boing wrote:
So I asked them about the 680x0 emulation they would be creating for their Dragon. Would it only emulate the 68060 with it's inherent incompatibilities and other issues? Or, since they're already using some emulation, would it offer fuller compatibility with the 68000 through 68030 and 040? Or would there be selectable modes for which processor type you could most closely emulate?
They never gave me an intelligible answer. Maybe they didn't understand me. If you want to support a machine you really ought to have a person on staff who can ttranslate English for you. I wish them the best and am eager to learn more about their Dragon. But they need to get their act together when it comes to dealing with the English speaking world and answering basic technical questions.
The Dragon FAQ states:
Recently, Motorola has developed and produced several series of the ColdFire processors but none of them were compatible enough with 68k processors to be able to run AmigaOS3.x. This changed with appearance of the MCF54xx processors family. These are the first ColdFire processors based on the V4e core.....The main ColdFire processor instruction set is a subset of the 68060 instruction set. It has been common practise in case of each new processor from the 68k family: some instructions are reduced in the new processor in order to gain better performance.
When only clock rate of the processor is taken into account, the ColdFire MCF5475 speed is comparable with 68060 clocked at 266MHz. Much higher performance of the DRAGON board compared with the fastest A1200 turbo cards is definitely affected also by: over 25 times faster speed of DDR SDRAM as compared with SIMMs used in A1200 turbo cards, bigger processor caches, and many times faster access to peripherals. For example access to the frame buffer of the graphic card in the DRAGON's AGP slot reaches up to 264MB/s, which is over 20 times faster then the access to the graphic card from any A1200 turbo card available so far.
Q: Is DRAGON able to execute 68k apps faster than G3 based boards?
A: Yes. Most of 68k Amiga applications run faster on DRAGON ColdFire then in the JIT emulation on currently available PowerPC G3-based boards.
I hope that helps. :-D
Before we all panic perhaps we should read the last update again:
Early this month our Freescale distributor informed us that the expected delivery date of the first production processor batch for us would be 27 September. If this is true, which we hope, the DRAGON 1200 boards sales will start by the end of October. In the meantime our developers work polishing software which will be bundled with DRAGONs.
MMM.needs a new update m'thinks, but if this was only vapour, what are the developers working with? Elbox have been late before, but they should try to keep us more informed. :roll:
