]

Actually, if you look at the benchmarks, MorphOS does do better in a lot of areas. X86 definitely has more horsepower to run 68K emulation, but in most other areas MorphOS has an edge.

http://www.lukysoft.cz/?page=benchmarks

And since Coldfire is a CISC, I suspect that RISCs like ARM and PPC might outperform it.
PPCs are expensive, but ARM and Coldfire are not so we'll just have to see.

MorphOS is no better than OS4/AROS in the context of my post. ALL use UAE to run legacy stuff like Rocket Ranger.

So OS + Emulator requirement is present on all 3 for REAL Amiga functionality.

My point about ARM or RISC was the removal of instructions to streamline the chip performance is exactly what ARM v1 did in 85 prototype and 87 retail machines. 400 MIPS is more than enough to emulate OCS or ECS and if you are writing a specific version of AROS for Coldfire and using something like Starscream to emulate 68000 then it is a non-issue.

We need to get off PoS PPC hardware that is overpriced AND underpowered. There is only an issue with getting KS/WB to run on Coldfire, if you are writing an OS version of AROS for it there is no issue whatsover.