Excitement about NatAmi

[Hattig]

The NatAmi folks have said that the blitter will be 100x faster.

I presume that they have proved this to themselves on the prototype board they did, so it's not just a theoretical and mathematical figure based upon memory bandwidth.

When the Natami comes out we will see how it performs. I think there's a bit too much trolling in this thread currently. It's not like the Natami people have been posting promises here to deserve the comments being made, which make me wonder why I bother with posting here and following stuff in the Amiga community still.

[jj]

To be fair no the team have not been promising anything.  Its the rabid followers promising the earth.
 
I for one will be glad if they pull this off but I think the cost of the board if going to be way to high for most people

[Louis Dias]

No you are correct no one knows anyhting about blitting apart from you.  You don't get it do you, without any proof or benchmarks to back this up all your claims are just that claims and theoritical.  
 
Yes OS4 might possibly run a Wii but god it would be an awful experience.  Im guessing, guessing mind, don't know, but did rouge say that just to shut you up on your GC/Wii os4 trolling ?

I linked what blitting was, it's just copying memory, occassionaly with a mask.  Hence your limiting factor is :shock: :horror: how fast you can move memory.

So potentially, Natami can move memory something like 438 times faster an an A500.

The reason you don't blit with an Amiga blitter anymore once you accelerate an Amiga is because any cpu >68000 can blit faster than the Amiga blitter.  With the Natami, the blitter will be on par with the cpu and free it up for more intensive tasks again.

As for your OS4 on Wii comment, simply ask yourself how much RAM is being used when you boot the OS.  All that extra ram is wasted unless you wanna load applications to fill your ram.  Wii's cpu is more powerful than a SAM440...with faster memory.  A combine 88MB is plenty to run a couple of applications considering the OS it's based on ran with 512k.  Ignorance is bliss.

[jj]

I really wouldnt want to run any NG AmigaOS on 88Mb of ram.  How usless would that be ?
 
You must be in Nirvana now if ignorance is bliss.
 
great assumption AOS4 is baed on an OS that ran on 512k, hence 88Mb is loads....wft ?

[Louis Dias]

I really wouldnt want to run any NG AmigaOS on 88Mb of ram.  How usless would that be ?
 
You must be in Nirvana now if ignorance is bliss.
 
great assumption AOS4 is baed on an OS that ran on 512k, hence 88Mb is loads....wft ?

Are you denying that OS3.1 can run on 512k?
Even a direct port would only bump it up to 1MB of PPC code.  Infact, how much ram are on the classic Amiga's with PPC accelerator?  64MB?

Forget algebra, a lot of people around here seem to fail 3rd grade math.

My CD32 boots into OS3.1 using up only about 120k leaving me with over 1.8MB free.  People got issues if they think a PPC port with some added features suddenly bumps up the requirement to a mandatory 128MB.  Perhaps it is a math problem.  1Mb=1024Kb.  OS3.1 can run on an unexpanded A500.  Buy a clue.

[Hattig]

Nobody is saying it couldn't run on the Wii.

They're wondering what the point is!

Firstly, this is completely off-topic to this thread.

Second, why not use a PS3 or XBox360 instead - more memory, both jailbroken. Supports higher resolutions than ~800x480.

Thirdly, who is going to fund such a port of the OS to jailbroken hardware? Who is going to take the legal liability when Nintendo Sony or Microsoft say that the software is encouraging piracy, jailbreaking and other bad things, and drags you through the courts at great expense? At least Sony did support it in the past, so that's a lower risk.

[Karlos]

I linked what blitting was, it's just copying memory, occassionaly with a mask.  Hence your limiting factor is :shock: :horror: how fast you can move memory.

So potentially, Natami can move memory something like 438 times faster an an A500.

There's more to amiga blitting than just moving data, even with a mask. The amiga's blitter could combine up to 3 sources using a user-specific boolean function and write the result to a separate destination. IIRC, the any combination source(s) and destination could be the same. As such, it's fair to say there's rather more sophistication in there than your typical graphics card blitter, which tend to be optimized memory copy units only.

Even a direct port would only bump it up to 1MB of PPC code. Infact, how much ram are on the classic Amiga's with PPC accelerator? 64MB?

Mine has 256MB. By now, most BlizzardPPC/CyberstormPPC users have fitted as much RAM as they can on their boards.

[Louis Dias]

Nobody is saying it couldn't run on the Wii.

They're wondering what the point is!

Firstly, this is completely off-topic to this thread.

Second, why not use a PS3 or XBox360 instead - more memory, both jailbroken. Supports higher resolutions than ~800x480.

Thirdly, who is going to fund such a port of the OS to jailbroken hardware? Who is going to take the legal liability when Nintendo Sony or Microsoft say that the software is encouraging piracy, jailbreaking and other bad things, and drags you through the courts at great expense? At least Sony did support it in the past, so that's a lower risk.

Like you said, it's OT.  Some people on here just like to razz me as if they know something.  This is also going back to a time where OS4 hardware was practically non-existent.  Porting to something you already had in your living-room made alot of sense.

[Hattig]

There's more to amiga blitting than just moving data, even with a mask. The amiga's blitter could combine up to 3 sources using a user-specific boolean function and write the result to a destination. IIRC, the any combination source(s) and destination could be the same. As such, it's fair to say there's rather more sophistication in there than your typical graphic's card blitter which tend to be optimized memory copy units only.

How the blitter works isn't in question, it's not a mystery, Minimig has an equivalent blitter and that was years ago. It's not hard to see that creating a full 32-bit blitter that runs a lot faster would end up being significantly more impressive than the ~4MHz blitter in an Amiga. Even if it only ran at ~40MHz in the FPGA it could blit 20x faster (memory bandwidth allowing, lou's point is that the memory bandwidth is not going to be an issue here). Only the Natami people can say how fast the Natami blitter is going to operate, but if they can run their 68050 core at 133MHz, then maybe they can run their blitter implementation at a similar speed...

[Louis Dias]

There's more to amiga blitting than just moving data, even with a mask. The amiga's blitter could combine up to 3 sources using a user-specific boolean function and write the result to a separate destination. IIRC, the any combination source(s) and destination could be the same. As such, it's fair to say there's rather more sophistication in there than your typical graphics card blitter, which tend to be optimized memory copy units only.

As will the Natami blitter.  Hence the limiting factor is: how fast you can move memory.

Mine has 256MB. By now, most BlizzardPPC/CyberstormPPC users have fitted as much RAM as they can on their boards.

Kudos to you.  What was the minimum required when OS4 for Classic was released?
Heck, the fact that the new product, 128MB ZoRAM, is being supported now shows me that many barely had 64MB...which is my point about OS4+Wii.  But, again, OT, just defending myself from the ignorant people(s).

[Karlos]

As will the Natami blitter.  Hence the limiting factor is: how fast you can move memory.

I'm not disagreeing, I was just expanding upon the point. Many people think of a blitter as a simple memory mover, since that's pretty much all modern blitters are, and they tend to have been superseded by 3D hardware where it's often just faster to redraw everything than it is to worry about blitting things (not to mention that compositing window managers actually require this to function properly).

Kudos to you.  What was the minimum required when OS4 for Classic was released?
Heck, the fact that the new product, 128MB ZoRAM, is being supported now shows me that many barely had 64MB...which is my point about OS4+Wii.  But, again, OT, just defending myself from the ignorant people(s).

Well, less than 256MB, that's for sure. In fact, 4.1 ran fine on my A1 in 128MB. However, the moment you start a remotely modern browser, that will quickly vanish.

[Louis Dias]

How the blitter works isn't in question, it's not a mystery, Minimig has an equivalent blitter and that was years ago. It's not hard to see that creating a full 32-bit blitter that runs a lot faster would end up being significantly more impressive than the ~4MHz blitter in an Amiga. Even if it only ran at ~40MHz in the FPGA it could blit 20x faster (memory bandwidth allowing, lou's point is that the memory bandwidth is not going to be an issue here). Only the Natami people can say how fast the Natami blitter is going to operate, but if they can run their 68050 core at 133MHz, then maybe they can run their blitter implementation at a similar speed...

Thank you.

Now factor in how much more memory DDR2 moves in 1 clock cycle and then they can begin to understand...  I showed the math a few pages back, but ... geesh, it's like trying to teach a caveman the the world is round.

[Louis Dias]

Well, less than 256MB, that's for sure. In fact, 4.1 ran fine on my A1 in 128MB. However, the moment you start a remotely modern browser, that will quickly vanish.

Well, that's more a fault of the architecture the browser was ported from.
Opera runs fine on the Wii natively.
As does Aweb on the Amiga.  It also depends on whether your cache is on Ramdisk or HDD...

[Karlos]

^The point, however, is that the minimum requirements to run the OS, should not be viewed as the minimum requirements to do something useful with it.

[Louis Dias]

^The point, however, is that the minimum requirements to run the OS, should not be viewed as the minimum requirements to do something useful with it.

I realize this.  I had a hard time running IE4.0 on less than 128MB back in the day.
But a web browser, these days, is about as memory intensive as anything gets on the Amiga, so that is an extreme case.  Let's call the kettle black here.

For most apps, 64MB is plenty.

To go back on topic, I think Natami will have 512MB (please people, you know who you are, that is not the same as 512KB).  Perhaps we can get some confirmation on this from a team member?

OT: People like to poop on the Wii but it is my primary Netflix streamer/viewer and it does so in full DVD quality.

[commodorejohn]

Only the Natami people can say how fast the Natami blitter is going to operate, but if they can run their 68050 core at 133MHz, then maybe they can run their blitter implementation at a similar speed...

I'd think if anything, the blitter would be able to run faster, as it's quite a bit simpler a circuit than a CPU on the 68k model. Still, only they can say for sure.