Excitement about NatAmi

[Karlos]

Gentlemen, a spot of calm if you please.

Until I have a working NatAmi in my grubby paws, as far as I am concerned it's all speculative. On that point, a modern implementation of the hardware, if it lives up to the promise of being able to utilise the full DDR2 memory bandwidth would seem to qualify as much, much faster than the original. However, that's as much as can be said. Putting numbers on it at the moment, no matter how educated a guess, remains a  guess.

[Karlos]

Karlos be careful, how dare you say its just a guess, its just moving memory.   Did you fail maths in school etc etc

If there's one thing I've learned when doing low level work with real hardware, there's the theoretical speed of which the hardware is capable and the actual speed that is attained in the real world with applications that test it. The interface between software and hardware is often a murky place.

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OS Graphics API
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Hardware

Remember, to use the blitter in an OS friendly manner, you have to wait for it, own it, set it up to do your operation, disown it etc. etc. All of those steps take time, which is more or less independent of how fast the blitter itself can do the operation you've asked.

Will you see a 100x speed up in a real world application? It all depends. If the setup cost is small, maybe you'll experience more than that. OTOH, if there are many small blits going on frequently, then the setup latency may dominate and you'll observe a lot less.

[Karlos]

Just giving you all enough rope to hang yourselves.

You don't have to take it.

[Karlos]

Theorectical maximums are the only thing worth comparing because all the inefficiencies you mention also apply to the old hardware..

I disagree. Most people buy new hardware on the basis of the real-world benefits they get, not what it's theoretical performance is. You don't see the latest CPU and graphics card round-ups quoting the theoretical performance of the hardware except as an annotation in the write up. All the comparisons are done with real-world applications, since that's what the target audience are most interested in.

By persistently hyping up the as-yet unreleased hardware based on theoretical performance projections of just the silicon, you are creating expectations that the end product might not fully live up to.

When the actual benchmarks of the NatAmi hardware appear that can be compared to real and emulated 68K systems running the same tests, then we can start drawing some meaningful conclusions.

[Karlos]

including 'chum', which actually doesn't mean 'friend', 'buddy', 'mate', but is used to make a phrase more unfriendly and aggressive.

Well, that's news to a lot of us: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/chum

chum: n. An intimate friend or companion.

You better contact them quick and tell them "No, wait... the other thing!"

[Karlos]

Look, words like "chum" and "muppet" just aren't terms to get unduly upset over. If we start moderating posts on the basis of how an otherwise innocent word appears to have been used then things really have gotten very silly indeed. Any word can be put in a negative context with enough effort.

Outright name-calling, foul and/or abusive language are moderation fodder. A few posts here are getting a bit too close to personal for my liking but there's not really anything that has been said yet that's a clear breach.

[Karlos]

What if I were to say cock socket ?

You keep your pink-velvet-sausage-wallet expressionism to yourself, son!

Anyway, I know it's a big ask, but maybe we could, you know, just for once, return to the subject at hand?

[Karlos]

Hi,

I am really excited about the Natami, (yawn). How about upgrading the processor to something a small bit newer like a AMD 6 core cpu (1090t, 1055t or the 1075t) , why are we futzin around with something Motorolla gave up on a long time ago.

Why, what are you going to run on it? In case it escaped your attention, OS3.x doesn't run directly on x86 and furthermore AmigaOS and it's offshoots don't actually support SMP. Since that's reduced you to UAE territory for running OS3.x in a backwards compatible (read with native chipset support), then you might as well just be using your existing PC/UAE.

The NatAmi is obviously for people that want a physical machine that is hardware compatible with their old kit, whilst simultaneously being a bit faster and more capable. I see no problem with that. My only criticism of the NatAmi project is that it seems to suffering from feature creep.

If you want a 6 core AMD (and frankly, I have trouble keeping my quad core intel fully occupied), buy a PC.

I seem to be a little nieve in this area.

Yes. Assuming you meant naive, that is

[Karlos]

Could someone explain what benefit there is in SMP over AMP.  It has always seem to me that AMP would be a far superior system.  AMP allows for the processors to be mismatched in both speed and architecture.  That seems like a huge benefit.

Benefit to whom? Most multiprocessing hardware you are likely to see is geared towards SMP. Having identical processor cores, preferably all on the same die, helps simplify everything from hardware cache coherency up to software kernel design.

[Karlos]

Next step is the 68070

Bindun and it was truly awful (phillips 68000 clone, used in CDi). I suggest you aim for 68080