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Author Topic: What happened to Coldfire?  (Read 4882 times)

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Offline cycloidTopic starter

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What happened to Coldfire?
« on: February 05, 2009, 01:16:35 PM »
Did a bit of googling today and found a few promises of dual-cpu coldfire boards, prototypes, 68k->coldfire reassemblers. Anyone anywhere still tinkering here or have we all jumped to PPC and i've not been paying attention? heh
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Offline bloodline

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Re: What happened to Coldfire?
« Reply #1 on: February 05, 2009, 01:43:43 PM »
The coldfire is not that powerful when compared with the PPC and not very 68k compatible... It would require just as much work as a PPC to support...

Also PPC is a sunk ship now...ARM and x86-64 are where it's at!
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Offline arnljot

Re: What happened to Coldfire?
« Reply #2 on: February 05, 2009, 01:57:12 PM »
What about the cell?

Performance wise, not performance vs $$$ - how does it stack up both in terms what is out now and what's in it's roadmap and it's ability to survive.
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Offline ChaosLord

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Re: What happened to Coldfire?
« Reply #3 on: February 05, 2009, 01:57:56 PM »
Coldfire is not compatible with Amiga software so it is as useless now as it was years ago.
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Offline Crumb

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Re: What happened to Coldfire?
« Reply #4 on: February 05, 2009, 02:04:47 PM »
@bloodline

Quote
Also PPC is a sunk ship now...ARM and x86-64 are where it's at!


That's the reason all next-gen consoles use PPC.
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Offline bloodline

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Re: What happened to Coldfire?
« Reply #5 on: February 05, 2009, 02:08:16 PM »
Quote

arnljot wrote:
What about the cell?

Performance wise, not performance vs $$$ - how does it stack up both in terms what is out now and what's in it's roadmap and it's ability to survive.


The PPC part of the Cell is rather unimpressive and the SPEs are totally incompatible with anything Amiga. The Xenon in the XBox360 is much more cool, but only because it has 3cores... AmigaOS can't support SMP so it is also a mute point... Both of this chips suck for desktop use when compare to both intel's and AMD's latest offerings.
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Offline bloodline

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Re: What happened to Coldfire?
« Reply #6 on: February 05, 2009, 02:10:48 PM »
Quote

Crumb wrote:
@bloodline

Quote
Also PPC is a sunk ship now...ARM and x86-64 are where it's at!


That's the reason all next-gen consoles use PPC.


ISA licensing is the reason for PPC use in the current consoles, PPC is a powerful chip design, good for embedded apps and is easy to licence... Obvious choice really. PPC still needs to watch it's heels for the ARM, if any company wanted to take the ARM from the mobile world, the PPC would be dead in the water...
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Offline arnljot

Re: What happened to Coldfire?
« Reply #7 on: February 05, 2009, 02:24:23 PM »
Quote

bloodline wrote:
AmigaOS can't support SMP so it is also a mute point...


Are we assuming that this will be the case for ever for OS4?

Also, isn't there also other versions of cell other than the one in the PS3?
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Offline bloodline

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Re: What happened to Coldfire?
« Reply #8 on: February 05, 2009, 02:30:08 PM »
Quote

arnljot wrote:
Quote

bloodline wrote:
AmigaOS can't support SMP so it is also a mute point...


Are we assuming that this will be the case for ever for OS4?

The design of AmigaOS isn't suited to multiprocessing... If OS4 wants to remain compatible with AmigaOS 3.1... Multiprocessing is really out...
Quote

Also, isn't there also other versions of cell other than the one in the PS3?


There are ones with 7SPEs and ones with 8... The PPC core on there is being used as a controler... Not really a desktop class CPU...
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Offline Crumb

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Re: What happened to Coldfire?
« Reply #9 on: February 05, 2009, 03:15:25 PM »
Quote
The PPC part of the Cell is rather unimpressive and the SPEs are totally incompatible with anything Amiga.


And what makes you think that an ARM core for example would give more performance? ARMs run at quite low speeds and PPC clocked at the same frequencies crush them in performance.

BTW, unlike SMP, it would be really easy to add SPE support to AmigaOS components. By design it would work far better than powerUp/warpOS.

It would be fairly easy to replace libraries and components step by step by SPE enabled libraries, just like Itix added Altivec support to PowerSDL (afaik it's the only SDL version with Altivec support). Memory copying functions would be the first ones taking benefit.

Perhaps we saw a native CELL build of AROS in the future :-)
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Offline Crumb

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Re: What happened to Coldfire?
« Reply #10 on: February 05, 2009, 03:27:28 PM »
Quote
The design of AmigaOS isn't suited to multiprocessing... If OS4 wants to remain compatible with AmigaOS 3.1... Multiprocessing is really out...


Xenon wouldn't be a good idea for AmigaOS if you plan to run existing software in the other cores but in contrast CELL cpu is perfect because there's no legacy software that has to run on the SPEs so a solution similar to WarpOS/powerUp may be possible with the advantage of no cache flushing on context switches. The "subkernel" that could run inside the SPEs could perfectly support SMP for SPE apps since Hyperion/AROS Team/MorphOS Team could define the new API.

Compatibility with OS3.x is not so important for SMP... old apps would continue locking all the cpus but new apps could use other (yet to do) SMP friendly functions instead of forbid/permit and all in all... use a new API. Running OS3.x apps would simply make the system slower as all the locks performed by the old app should lock all the cpus. Of course, an alternative API to perform the operations that now aren't SMP-friendly should be defined, later the OS components should use it and later the new apps should use it.

In conclusion: Taking full advantage of Xenon would mean a lot of work but allowing coders to use the SPEs and use all SPE units simultaneously would be quite easy.
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Offline bloodline

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Re: What happened to Coldfire?
« Reply #11 on: February 05, 2009, 03:38:04 PM »
@Crumb

But SPEs aren't much use to desktop tasks... The Cell is hot power hungry chip which still needs a decent GPU to perform well...

The Xenon is a better desktop chip... but this is all mute, who is going to waste their time writing software that needs serious horse power for an exotic platform with no user base and non standard hardware... You already have more of a chance if your hardware is stardard desktop kit...
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Offline Colani1200

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Re: What happened to Coldfire?
« Reply #12 on: February 05, 2009, 03:41:35 PM »
Quote

bloodline wrote:
The Xenon in the XBox360 is much more cool.


Wow, a gaming console with head lamps?
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Offline Piru

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Re: What happened to Coldfire?
« Reply #13 on: February 05, 2009, 03:46:15 PM »
@Crumb
Quote
Compatibility with OS3.x is not so important for SMP... old apps would continue locking all the cpus but new apps could use other (yet to do) SMP friendly functions instead of forbid/permit and all in all... use a new API. Running OS3.x apps would simply make the system slower as all the locks performed by the old app should lock all the cpus.

In order to get any decent SMP performance execbase would need to go. As such mixing new and old apps would not work. Old stuff would need to run in a legacy emulation box, much like UAE, minus most of the HW emulation. But if you do that, why bother with your own OS at all? Just take GNU/Linux, Mac OS X or Windows and use UAE. Or take the Amithlon road.

PS3 sucks on many levels: the DRM hypervisor bogs everything down, the SDK is something like 7500 € and the small non-upgradeable system memory doesn't help either. It's a game console, not a desktop.

In conclusion: Thanks but no thanks.

What happened to coldfire? Nothing I didn't predict in 2003 already.
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Offline bloodline

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Re: What happened to Coldfire?
« Reply #14 on: February 05, 2009, 03:47:05 PM »
Quote

Colani1200 wrote:
Quote

bloodline wrote:
The Xenon in the XBox360 is much more cool.


Wow, a gaming console with head lamps?


Wikipedia Xenon Xbox :-)
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