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Author Topic: Look what else the new year has brought us...(NATAMI)  (Read 2739 times)

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Offline Louis DiasTopic starter

Look what else the new year has brought us...(NATAMI)
« on: January 05, 2010, 05:22:25 PM »
http://www.natami.net/knowledge.php?b=1¬e=11215&order=&x=9

It seems the people who thought that the board would simply not work at all need to insert foot into mouth.

Congrats to Hyperion and A-EON Partners, but this is no less relevant to Amiga-land...

:)
 

Offline Flashlab

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Re: Look what else the new year has brought us...(NATAMI)
« Reply #1 on: January 05, 2010, 05:33:51 PM »
Quote from: lou_dias;536563
http://www.natami.net/knowledge.php?b=1¬e=11215&order=&x=9

It seems the people who thought that the board would simply not work at all need to insert foot into mouth.

Congrats to Hyperion and A-EON Partners, but this is no less relevant to Amiga-land...

:)


If you read the actual text you'd see that it's far from finished.
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Offline Louis DiasTopic starter

Re: Look what else the new year has brought us...(NATAMI)
« Reply #2 on: January 05, 2010, 05:34:48 PM »
Did I say it was finished?
 

Offline klx300r

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Re: Look what else the new year has brought us...(NATAMI)
« Reply #3 on: January 05, 2010, 05:40:57 PM »
no disrespect to the Natami team but I think unless its priced alot cheaper than the X1000 (which it sould hopefully be), the X1000 has the capability of emulating any past classic Amiga OS on the hardware level and also XBox, Play Station, C64, Atari etc etc etc etc etc...plus its uber cool being a full Amiga complete system in 2010..

now saying that if I had the cash and the Natami was cheap enough..I would definitely get one too as it sounds great so far :-)
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Offline SamuraiCrow

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Re: Look what else the new year has brought us...(NATAMI)
« Reply #4 on: January 05, 2010, 06:44:51 PM »
The Robin core of the Natami chipset should be able to do the same stuff as the Xena chip but if you're going to make a custom board anyway, then why not throw on a $5.60 XCore chip anyway?  It wouldn't cost that much.
 

Offline MskoDestny

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Re: Look what else the new year has brought us...(NATAMI)
« Reply #5 on: January 05, 2010, 06:58:00 PM »
Quote from: klx300r;536573
the X1000 has the capability of emulating any past classic Amiga OS on the hardware level and also XBox, Play Station, C64, Atari etc etc etc etc etc...

No it doesn't. The XMOS chip is just a fast microcontroller with 8 hardware threads. Their marketing materials may call it "software defined silicon" but its really nothing of the sort. I'm sure you could write an emulator for some of those systems (the XBox is almost certainly out of reach, probably the PS1 as well), but it wouldn't be "in hardware" any more than it would if it ran on the main CPU.

It's also unclear to what extent the XMOS chip can access the rest of the system. I imagine the CPU can talk to it, but I doubt it has access to any of the other hardware in the system limiting its usefulness for emulation.
 

Offline SamuraiCrow

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Re: Look what else the new year has brought us...(NATAMI)
« Reply #6 on: January 05, 2010, 07:03:49 PM »
The toolchain is LLVM.  Getting a multithreaded emulator to run shouldn't be a problem.  Maybe we'll have to ditch UAE though since it's a single-threaded emulator.

But as I said before, the Natami already is planned to have the Robin core which is probably the same technique used internally as the XCore system.
 

Offline Crom00

Re: Look what else the new year has brought us...(NATAMI)
« Reply #7 on: January 05, 2010, 07:25:32 PM »
The Natami is really quite a break from an OS4 system and it's goal is legacy AGA compatiblity. The two should be able to co-exits. Yes it's going to cost more than $300... Come on guys if you want good prices you gotta have  at least 10K units or more.
 

Offline MskoDestny

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Re: Look what else the new year has brought us...(NATAMI)
« Reply #8 on: January 05, 2010, 07:38:24 PM »
Quote from: SamuraiCrow;536594

But as I said before, the Natami already is planned to have the Robin core which is probably the same technique used internally as the XCore system.

Not at all. Natami uses an FPGA which is more or less an electrically reconfigurable custom chip. You write a description of the hardware you want in a language like VHDL or Verilog and the FPGA gets configured to act like a chip designed to your description.

The XCore from XMOS is basically a microcontroller (CPU plus some other stuff on the same chip). It's a little funky (8 hardware threads is an unusual feature and the main thing that differentiates it from other offerings), but it's still built like a CPU and writing an emulator to run on it wouldn't be that different from writing one for any other CPU whether it be PowerPC, x86 or something else.

Now for all practical purposes, emulating something in hardware doesn't necessarily give you any benefit (unless your CPU is too slow of course). So the distinction between hardware and software isn't all that important (but I tend to be a bit of a pedant).

Without more details about how the XCore is integrated to the rest of the system. If it can read and write directly to main RAM and access the rest of the hardware, offloading emulation tasks to it might make sense, but if the connection is more limited then you might spend more time shuffling data back and forth than you save.
 

Offline SamuraiCrow

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Re: Look what else the new year has brought us...(NATAMI)
« Reply #9 on: January 05, 2010, 08:00:43 PM »
Quote
Not at all. Natami uses an FPGA which is more or less an electrically reconfigurable custom chip. You write a description of the hardware you want in a language like VHDL or Verilog and the FPGA gets configured to act like a chip designed to your description.

The Robin core is designed in VHDL.  The FPGA programming on the Natami is not dynamically generated, but the design for multiple cores being placed in it.  They have about 4 cores planned to be implemented in the FPGA.  1) SuperAGA, 2) 68050, 3) Tami the texture mapper, and 4) the Robin DSP core.
 

Offline runequester

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Re: Look what else the new year has brought us...(NATAMI)
« Reply #10 on: January 07, 2010, 04:23:43 PM »
A big difference is that X1000 is aimed at a current market, while Natami is aimed at legacy compatibility
 

Offline MskoDestny

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Re: Look what else the new year has brought us...(NATAMI)
« Reply #11 on: January 07, 2010, 05:49:42 PM »
Quote from: SamuraiCrow;536607
The Robin core is designed in VHDL.  The FPGA programming on the Natami is not dynamically generated, but the design for multiple cores being placed in it.  They have about 4 cores planned to be implemented in the FPGA.  1) SuperAGA, 2) 68050, 3) Tami the texture mapper, and 4) the Robin DSP core.

Sorry, I misunderstood what you were getting at. I doubt Robin has the hardware thread support that the XCore does, but that's probably not terribly useful for the kind of tasks you would use a DSP for anyway. The XCore will probably end up being faster, but without access to main RAM that speed won't be particularly useful since it only has 64KB on board. Really, I don't think the XCore on the X1000 will be useful for anything other than interacting with whatever is connected to the Xorro slot. The DSP proposed for Natami could potentially be useful for accelerating some operations (MP3 playback for instance).

Quote from: runequester
A big difference is that X1000 is aimed at a current market

What current market? Seems to me that they are both aimed at nostalgic Amiga hobbyists.
 

Offline runequester

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Re: Look what else the new year has brought us...(NATAMI)
« Reply #12 on: January 08, 2010, 11:08:27 PM »
Quote from: MskoDestny;536939


What current market? Seems to me that they are both aimed at nostalgic Amiga hobbyists.


I phrased it poorly. What I meant was OS 4.1 onwards. Natami seems to be aiming at a higher degree of backwards compatibility.